from Hacker News

Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments

by _3e1t on 6/16/23, 11:36 AM with 554 comments

• by kaimac on 6/16/23, 11:48 AM

  Clicking on the title of the kbin post takes you here where there are more comments: https://mstdn.games/@chris/110553477682106144

  This seems like such an unwise thing for them to do that I feel like there must be another explanation.

• by _fs on 6/16/23, 4:20 PM

  I wipe my comments about every 6 months. Not just delete, I overwrite them and then purge them with one of those browser scripts. Looking back, it appears my history has been completely restored going back 5 years. Beyond 5 years, they are still deleted.

• by 293984j29384 on 6/16/23, 11:57 AM

  I can confirm a comment I made in r/vmware has been restored. I typically delete my comments after 24 hours. I have a single comment from 20 days ago that was previously deleted now back on my profile.

• by Seattle3503 on 6/16/23, 1:38 PM

  What is interesting is that reddit claimed they couldn't show mods deleted comments for "lawyercat" reasons[1]. Mods used to be able to check deleted comments for harassment via Pushshift. Has the legal calculus changed so much in the past month that reviving comments to the general public is now okay?

  [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...

• by llm_nerd on 6/16/23, 11:55 AM

  Hanlon's razor.

  Anyone who has used Reddit for any period of time (or basically any similar site, which includes FB, Twitter, and even HN), has seen data consistency issues during high load (like periods of activism). Shards die or fall out of quorum, work queues get purged, etc. That's the reality of systems with a lot of very low value data.

  Eventually consistent, but also perpetually inconsistent.

• by hajile on 6/16/23, 1:00 PM

  Reddit's privacy policy here seems to be pretty clear [0]

  > Deleting Your Account

  > You may delete your account information at any time from the user preferences page. You can also submit a request to delete the personal information Reddit maintains about you by following the process described below this table. When you delete your account, your profile is no longer visible to other users and disassociated from content you posted under that account. Please note, however, that the posts, comments, and messages you submitted prior to deleting your account will still be visible to others unless you first delete the specific content. After you submit a request to delete your account, it may take up to 90 days for our purge script to complete deletion. We may also retain certain information about you as required by law or for legitimate business purposes.

  If you say you are deleting information and they don't do it, they are violating their privacy agreement.

  Of course, that is in clear conflict with their TOS. [1]

  > When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.

  [0] https://www.reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy

  [1] https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-september-...

• by bambax on 6/16/23, 12:42 PM

  Requesting our own user data en masse is probably a good avenue of protest. Here's the link:

  https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request

• by andybak on 6/16/23, 1:05 PM

  Isn't this potentially a safety risk? Some people have deleted comments due to accidentally posting personal information and some people are also genuinely at risk from real-world harassers and stalkers.

  Having said that - people are scraping and archiving Reddit all the time for both good and not so good purposes - so maybe it's not a big deal?

• by Havoc on 6/16/23, 12:25 PM

  That’s wild given that their reddiquette doc specific says the precise opposite

  > Repost deleted/removed information. Remember that comment someone just deleted because it had personal information in it or was a picture of gore? Resist the urge to repost it. It doesn't matter what the content was. If it was deleted/removed, it should stay deleted/removed.

• by unshavedyak on 6/16/23, 3:27 PM

  Yea.. this is why you don't delete, because god knows it isn't actually deleted. You edit, and even then it's as crapshoot because it might not be gone. If they store versions of old comments then even editing wouldn't help (which tbh, would make sense in case there were ban-worthy content being hidden via edit).

  Plus of course the rest of the internet still likely has your deleted/edited comment. So nothing public is really lost, with any assurance at least heh.

• by hubraumhugo on 6/16/23, 11:54 AM

  There has been a constant stream of negative top HN posts about Reddit for a few weeks now, even if they often get manually pushed down from the front page. Was there ever a comparable shitstorm on HN against a big corp? Will this go down as the fastest suicide of a social media company?

• by aroundtown on 6/16/23, 3:51 PM

  I can also confirm. I nuked an alt account last year using an app that replaces the content with [deleted] before deleting the post. I'd say at least about 40% of those posts have been restored to full text.

• by fabian2k on 6/16/23, 11:54 AM

  Where does the idea come from that not allowing users to delete content is against the law/GPDR?

  You have the right to ask for deletion of personal information they store, and even that has certain limits. You don't have the right to force the company to delete content unless they granted you that right via the licence somehow.

  Whether this is a good or bad idea for a company to do is a different question. But I don't see a legal issue here like the linked post claims.

• by nashashmi on 6/16/23, 12:06 PM

  The Reddit wars have begun. Users were misled to believe they have power. And now are completely bewildered when they realize they don’t have as much power as they thought.

  The funny thing is that this is all over a stupid API that was causing more harm to Reddit than it was functioning as a public service. Apps were functioning as alternatives to the Reddit website and app.

  The whole thing about API back in 2000s is it allows users to interface with Reddit programmably. Remember the first Web3.0? Who would have thought it would be used to create an entirely alternate app market?

  Every platform eventually pivots to paid APIs. Twitter did a long time back by buying all of the alt apps.

  Lesson: APIs are expensive to maintain and no real P̶r̶o̶f̶i̶t̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ (edit: profit-driven) business is going to keep them around unselfishly.

• by motohagiography on 6/16/23, 3:29 PM

  This sounds like some kind of political move. If someone resurrected all of your deleted emails, it would seem like an act of aggression. What's going on?

• by FactualOrion on 6/17/23, 12:45 AM

  Long time lurker, I checked my old account that I had used scripts to EDIT and DELETE every post, I used this script 3+ years ago and my 4+ year old comments are BACK. Only 2 of them were visible from my user page but ALL of them are back on subreddits. I had to go hunt one down and BAM, there's my comment and name etc. This is CRAZY!

• by juujian on 6/16/23, 3:29 PM

  Lawsuits under EU privacy laws incoming?

• by scandinavian on 6/16/23, 11:58 AM

  I really think they are just misunderstanding something. When I look at my profile, there's no comments, but I know there should be some. Isn't it more likely that when a subreddit you posted in goes private, the comments don't show up. The people in the linked thread ran the delete script after some subreddits went private. Now when some are made public again, so are their comments. Comments that were never deleted with the tool as they were hidden because of the subreddit being private.

• by kazinator on 6/16/23, 3:56 PM

  I supposedly deleted all my Reddit posts recently. While I don't see anything in my profile post timeline, the posts are still there, if they are accessed by other means, like context links from old inbox messages.

  Not only is the post accessible, but when you go from that to the entire Reddit submission, you can clearly see that it's not deleted.

  Reddit not only does not have a bona fide implementation of deletion, but has hacks in place to thwart deletions that replace text by random "lorem ipsum" before deleting. These changes affect your post timeline only, not the in-thread originals.

• by perlgeek on 6/16/23, 12:51 PM

  If you live in Europe, please file a complaint with your local data protection authorities.

• by Tozen on 6/16/23, 3:24 PM

  More people are finding out that when a site or company says or pretends they have "deleted" something, that's not necessarily the case. Soon more will find out it's not just reddit, that holds on to or even transfers data for all kinds of undisclosed purposes or profit, that people think was gone or forgotten.

• by axegon_ on 6/16/23, 3:43 PM

  The true issue here is that reddit by design NEVER deletes anything. Ever. It's only levels of visibility. In practice the 4 obvious levels are:

  * Unregistered users: Public, non-age restricted content(whether that be as a subreddit requirement or post-specific thing).

  * Registered users: same as above, minus content that was published by individual users and deleted afterwards, content removed by moderators or in more extreme cases reddit themselves(last one is a bit of a special case, I'll come to that part later).

  * Moderators: they see everything that was posted by other users and subsequently removed by the moderators for whatever reason. If a user deletes their contribution personally, then moderators won't see it either.

  * Content removed by reddit: visible by reddit employees, appears as "Removed by Reddit" to anyone else. In this particular instance, reddit may remove contents that was removed by moderators already.

  I'm a moderator of 2 large subs and a few smaller ones. Luckily I developed a backup system, which effectively backs up everything that was ever published on the sub(plus a ton of other stuff, including image recognition, lightweight nlp and tracking what reddit removes. Without saying which subreddit I'm talking about, I can tell you that a lot more is happening in large communities(20+k people online at any given time) than you might think.

  So in the case mentioned here, it's simply a case of some "status" field in some database that was flicked. Which is kind of concerning, given the amount of contents me and the other mods have removed. Truth be told, the moderation tools that reddit provide are rat shit. I ended up developing a ton of custom ones(completely nuking a specific user's history, chained comments or entire comment sections. Things, which reddit has been promosing for years but never delivered. Funny enough, all of those are a question of 30 lines of code in total, if we are talking about a single-script type of thing. But it is worrying that stuff like this happened. Just earlier today I used one of those scripts to nuke 300+ comments in a post. I also keep a backup of the mod log so in theory I could undo the damage. Question is, how long would that take. We are talking about 500k action we've collectively taken over the past year. Some through a script, plenty manually however.

  Despite all the drama lately, I don't think that's a deliberate retaliation from reddit due to the blackout, more likely a "woops" moment that happened at a very inconvenient time for reddit.

• by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK on 6/16/23, 5:45 PM

  That could be outright dangerous to people involved. For example, something innocent posted 2 years ago, could get you many years of jail now in certain countries.

• by slily on 6/16/23, 3:29 PM

  This is actually egregious. I was indifferent about the whole API pricing controversy, but I saw that a few posts I'd deleted for various reasons are back up. I'm deleting my entire message history and will not be posting on Reddit again. Luckily I never posted identifying personal information, but I guarantee plenty of people have deleted posts containing sensitive information and those are now back up for all to see.

• by 6c696e7578 on 6/16/23, 3:19 PM

  Obvious LOL.

  Stupid question, but did anyone ever /trust/ online social sites to do what they claimed when it came to managing user data?

• by DropInIn on 6/16/23, 3:41 PM

  Comments are protected by copyright....

  By undeleting comments they are violating the copyright of the authors by engaging in unauthorized use

  Even if Reddit was the one that deleted it, the user needs to be informed if Reddit renews their use of the copyrighted work.

  Where the user deleted it, the violation is beyond obvious.

• by thatsadude on 6/16/23, 12:05 PM

  What? I pruned my comments before leaving reddit. If they restore my comments, does this mean they don’t respect me as a user at all!

• by SAI_Peregrinus on 6/16/23, 5:30 PM

  Murphy's Law applies, as always. Once it's on the internet, it's public forever, with one exception: if you need to find it again later, it's guaranteed to have link-rotted.

  Trying to delete things is an exercise in futility.

• by OrangeMusic on 6/16/23, 9:02 PM

  I deleted all my comments about 2 years ago.

  I can confirm that they are back.

  However I don't see them on my profile, which is even more sneaky and infuriating. It makes searching for them (to delete again) hard.

• by Glench on 6/16/23, 5:34 PM

  I made an extension that lets you delete Reddit posts and comments, but if Reddit is doing this maybe I can add a feature to periodically check if comments actually stayed deleted and if not delete them again.

  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit...

• by edgineer on 6/16/23, 3:31 PM

  This reinforces the adage (that used to be true) "nothing gets deleted from the internet" and so I am for it. I hope useful posts will be un-404'd.

• by dizhn on 6/16/23, 12:25 PM

  Little off topic but this kbin.social site seems really nice. Very short and clear privacy/terms, very good default settings, nice design. Slow though.

• by motohagiography on 6/16/23, 3:44 PM

  This seems like some kind of political act of aggression intended to threaten someone or create a putsch of some kind. What's going on?

• by jarym on 6/16/23, 1:17 PM

  Ah, maybe they finally see an impact on revenue! That was their last argument against changing course. Although if we accept they are restoring deleted comments then its not so much 'changing course' as it is 'doubling down'. I wonder if the Reddit management even know the difference?

• by shapefrog on 6/16/23, 3:47 PM

  Are they going to undelete all of spez's comments where he is begging underage girls for nudes?

• by vagab0nd on 6/16/23, 3:56 PM

  I said this elsewhere which is relevant:

  I firmly believe that in the future, what you say doesn't matter. What matters is what you can prove you've said.

  What's the difference between the following two? (a) You say something and someone takes a screenshot of it, and (b) Someone just conjures up a fake screenshot of you saying something. These are indistinguishable. With LLM and SD, these fakes will become easier and easier.

  The solution is some crypto that allows you to do two things: (a) Be able to prove that you said something, and (b) later revoke it, such that your prove doesn't work anymore and there's no trace it was ever used.

• by vibecat on 6/16/23, 5:05 PM

  > Also worth noting: according to the ToS Reddit can actually do whatever they want with existing content, apparently we agreed to this when signing up.

  not sure if this meant as sarcasm or not

• by tanepiper on 6/16/23, 2:32 PM

  Today, Reddit has started a data rollback.

  What they've done though it go way too far - so far they are undeleting posts from over a decade ago. Reddit didn't actually delete anything, only soft deletes.

  In the image posted there are also cached thumbnails from YouTube - those videos no longer exist.

  I've already had one trans person confirm there are posts appearing from before their transition.

  The IPO is really going great for them with such a huge GDPR Privacy violation...

• by mittermayr on 6/16/23, 11:57 AM

  It can only be a matter of hours until someone releases the "ChatGPT rewrites your Reddit history" AI tool. URL coming up in 3...2...1....

• by Kye on 6/16/23, 1:38 PM

  Yep. I wiped my accounts, and now the posts have returned. Not all of them, though. That lends credence to the database funkiness theory.

• by bigbacaloa on 6/16/23, 3:27 PM

  That's a very fundamental abuse of trust

• by NikkiA on 6/17/23, 12:14 PM

  I just had another cluster of deleted comments reappear, this time all that had been posted in r/Unexpected, which leads me to suspect this is happening on a per-subreddit occurance, perhaps as a side effect of some other subreddit-specific shenanigans that reddit is doing.

• by lom on 6/16/23, 5:35 PM

  What if I wrote something that doxxed me and then deleted it. Is it being restored? This is unacceptable.

• by vintermann on 6/16/23, 12:05 PM

  I think it's been a long time, if ever, since the editing-before-deleting worked on Reddit. Why wouldn't they store older comments/editing history? Even if they don't have them in the main DB, they will of course still remain in backups, snapshots etc.

• by Siecje on 6/16/23, 1:36 PM

  How would you feel if the comments were restored but not associated to your account?

  That way the discussion is still there for people in the diture to follow but someone can't go through your comment history to learn about your political view or wealth or whatever people look for.

• by hourago on 6/16/23, 1:28 PM

  That could be interesting. I have seen accounts making racist or violent remarks and just deleting them afterwards after a few hours.

  That accounts seem of normal people engaging in normal conversations. But they spit hate everywhere they go, it is just not reflected in their history.

• by throwaway87543 on 6/16/23, 3:30 PM

  Looks like every time a lemmy instance gets posted, that instance gets nuked off the planet. Maybe if you want to post something from lemmy, you should find the mirror on lemmy.world or lemmy.directory and see if that can handle the traffic.

• by maxk42 on 6/17/23, 4:02 AM

  I requested my data from Reddit under CCPA I highly suggest all of you do as well

  Several logins from '127.0.0.1' attributed to my account: Reddit staff logs in and performs actions as users without their knowledge or consent.

• by drumhead on 6/16/23, 12:04 PM

  I know a lot of users are nuking their accounts and deleting everything, I really hope spez and the gang aren't restoring them from backups to sell to their new LLM overlords. That would be very very unwise considering GDPR

• by TheRoque on 6/16/23, 3:32 PM

  I really wonder how it's gonna turn when discord is gonna do the same kind of thing. I'm so amazed that people think they can use big social media websites for free AND not see ad nor have their data stolen.

• by TheRoque on 6/16/23, 3:32 PM

  I really wonder how it's gonna turn when discord is gonna do the same kind of thing. I'm so amazed that people think they can use big social media apps for free AND not see ad nor have their data stolen.

• by NikkiA on 6/16/23, 8:30 PM

  I had most of mine re-appear, and Redact was failing to re-delete them (it would lose authentication the second it tried to delete a comment).

  So I just ran Nuke Reddit History and deleted them all again.

• by Nimelrian on 6/16/23, 4:41 PM

  Can confirm, I ran an edit-delete purge a couple of years ago and now have comments from ~10 years ago visible again, with the original content.

• by nomilk on 6/16/23, 3:40 PM

  What's the root cause of all the recent reddit tumult? Is it essentially that reddit is trying to keep away web scrapers so it can retain exclusive access to its data and sell to LLM companies?

  If so, this seems like an impulsive miscalculation, based on how easy it would be for any determined actor to scrape reddit. So why annoy users in order to attempt to do something that has a high probability of failure?

  The situation sounds a lot like news website paywalling circa 2010, which was a flop for most sites.

• by swader999 on 6/16/23, 2:00 PM

  I think reddit is doomed anyway. Chat generated content is going to flood all these venues.

• by switch007 on 6/16/23, 3:21 PM

  Hilarious how this is post 49 on the 2nd page currently.

  Magic algorithm for everyone’s benefit I’m sure …

• by nik736 on 6/16/23, 11:52 AM

  This is crazy! I like the following comment on kbin:

  > I said it before and I say it again: if you have the patience to do so then make sure you overwrite your content with chatgpt generated content, as the future AI that will feed on your post HATE feeding on already AI generated stuff. It makes the AI diverge.

  People should not be deleting their posts but actually just replacing them with random AI generated content. This will make Reddit a mess.

• by andreagrandi on 6/16/23, 12:12 PM

  Oh... now I see why kbin.social is not working. It's been hackernewsed!

• by Simulacra on 6/16/23, 3:39 PM

  ...and I just wrote a script to go through and delete them all again.

  What was accomplished?

• by xwdv on 6/16/23, 3:33 PM

  I’m actually glad this is happening because I’m sick and tired of looking for information on Reddit and seeing someone reply to a deleted comment with “Wow thank you that information was very useful!”

  It’s user hostile, and prevents the spread of knowledge.

• by sschueller on 6/16/23, 3:31 PM

  So I have to go back and check everything I ever deleted? WTF

• by clircle on 6/17/23, 11:42 AM

  Are they also restoring content from deleted accounts?

• by drcongo on 6/16/23, 11:55 AM

  Every European Reddit user should put in a full GDPR data request.

• by jlpcsl on 6/16/23, 2:51 PM

  Wow wow, Isn't this the violation of the Europen GDPR privacy laws. If you deletd it then they should actually be deleted, otherwise you are violating the laws.

• by layer8 on 6/16/23, 10:56 PM

  I wonder if the GDPR’s “right to be forgotten”/“right to erasure” can be held against them here.

• by nofeelings on 6/16/23, 11:56 AM

  Internet archive will back everything up anyway. Information wants to b free

• by tsunamifury on 6/16/23, 5:03 PM

  This is not at all a dupe, and feels like HN is censoring this post.

• by eq88 on 6/16/23, 3:23 PM

  With how quickly Reddit and Twitter have destroyed their reputations, it almost feels like it's been intentional to bring down our giant public communication platforms as we enter a new age of misinformation.

• by mkaszkowiak on 6/16/23, 11:53 AM

  Does this comply with GDPR?

• by nuclearsugar on 6/18/23, 4:38 AM

  Anyone in the EU experiencing undeleted stuff?

  Is it possibly they are specifically geotargeting IP's to undelete stuff and therefore avoid GDPR?

• by jacksnipe on 6/16/23, 1:09 PM

  Pretty sure this is an egregious GDPR violation.

• by yasuocidal on 6/16/23, 12:09 PM

  Is it down? i cant get it to load : (

• by Joe_Boogz on 6/16/23, 3:35 PM

  wow this is a massive privacy violation / gdpr issue. What can we do about this?

  Tangent: I used to love reddit, i would actively pay for reddit gold just to support the site. I still have a hard time moving on, but this latest fiasco has set things in stone for me. RIP Reddit.

• by cush on 6/16/23, 3:27 PM

  Doesn't this violate GDPR?

• by nerds on 6/16/23, 6:20 PM

  test

• by schnitzelstoat on 6/16/23, 12:48 PM

  GDPR time.

• by Xen9 on 6/16/23, 12:06 PM

  In the role an evil reddit CEO, I would restore bulk-deleted comments but disconnected from the accounts that made them and allow GDPR requests via carefully hidden form.

  This would disable my users / victims from deleting their stuff (thus decreasing the value of my platform temporarily) while probably complying with GDPR.

  I would also consider copying Twitters URL shortener.

  Muhaha

• by skwirl on 6/16/23, 12:05 PM

  Looks like the owners of “kbin.social” are learning the hard way that hosting your own social media service isn’t easy. Just 25 minutes on HN in the early morning US time brought them down.

• by ghglkl on 6/16/23, 12:20 PM

  Am I the only one here who thinks it is actually quite reasonable to restore such comments?

  It's equivalent to a librarian restoring some of their books that have been vandalised by a disgruntled author.