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Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments
- dizhn 3y agoLittle off topic but this kbin.social site seems really nice. Very short and clear privacy/terms, very good default settings, nice design. Slow though.
- yasuocidal 3y agoIf i understood correctly the migration brought lots of users that were not expected and the instance is getting overwhelmed. It should get back on its feet if they mindfully upgrade it
- dizhn 3y agoThat's probably it. I noticed that it's not slow per se but it fails a lot. When it works it's fast enough.
- bigbacaloa 3y agoThat's a very fundamental abuse of trust
- kaimac 3y agoClicking on the title of the kbin post takes you here where there are more comments: https://mstdn.games/@chris/110553477682106144 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.
- notarget137 3y agoMaybe some database restoring gone wrong?
- dmix 3y agoDefinitely sounds like some DB issue or other mundane thing. Probably just bad timing with the protestors mass-deleting most likely.
- FireBeyond 3y agoGiven that Steve (the CEO) has, now or in the past: * edited the content of user comments without acknowledgment, * threatened to or has removed or installed moderators into communities to circumvent the blackout * threatened to "un-private" communities Why are you so sure that he wouldn't authorize un-deletion of comments?
- dmix 3y agoWhat business value would it provide?
- FireBeyond 3y agoWhat business value did editing users comments out from under them? Still happened, though.
- dmix 3y agoI’m not sure how that’s relevant to my question. He was drunk and being an idiot, that wasn’t a major management decision like disallowing deletion of comments which affects the entire platform. That would be unprecedented in the history of social media to only allow permanent comments. Im also very skeptical comment deletion is happening at such a scale to be meaningful vs the billion new comments they get a year. This all smacks of low quality speculation thats mostly a consequence of the current outrage cycle of the week.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y agohim editing user comments like he did was also unprecedented, maybe he's just vindictive and belligerent and irrational his recent behavior suggest that's a possibility
- buro9 3y agoThis is definitely unwise. I run forums and have done for +20y. Reddit may have a user agreement that allows them to use the data forever, but historical versions that were not visible (effectively soft-deleted on edit) puts this into a risk area as it removes the ability for someone to control the data thus transferring ownership far more explicitly to Reddit. Reddit should be very cautious here... you only get a lot of protections (EU eCommerce Act, etc) but being mere conduit. Arguably volunteer moderators took on a lot of the liability by their act of moderating, and Reddit were able to distance themselves from a lot of the content on the platform. But once Reddit go intervening in the content, choosing to make some old revisions public, they're now taking editorial decisions that strip them of a lot of the things that protect them. This is an incredibly naive move in the big picture.
- hedora 3y agoThey already apparently provided a 2TB data dump of everything up to march of this year. That's shockingly small. Like, can we just build some retro love-child of unison and NNTP, and just keep a copy of all the news groups on our laptops / the ones we care about on our phones? Anyway, from a liability perspective, undeleting stuff older than that seems to be a moot point.
- jbverschoor 3y agoGDPR request to request your data and then one to delete all data about you. If they don’t comply, they’ll get fined, and I have the feeling it will not be a small one given how they handle things
- Meph504 3y agoI think Reddit, like most U.S. web based companies aren't overly concerned with GDPR in many situations, and they are focused on what looks best for their IPO.
- alexvoda 3y agoDoesn't matter. They operate in the EU therefore they can still be fined. They can of course decide block access from EU countries.
- hgsgm 3y ago[flagged]
- samstave 3y agoHe was literally just on NPR defending his position. Stated that there has been no impact to the business and that paying "tens of millions a year on infra to support third party apps is not sustainable" but that he wont be changing any policy changes because they need to find a sustainable balance on the UGC ad model.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoI don't think anything he says to anybody right now is all that credible.
- dspillett 3y ago> another explanation Could be an intentional small-scale data rollback that has accidentally had far wider effect. Or some “eventually consistent” anomaly where nodes that never saw the changes/deletes have reasserted the version of reality they still see. But back to the previous hand… > seems like such an unwise thing for them to do Doing unwise things then doubling down on them seems to be Reddit's MO at the moment, and that has been the case for a while so each re-doubling currently means a notable jump in unwiseness, so I'm not surprised enough by any given apparent iffy decision that I reach for other explanations by default.
- nik736 3y agoThis 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.
- dmix 3y agoI've actually been thinking about building this sort of thing as a Chrome extension, a generic comment/tweet deleting app. More for privacy reasons than protest ones. The web based services that do this via APIs never seem to stick around long which is why a browser extension makes more sense IMO. The AI thing is clever.
- flushit 3y agoAnd it will be really hard to look at the database entries that all changed in bulk to distinguish them from legit entries. /s
- actionfromafar 3y agoSo make it work in the background then, registering on lots of sub-reddits and similar, and slowly shitpost in all of them.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoPlease don’t, that just speeds up the Turing Syndrome The last thing we need is for the internet to be harder to tell truth from fiction [1]https://kemendo.com/blog/turing-syndrome.html https://kemendo.com/blog/turing-syndrome.html
- xmdx 3y agoEven that won't work because there are companies like Pushshift (I think it's pushshift anyway) that are constantly archiving comments, so they have the old comment and the overwritten one. I think you can request pushshift delete your data under GDPR so at least you can remove your data from there, but I believe they are not the only ones doing this.
- mkaszkowiak 3y agoDoes this comply with GDPR?
- rrobukef 3y agoOf course not!
- notarget137 3y agoNo it isn't, obviously.
- boredumb 3y agoI would like to say yes but, if it's a comment being restored containing personally identifiable information of the person that deleted it than I would say no. With that said I believe you need to have a formal request to remove PII and I have some doubts if deleting or obfuscating a reddit comment you made qualifies as such.
- jwestbury 3y agoThe username attached to the post is almost certainly PII. Unless they're anonymising the post, they're definitely running afoul of GDPR. This, of course, assumes this is intentional action, which I'm not wholly convinced of. Malice, incompetence, and all that.
- justin66 3y agoGDPR is principles-based regulation. No specific thing you mentioned actually matters, what matters is whether anyone's privacy rights will be violated by rolling back years worth of deletes or edits.
- fabian2k 3y agoWhere 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.
- Drakim 3y agoWhat if that content includes personal data about me? My hopes, dreams, preferences, plans, goals and political opinions?
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoThat’s an interesting question in principle (even if there are some clear legal directives). You can try to reconstruct a user profile even just from a list of commonly visited subreddits. It can help gauge age, location, personal interests and political convictions. And if you have access to the content of the messages, well, even doxing may be possible.
- codingdave 3y agoWhat if it does? I am not under the impression that those fall under PII/GDPR (IANAL), so if you post that stuff online to a site you do not control, it certainly has the potential to remain there. And that is the heart of one the problems with reddit or any other site that encourages people to post everything under the sun. You are giving up control of what then happens with your content.
- jwestbury 3y agoGDPR protects any data which can be tied to an identifiable person. So, if reddit posts are attached to my username, and my username can ultimately be tied back to me (see: my username is my name), then reddit cannot disallow deletion of these posts. There may be a workaround by no longer identifying them with a specific user, but this would have to be done on the back end, as simply changing who the displayed user is would still leave the data intact.
- hubraumhugo 3y agoThere 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?
- Applejinx 3y agoI think it's justified and strangely on-brand, since Reddit is OpenAI's moat and feeds ChatGPT pretty directly. It's the nexus of a lot of interests that are dead center to what Hacker News is about.
- Semaphor 3y ago> Will this go down as the fastest suicide of a social media company? While that would be nice, I doubt it. The quality of content might suffer and smaller subreddits will finally be where large ones have been for a long time, but for the vast majority of users who doomscroll and share memes, nothing much will change and reddit will continue.
- nologic01 3y ago> the vast majority of users who doomscroll and share memes this might be true, but this content is not what made reddit valuable as with twitter, the fundamental question is: where do the large numbers of contributors of quality information / discussion (a small fraction of billions is still a huge number) go for a sane, long-term sustainable online platform that will not turn into the next Library of Alexandria
- outime 3y agoI don't think Reddit will die because of this nor I think this is the first time HN gets sensitive against a corporation's actions. It's happened several times in the past. The most recent I remember is the beef with Meta and WhatsApp, where a good chunk of HN was very sure everybody would move over to Signal and WhatsApp would be left to rot. Similar thing happened with Twitter and Mastodon. People get very emotional and cannot see through the fog. It's just the same cycle over and over. As time has demonstrated dozens of times, HN isn't good at forecasting nor is representative at all of most end-users. The great majority of Reddit users (and this doesn't include me) use the official app or the official website and therefore besides this very short protest which will end soon as like many other protests in the past for different reasons, Reddit will just continue to be as popular.
- mittermayr 3y agoIt 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....
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- llm_nerd 3y agoHanlon'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.
- goykasi 3y agoYes, I have a strong love/hate relationship with multi-DC Cassandra.
- willis936 3y agoDoes Hanlon's razor apply when the actor has openly stated malicious intent?
- MichaelZuo 3y agoWhich is a bit surprising since nowadays an entire reddit instance could fit on a single server rack.
- seanalltogether 3y agoYeah people are going into overdrive right now with speculating all the bad things reddit is doing. Someone claimed that reddit admins had taken over their local city's subreddit to install new mods, as if that was a priority for them right now.
- hospitalJail 3y agoIts not a shock to anyone who knows how cheap data is, but it just proves there is no true 'delete'. I never deleted my facebook profile/pictures because I didn't want to shine a spotlight on my account. I care more about what a 'deleted' post says, than any other post in a thread. I imagine there is a good reason for that.
- 4BynHmBFUxBD 3y agoSame here. I also thought if I deleted my FB account, they would just maintain a “shadow profile” for me.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- drcongo 3y agoEvery European Reddit user should put in a full GDPR data request.
- tazjin 3y agoAnd then what? I looked at the request form and it's pretty clear that they've automated those as a regular batch job, so other than a spike on some graph they're unlikely to notice that.
- red75prime 3y agoAnd they will get a reasonable answer that reddit doesn't store personal information beyond what it needs to operate. It's technically impossible to identify correct personal information in users' posts.
- randunel 3y agoPost something personal, then put in a 1st GDPR request and ask for all the servers (and their jurisdictions), all the backups, all the 3rd parties with access related to the post itself. Then ask for the security certifications and GDPR policies of each entity named. Then ask the company to delete the post for you in a 3rd GDPR request.
- red75prime 3y agoWouldn't it be classified as an abuse of process?
- blibble 3y agono such concept in the law you can have some real fun with companies with it
- bennyp101 3y agoI don't see how they can argue that they own the data, and then turn around and say they have no way of making sure there is no PII - if a user thinks that a comment or post contains their PII and delete it, then either the user owns it or reddit needs to respect that is was deleted for that reason
- nofeelings 3y agoInternet archive will back everything up anyway. Information wants to b free
- Hendrikto 3y agoThe Internet Archive is currently in a bit of a pickle [0], which could a serious risk to them. [0]: https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/ https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/
- bombcar 3y agoInternet archive has deleted things when requested, and not even by the site owner.
- tvbusy 3y ago[flagged]
- samstave 3y ago/u/spez was just on NPR claiming that the protest is having no impact on the business.
- 293984j29384 3y agoI 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.
- testfrequency 3y agoAlright I’m not crazy. I wiped all my comments a week ago, and my comments in /r/Apple, /r/SanFrancisco, and /r/gaming all are active again
- b0afc375b5 3y agoInteresting. If it's alright to ask, why do you have this policy? In my case I never delete my posts/comments and always edit with a big "EDIT" disclosure.
- randomdata 3y agoA comment’s value rarely outlasts more than 24 hours, if that. Why hoard data?
- asylteltine 3y agoThat’s not true at all. Most of the random helpful searches I have done dig up comments that are months or years old. It’s basically like making a post asking a really obscure question and then just writing nvm figured it out. At the same time, I want Reddit to fail
- Cerium 3y agoThat's crazy, most of the comments I read are months if not years old.
- randomdata 3y agoIf I wrote something especially noteworthy, I'll likely remember in my mind forevermore. If memory loss does occur someday, oh well. Am I going to remember to care? The rest served its purpose at the time, but isn't something I will ever want to look back on again. What do you find so interesting in your old work?
- scandinavian 3y agoI 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.
- jorams 3y agoYeah, the mention of June 14th suggests the same to me. I can attest that comments from private subreddits don't show up on your own profile. The deletion script won't be able to find them nor delete them.
- popey 3y agoI used Power Delete Suite to remove all comments from all public and private subs. They all came back today. So I re-deleted them again. I suspect it's more likely the site didn't process the deletions properly, rather than maliciously bringing them back, or as you suggest, that they were private. Edit: It's possible that the deletion only worked on public posts, after all, it seems?
- danpalmer 3y agoAbsolutely this. I highly doubt Reddit would want to fuck this up at this point for seemingly minimal gain. Much more likely that a 10x increase in deletions caused some pipeline to collapse somewhere.
- goykasi 3y agoI can see this starting a positive feedback loop of issues. More people get upset; so more people start deleting -- cascading failures start occurring. Hopefully their team can keep it under control. But would the current upset userbase even believe reddit if they came out and said "our deletes arent working right now. please try again later."
- drumhead 3y agoI 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
- Applejinx 3y agoUnwise, yes, but if they do in fact know that the fundamental value to their proposition is exactly what's being deleted, they might be in a desperation mode. Law might mean nothing to them now.
- thatsadude 3y agoWhat? 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!
- arbitrage 3y agoReddit has never respected its users. Spez's continued user-hostile antics over the years show that this is the case very clearly.
- skwirl 3y agoLooks 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.
- linoor 3y agoIt’s literally one guy running it
- vintermann 3y agoI 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.
- Xen9 3y agoIn 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
- delusional 3y agoDo you even have any GDPR related rights when talking about anonymous comments left on a messageboard?
- roomey 3y agoYes, particularly as it isn't anonymous, and GDPR covers internet handles. If Reddit were to fight this in Europe (which is what would happen) I imagine they would loose
- nashashmi 3y agoThe 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.
- telmo 3y ago> 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. First of all: if Reddit really is doing this, then it is committing an illegal act. At least in the EU, I'm sure in other jurisdictions also. There are in fact laws protecting the users. Second of all: Reddit cannot force users to post and moderate, and without those things there is no Reddit. Have you heard of Digg, by any chance? > 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. It was absolutely functioning as a public service, because third-party apps are the only ones that are actually usable. Especially so for moderator activities (that Reddit depends on to exist) and even more especially so for blind people, to whom Reddit official app does not cater. Do you know what else functions as a public service? Unpaid moderators! > The whole thing about API back in 2000s is it allows users to interface with Reddit programmably. I remember those times very well, and that was not "the whole thing" at all, there was a "bait and switch" from independent forums to centralized services based on a promise of openness forever. But I digress. Who cares what the "whole thing was about back in 2000s"? It doesn't matter what it was about, the only thing that matters is what the situation is now, and the situation is that Reddit as we know it is an interdependent partnership between a company and an extensive international community. This is what survived to 2023 and this is what matters in 2023. > Lesson: APIs are expensive to maintain and no real profitable business is going to keep them around unselfishly. Another lesson: a profitable business cannot extract value from the unpaid work of enthusiasts while at the same time expecting to be able to treat said enthusiasts as valueless replaceable cogs.
- yasuocidal 3y agoIs it down? i cant get it to load : (
- andreagrandi 3y agoOh... now I see why kbin.social is not working. It's been hackernewsed!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ghglkl 3y agoAm 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.
- lpcvoid 3y agoThe library bought those books and as such possess the physical copy. If somebody vandalizes it, that's destruction of property and bad. Reddit never paid anybody. Reddit is made up of comments made by people, and those people can decide to delete these comments. Reddit is a for profit company looking to squeeze maximum shareholder value from the value provided by others people comments, and doesn't enjoy the same leniency that a public library would, IMHO.
- TwoNineA 3y ago>> It's equivalent to a librarian restoring some of their books that have been vandalised by a disgruntled author. No, your analogy is idiotic. Librarian had a sign up: Authors are allowed to vandalise their books. Then they restored it. Every single reddit post has a "delete" link. If Reddit doesn't want people to delete their posts ... then I will go out on a limb and will suggest to ... remove the "delete" link?
- Havoc 3y agoThat’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.
- Aaargh20318 3y agoRules for thee and not for me.
- 666satanhimself 3y ago[dead]
- bambax 3y agoRequesting our own user data en masse is probably a good avenue of protest. Here's the link: https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
- hospitalJail 3y agoThank you
- wallmountedtv 3y agoIt seems that Reddit has stopped responding to data requests. If this is because their servers are overloaded, or if this is intentional, I'm not sure.
- tjalfi 3y agoI requested mine last week and haven't heard back from them.
- Semaphor 3y agoIt does say within 30 days
- shirro 3y agoI haven't heard back on my data request but I expect they are dealing with a higher than usual volume. I got an export when I mass deleted my comment history so I am not too concerned. My main interest in the data request now is as confirmation that my content has been deleted.
- schnitzelstoat 3y agoGDPR time.
- perlgeek 3y agoIf you live in Europe, please file a complaint with your local data protection authorities.
- BeenAGoodUser 3y agoWould it be possible tho? I always wondered wether GPDR applies to data posted publicly?
- perlgeek 3y agoIANAL, but in my understanding the right to correction and deletion applies to publicly posted data as well.
- Nextgrid 3y agoWhich they will promptly ignore or stonewall with endless back & forth until you give up.
- perlgeek 3y agoYou talk to the governing body / regulator so that they talk to reddit and deal with the ignoring and stonewalling.
- Nextgrid 3y agoMy argument is that the regulator itself is useless and will stonewall you. Not to mention, even in a hypothetical world where the regulator actually did their job, Reddit can still ignore them as they have no EU-based presence to be fined.
- hajile 3y agoReddit'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 https://www.reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy [1] https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-september-12-2021 https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-september-...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ncallaway 3y agoThis is slightly different than account deletions. They’re also restoring individually deleted comments. I, for example, deleted every comment I ever posted on Reddit, but left my account itself in place. As of this morning, many of my comments appear to have been restored.
- andybak 3y agoIsn'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?
- jacksnipe 3y agoPretty sure this is an egregious GDPR violation.
- jarym 3y agoAh, 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?
- hourago 3y agoThat 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.
- Siecje 3y agoHow 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- activiation 3y ago[flagged]
- Kye 3y agoYep. I wiped my accounts, and now the posts have returned. Not all of them, though. That lends credence to the database funkiness theory.
- Seattle3503 3y agoWhat 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_data_api_update_changes_to_pushshift_access/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...
- mrits 3y agoI don't see how GDPR can't force them to remove all comments? Additionally, there is no reason Europeans can't own multiple accounts and that accounts can't change hands. So a single European should be able to delete thousands of accounts?
- x0x0 3y agoUnlikely. Reddit will anonymize -- well, "anonymize" -- the data by disassociating posts and comments from the username. This is potentially gdpr compliant (anonymity is a valid way to do things!). There's separately a balancing act: eg a post is valuable to everyone who commented in the thread. So it's not clear that this is wrong, and forcing them to go further will be a slow process involving complaining to a country-specific DPA; getting that DPA to take on what will be a very low-priority case; letting the DPA process play out; and seeing if Reddit will appeal.
- swader999 3y agoI think reddit is doomed anyway. Chat generated content is going to flood all these venues.
- tanepiper 3y agoToday, 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...
- BonoboIO 3y agoWhy are you downvoted?
- Hans_Dorn 3y agoblames u/spez
- soggybread 3y agoI wonder if this includes content that was removed for violating terms and conditions like threats, doxxed info, images. If so, there might be some legal issues that arise from this no?
- jlpcsl 3y agoWow 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.
- tanepiper 3y agoYes and the irony is I was in Oslo today, showing to people within the EU our PoC demo for IKEA.com - on how we can provide recommendations with no third party data - and with the idea of consumers controlling exactly what is used to provide it - including the right to delete it all. This is the way we're going - totally the opposite way.
- oh_sigh 3y agoIs your poc or a further description of it up online anywhere?
- tanepiper 3y agoNot yet - we built it in 3 days, as a Chrome extension (so it works on IKEA.com) on top of our Knowledge Graph as sessionless - it was part of the OntoCommons innovation lab hackathon (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michelamagas_ontology-commons-addressing-challenges-of-activity-7075148421543698432-NFlB https://www.linkedin.com/posts/michelamagas_ontology-commons...)
- libraryatnight 3y agoI want to go with you. The US is so awful for privacy, not just at an administrative level, but we have too many citizens that do not care ('nothing to hide') and believe in an internet that can only be funded by giving up privacy. (Just look to HN for many "well, how else do you pay for it?!" arms tossed up comments) For a people that seem to think we're synonymous with 'freedom,' the paths we choose sure seem to indicate a fucked up vision of what 'freedom' looks like going forward. Too many attitudes feel defeated and resigned to abusive things today.
- avgDev 3y ago
- 6c696e7578 3y agoObvious LOL. Stupid question, but did anyone ever /trust/ online social sites to do what they claimed when it came to managing user data?
- im3w1l 3y agoI'm a pessimist and usually suspect the worst. But when they actually do it, you can bet I still hold it against them.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y agoWho knows. Maybe this will actually make people hesitate to trust everything to a private 'platform'. Maybe this will finally be the straw that breaks the camel's back and maybe even makes people consider the real issue at play ( platforms vs protocols ) and maybe even make appropriate conclusions. I am a dreamer.
- none_to_remain 3y agoFor a "protocol" of any note, wouldn't you expect there to be various actors archiving everything posted via that protocol?
- MiguelX413 3y agoNot anything with a reasonable expectation of privacy, which would either only be federated to the nodes of the people who are supposed to see it or not at all. Decentralized platforms are identical to the vast majority of the internet in their archivability, the distinction is in their administration.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y agoI think the only right answer here is: it depends on use case. Not everyone wants everything archived for potential future use. Some people not only want, but are also mandated by law to have an appropriate archive of their communications. My point is that we should be able to figure out options for both and anything in between, where user has control over it. This is the important part. As a user, I used to be able to have some modicum of control over what happens on the machines I own and the data I send to others. Over the years, that control was slowly wrangled from the population under various guises ( cloud, convenience and so on ). But instead of discussing protocols that would, hopefully, behave in deterministic and predictable ways, we discuss platforms and their pinkyswear promises not to do something. It is a lot to ask these days, because a lot of people got really used to 'easy' and 'free' internet. And that is before we get to the technical issues you mention.
- switch007 3y agoHilarious how this is post 49 on the 2nd page currently. Magic algorithm for everyone’s benefit I’m sure …
- eq88 3y agoWith 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.
- blastro 3y agoagreed
- 404mm 3y agoI dare to argue that the reputation was destroyed for people who are less likely to be influenced by media. In other words, critical thinker’s probably didn’t trust the platforms just for their reputation to begin with.
- anovikov 3y agoMaybe it's a good thing. If people will grow up and realise that "everything you see on the internet is by default a piece of bullshit crafted to manipulate you", world will become a better place. The less trust we have, the better.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoI dunno what you are implying, but Reddit and Twitter dug their own graves. They repeatedly chose short term gain over the long term health of their platforms/users, and the debt is catching up with them.
- eq88 3y agoI just am looking at two major platforms that have helped push back against the ruling class, and both got taken over and dismantled systematically
- _zoltan_ 3y agoTwitter is alive and well, thank you.
- Tozen 3y agoMore 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.
- Swizec 3y agoPart of the problem of course is that users want both soft deletes and hard deletes at the same time. The number of deleted things people later said was deleted in error and can we please restore is too damn high.
- unshavedyak 3y agoYea.. 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.
- aqfamnzc 3y agoDon't remember where I heard this, but I've always held the idea that anything you type into a text box, whether you remove it before hitting "cancel", delete it after submitting, or edit it, should be considered non-revocable and "out there". IIRC Facebook got caught recording what users typed up, changed their mind, and never thought they were submitting?
- systemtest 3y agoI've had interviews with programming challenges and they recorded every single keystroke. Not sure how legal that is.
- upon_drumhead 3y agoIs there something specific that you think would be illegal? Or just a general sense that keystrokes shouldn't be logged?
- unshavedyak 3y agoNot OP, but i could see hypothetically laws that prevent recording user data unknowingly. The same logic could say that just because i'm running your process does not mean you can monitor all my other processes/keystrokes/network-traffic/etc; could be used (hypothetically!) to say that if it's not obvious the user has submitted data, that you can't record it. Obviously it gets into the weeds, but where does it stop? Clearly there's some boundaries. If i have an app actively open/selected, what does it have access to? I could see an argument where if the user didn't think they were sending it, then the user has not acknowledged to transferring "ownership" of data. As nebulous as ownership is in this context, i'm simplifying. I'm not making any statement here. Just posing a hypothetical to attempt to illustrate where privacy arguments could be made.
- cush 3y agoDoesn't this violate GDPR?
- juujian 3y agoLawsuits under EU privacy laws incoming?
- sschueller 3y agoYes, you can't keep deleted data indefinitely.
- upon_drumhead 3y agoFrankly, you can't keep deleted data at all. The term has been misused and twisted into meaningless.
- 0x0f_4 3y agohopefully
- motohagiography 3y agoThis 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?
- slily 3y agoThis 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.
- throwaway87543 3y agoLooks 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.
- sschueller 3y agoSo I have to go back and check everything I ever deleted? WTF
- cgriswald 3y agoProbably not. I checked on a post where someone said something really stupid to me and then deleted it after I responded and it’s still deleted. I’m betting this was directed at the people who recently used tools to delete all of their posts. Edit: On further inspection, maybe so. It’s possible they’re still in process or maybe I had it cached.
- edgineer 3y agoThis 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.
- 411111111111111 3y agoThe adage means something very different though. It's about the fact that once you've posted it, someone will have made a screenshot or scrape of the content, which will resurface at the most inopportune times. I.e what unddit.com did for reddit What're reddit decided to do here is almost certainly against european law and I expect we'll hear more about it over the following months.
- edgineer 3y agoUndesirable resharing of personal information is only one consequence. In my time on the internet I've known it to be said in the context of other consequences, be it archiving, digital archaeology, datahoarding, etc. I do like legislation that stops big players from using their resources to be exploitive, and I understand the right to be forgotten for individuals. The other edge of the sword is all the reasons why information wants to be free. I am biased towards this side. Either way, I think it's important to remember to operate under the axiom that nothing is deleted from the internet. Deletion (by legislation or by privacy tools and services) is a cludge, and saving and resharing is the natural force.
- TheRoque 3y agoI 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.
- TheRoque 3y agoI 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.
- xwdv 3y agoI’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.
- buildbot 3y agoNo, it’s user hostile to undelete information the original CREATOR of the information choose to delete. They don’t owe you anything.
- xwdv 3y agoDoes Reddit owe them anything? Didn’t think so.
- AlexandrB 3y agoPeople delete posts for all kinds of reasons - including accidentally violating NDA, or posting NSFW pics you no longer want "out there". Undeleting this stuff is opening Pandora's Box.
- xwdv 3y agoIt’s naive to think deleting solves the problem. Once you post something on the internet, it’s out there forever potentially. Someone could easily saved whatever you posted, even if it’s under NDA or it’s a NSFW pic.
- AlexandrB 3y agoThis is technically true, but then why does any website bother with content moderation? It's one thing for something to be archived on a hard drive somewhere and another for it to be google-searchable.
- 3y ago
- Joe_Boogz 3y agowow 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Simulacra 3y ago...and I just wrote a script to go through and delete them all again. What was accomplished?
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoNow they will pin all your comments to the top and disable the delete button :)
- DropInIn 3y agoComments 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.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoGood thing they included a "you essentially transfer ownership to us and allow us to do anything we want" clause in their little terms of service document that nobody actually reads.
- DropInIn 3y ago[flagged]
- nomilk 3y agoWhat'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.
- axegon_ 3y agoThe 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.
- motohagiography 3y agoThis seems like some kind of political act of aggression intended to threaten someone or create a putsch of some kind. What's going on?
- the-printer 3y agoElaborate, please.
- motohagiography 3y agoIf someone resurrected your deleted texts and emails - deletion being the explicit expression of your non-consent to sharing, it would be difficult not to interpret it as an act of aggression. If they don't respect your consent, why should anyone respect theirs?
- the-printer 3y agoI hate to respond to your questions with more questions but the novelty of your's compels me to do so. Please do not take offense. How do you reconcile the differences between the private nature of communications like text/emails vis-à-vis comments on a public forum? > If they don't respect your consent, why should anyone respect theirs? I'm interpreting "they" as Reddit (or any large media corp.), would I be wrong to interpret "anyone" in this context as a state actor?
- motohagiography 3y agoConsent. You either respect it or not. If you believe you don't need someones consent and they believe you do, you have a pretty serious conflict in front of you.
- shapefrog 3y agoAre they going to undelete all of spez's comments where he is begging underage girls for nudes?
- aroundtown 3y agoI 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.
- vagab0nd 3y agoI 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.
- nomilk 3y agoI think the problem here is that content that the user expected to be deleted from Reddit's databases is popping up in public forums. Not to downplay it but the problem you mention is the inverse of the current issue.
- vagab0nd 3y agoThat's true. However the solution solves both problems. If I can delete my post by invalidating the proof, then no one can "undelete" it.
- kazinator 3y agoI 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- _fs 3y agoI 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.
- floren 3y agoCompletely restored to the overwritten value you set before deleting, or completely restored to the actual original content as people have speculated could happen?
- aroundtown 3y agoFor my account, it restored to the actual original content, not the overwritten.
- floren 3y agoVery interesting, thank you!
- kazinator 3y agoThat means they went back to five-year-old backups. Delete actions which you took five years ago were undone. This more or less tends to confirm that Reddit management handed down a mandate to restore everything being deleted, not only recently but going back as far as they have backups. The restoration isn't perfect; it doesn't patch back the posts into your timeline, so when you search for your own posts, it appears empty. That is probably deliberate, the idea being that people don't notice the reverts. When I re-delete a post manually, that action seems to stick. But for how long; they will probably be repeatedly restoring old posts from backups from now on. Luckily, I have every single link to each one of my deleted posts. I told Shreddit to save them. The numerous .json files have all the info to re-delete the posts. Shreddit can be modified (or else a new program written) to use the .json files as input rather than obtaining a list of posts from the API.
- 3y ago
- Nimelrian 3y agoCan 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.
- tsunamifury 3y agoThis is not at all a dupe, and feels like HN is censoring this post.
- vibecat 3y ago> 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
- SAI_Peregrinus 3y agoMurphy'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.
- flangola7 3y agoIndividuals have a Right to be Forgotten. It seems this action is almost certainly in gross violation of GDPR. Reddit not only has EU users but employees and physical assets in Europe, are they trying to be made an example of?
- shagie 3y ago> Individuals have a Right to be Forgotten. It seems this action is almost certainly in gross violation of GDPR. I'm curious how this would apply to the fedverse.
- Glench 3y agoI 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-posts/nbfdoajmaaohkohdnbpjakamhcaaleco?hl=en&authuser=0 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit...
- OrangeMusic 3y agoUnfortunately this doesn't work to delete the messages that have been restored, because they don't appear in https://old.reddit.com/user/<user>/comments https://old.reddit.com/user/<user>/comments. Other deletion tools I've tried also don't work because of this.
- Glench 3y agoHm, can you give an example?
- throwaway742 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=36366059 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=36366059
- lom 3y agoWhat if I wrote something that doxxed me and then deleted it. Is it being restored? This is unacceptable.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoThat 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.
- nerds 3y agotest
- NikkiA 3y agoI 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.
- OrangeMusic 3y agoLooked for Nuke Reddit History, can't find it?
- NikkiA 3y agoIt is an extension for Chrome, but google delisted it (along with other reddit content deleters). It still exists on the edge extension store though: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/nuke-reddit-history/bklbcgohenjegdibgmppligaapohkgip https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/nuke-reddi...
- OrangeMusic 3y agoI 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.
- layer8 3y agoI wonder if the GDPR’s “right to be forgotten”/“right to erasure” can be held against them here.
- FactualOrion 3y agoLong 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!
- FactualOrion 3y agoIf you guys want to check it out: https://old.reddit.com/user/kingjj/ https://old.reddit.com/user/kingjj/ Click context on my recent comment. Pics: https://ibb.co/yyK4hS3 https://ibb.co/yyK4hS3 https://ibb.co/F3sk829 https://ibb.co/F3sk829
- maxk42 3y agoI 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.
- clircle 3y agoAre they also restoring content from deleted accounts?
- NikkiA 3y agoI 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.
- nuclearsugar 3y agoAnyone in the EU experiencing undeleted stuff? Is it possibly they are specifically geotargeting IP's to undelete stuff and therefore avoid GDPR?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]