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by prepend 1103 days ago
The plug in I use (I think nuke Reddit) overwrites comments with random blarg that’s realistic sounding text, then deletes them.

I’m sure Reddit keeps all versions as well. But I think it would be impractical to restore to the correct version at scale unless they want to manually review to find the “right” version to restore.

I think if they got a specific subpoena for me, they could find my comments with a manual investigation, but I expect that will never happen as there’s no reason for anyone to do that.

I just want to remove my content from Reddit.com and make it harder if they decide to undelete or otherwise not respect my decision.

I’m surprised Reddit still allows edit and undelete and expect them to remove the functionality soon.
2 comments
anonymouskimmer 1103 days ago
> I’m sure Reddit keeps all versions as well. But I think it would be impractical to restore to the correct version at scale unless they want to manually review to find the “right” version to restore.

If they retain versioning history I'm sure it would be easy to identify a mass edit and revert all of those edits from the user. If it wasn't easy, for some reason, it would probably be easy to revert all edits after, say, 2 days of posting.

Given that everything posted to Reddit becomes the property of Reddit (okay, perpetually licensed to Reddit), I don't know that much legally could be done about this. Unless they restored stuff posted while under-age, or PII, maybe.

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chongli 1103 days ago
Just need to update the script to also create new comments with random garbage, edit those to other random garbage, then delete. Add in some random delays between actions, randomize the order of all individual actions, and this would make it very difficult for admins to separate legitimate activity from script activity.
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anonymouskimmer 1103 days ago
If on a new page those new comments would get downvoted to oblivion. If on an older page they'd be partially identifiable by dint of being on an older page.

But sure, things could be done to make this more difficult. It's probably not worthwhile on Reddit's part to do anything to stop this, just as it hasn't been too worthwhile for websites to evade ad blockers. The number of people who mass delete is just too small to matter.

If I worked at Reddit and wanted to do something about it though (and was a programmer), I'd add an option under individual deleted comments for viewers to click to view the comment (and any versions). And possibly add an option for viewers to restore a version entirely. This would save helpful comments, at least until some jerk decided to automate the process and restore everything. So maybe the complete restoration is a bad idea.

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chongli 1103 days ago
If I worked at Reddit and wanted to do something about it though (and was a programmer), I'd add an option under individual deleted comments for viewers to click to view the comment (and any versions).

That could still backfire. Users may be very unhappy that their unedited comments are accessible forever. This may drive them away from commenting and participating in general.

The goal of mass-deleters is to drive down engagement. If Reddit makes the entire edit history of each comment accessible, then mass deleters could flood that history with bogus, AI-generated crap. Although it may still be possible to determine which edit was the last real one, the effort to do so goes way up, and engagement goes down as a result.

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PrimeMcFly 1103 days ago
> But I think it would be impractical to restore to the correct version at scale unless they want to manually review to find the “right” version to restore.

They could restore all comments a month after controversy/blackout events from about a month before such events.

That would probably restore the majority as most people are deleting/overwriting their comments as a reaction to or as a part of these events.

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prepend 1102 days ago
Of course they could, but it’s very unlikely. Even if 10% of the users did this, there would be an uproar.

It’s much more likely they just disallow editing and deleting.

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PrimeMcFly 1102 days ago
I was thinking more restore for their own dataset they might want to use to sell or whatever, I agree they wouldn't restore them publicly.
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