[scandinavian]

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.

[popey]

I 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?

[rodw]

I've got a decade old account on which I've made a habit of manually deleting comments older than 6 - 9 months, since they get so little visibility and there's no value in leaving a breadcrumb trail.

Checking just now I see that comments up to 3 - 4 years old have been restored.

I'm not going to speculate as to why (beyond agreeing it's more likely to be incompetence than malice) but in my case at least there are definitely long deleted comments that have been restored.

[lumb63]

I’m astounded and confused that you and a lot of other commenters are giving Reddit the benefit of the doubt. At a time when tensions between Reddit management and its users are at an all-time high, and both sides are maliciously striking back and forth, most commenters are assuming that an act like this is due to incompetence rather than malice? I don’t understand the thought process.

[cj]

Innocent until proven guilty can be a decent philosophy even outside the courtroom. Especially when tensions are high. Both sides giving the other the benefit of the doubt can help to deescalate.

Unless the objective isn't to deescalate.

[rakoo]

That's the thing: you are deemed innocent until proven, guilty or innocent.This framework supposes there is a common search for truth and working together. The current situation is not that: there is no accountability of reddit, no desire to be open or to listen to the users, contempt towards users for years,...

If there's no due process, reddit doesn't deserve to be held innocent.

[ScoobleDoodle]

There are different thresholds in the legal system for criminal (beyond a reasonable doubt) versus civil (the preponderance of the evidence.) It already varies by venue and consequence. This is a social discussion. 4 year old comments being restored means Reddit is doing something to restore them now, which they didn’t do before.

[freediverx]

Except in this case, we have a proven bad faith actor with a pension for deceit and vindictive behavior.

[aerio]

A penchant for*

[yarg]

Outside of court, the preponderance of evidence changes with a history of operating in bad faith.

[the_gipsy]

> Unless the objective isn't to deescalate.

Oh, the sleighthanded irony.

[jojobas]

Well Reddit's objective certainly isn't to deescalate.

[ziftface]

It's also worth noting that reddit admins have maliciously modified comments in the past.

[mandmandam]

This one in particular, in fact - Steve Huffman, aka spez. Google "fuck spez" to see just how popular this guy is.

Same guy who un-personed Aaron Swartz, claiming he wasn't a cofounder after Swartz died, and removing him from Reddit's founder page.

[usefulcat]

> I’m astounded and confused that you and a lot of other commenters are giving Reddit the benefit of the doubt.

I think it makes sense for anyone who values objective truth above any other agenda. "Benefit of the doubt" is just acknowledging that we don't know for sure.

[hackinthebochs]

Because there's no apparent benefit to reddit to bring back long deleted comments from arbitrary users. When you can think of no motive for malicious behavior, it is unparsimonious to assume malicious behavior.

[tremon]

Of course there is a benefit. If users leave and remove their comments in protest, the data content available on Reddit is lowered, thereby lowering one of the IPO metrics. By un-deleting comments, the site's message count and user activity goes up, and thereby its IPO value.

[nerdponx]

It's probably more about search engine results than the appearance of user account.

[brookst]

Investors aren’t that dumb, and if they were, your theory would create liability for securities fraud.

[hackinthebochs]

But that's not what's happening (only those protesting having their comments restored).

[Daneel_]

There’s a huge incentive for Reddit to retain the comments - that’s their knowledge base. Without that a lot of their value is gone.

[hackinthebochs]

Retain is not equivalent to undelete (making visible to everyone).

[brookst]

Do you think that choosing to believe it is malice somehow punishes Reddit?

[reaperducer]

you and a lot of other commenters are giving Reddit the benefit of the doubt

It's what normal people did before the internet.

People who didn't were known as lynch mobs, and were considered bad.

Thanks to the web, it's now perfectly normal to believe the worst of people for no better reason than to fuel one's own anger issues.

[piva00]

> Thanks to the web, it's now perfectly normal to believe the worst of people for no better reason than to fuel one's own anger issues.

I believe that in this case it's more that Reddit's management has completely lost any sort of trust, it's not so much to fuel one's own anger issues but give the current context there's very little in terms of Reddit's management being trustworthy, transparent. Spez was caught lying in the open, how can one still have any trust they aren't lying in other aspects?

Let's agree that this particular case is not a baseless witch hunt, Reddit's management own dishonest actions have brought a dissatisfied lynching mob to them.

[didntcheck]

Isn't the fact that they're able to restore deleted comments from that far back itself an indication of malice, or at least irresponsibility? I could understand if it was comments from the past month, but after 3 years I'd expect the only remnant to be on very old backups if at all. The fact that they're visible again adds a lot of weight to the common suspicion that they're just setting a delete bit and keeping them in the live database

I do seem to recall that their database schema is mostly a big unstructured key-value table, so it's possible that this is part of the explanation - and they've never cleaned up any garbage/orphans in at least 3 years?

[rodw]

> Isn't the fact that they're able to restore deleted comments from that far back itself an indication of malice, or at least irresponsibility?

Meh. You're not exactly wrong but I think it's pretty common for user-generated content sites to follow a logical delete strategy. It holds open the door to being able to restore data deleted by end-user error, and within the bounds of their data retention policy keeps data around that may be useful for internal analysis.

Actually come to think of it seems plausible that they only have ~3 years of logically deleted data, having purged deleted records older than that.

It's also plausible they had all the is-logically-deleted information in some redis datastore that wasn't being reliably persisted to disk and the process had to be restarted for the first time 3 years.

I'm actually leaving my restored comments untouched for now out of curiosity about what they'll do about it now that the issue is known. I think that will probably answer the question about whether this was accidental or intentional.

[Tangurena2]

So it looks more like a database restore of some data. I'm inclined to think it was a rollback of some sort - to fix something that needed more QA time.

[rodw]

This was more or less my working theory. It's not _all_ of my comments that have been restored, it's only my comments going back to 2020 (and I can't be sure that _all_ of the comments in that time range were restored either, but it looks pretty thorough).

I wouldn't put it past Reddit to restore old comments given sufficient motivation, I just have a hard time imaging how the cost/benefit analysis would say that this is a good idea at this specific point in time.

It seems plausible that with all the other churn going on at Reddit - and as others have noted a large number of people deleting comments and accounts and maybe subs - that they accidentally restored some data-store to the wrong snapshot or something.

I just don't understand how the difference between "we HAVE N million comments" and "N million comments HAVE BEEN posted" in some investment deck could be worth the risk to reputation and good will, not to mention potential GDPR violations or bad press from doxing stalking victims or whatever.

Someone else mentioned SEO as a possible motivation. I might buy that. If Reddit is losing PV and DAU and restoring a bunch of old content would offset some of that with organic search traffic, that seems like something they might do.

[eitland]

If they have done this to an EU citizens I am fairly sure they have broken GDPR in some way or another.

For most users this isn't going to be a problem but my guess is there is a rather big chance for a number of the comments that were restored there were really good reason why they were deleted and now Reddit are responsible for them being online again.

[katbyte]

> Checking just now

how did you check? profile page?

[EMCymatics]

just hope they dont edit them too

[jlmorton]

I did the same a week ago, deleting fifteen years worth and several thousand comments using Shreddit, by editing and deleting, however mine have not been restored, so I doubt this was some kind of broad action.

I very much doubt Reddit cares at all about the small number of us that have done this.

[DavideNL]

Me too… note that Shreddit first edits the comment, and then, deletes it.

Not sure if this would complicate a restore process by Reddit.

[cge]

Apparently not. I deleted my comments with shreddit, editing first, and at least a large portion of them appear to have been restored to their original text.

[danpalmer]

Absolutely 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.

[zoky]

As much as I hate to give Reddit the benefit of the doubt, I think you’re right that Hanlon’s razor may well apply here, albeit substituting incompetence for stupidity.

[hunter2_]

I think you meant to say "substituting stupidity" -- the new thing is the substitute for the old thing.

[zoky]

Hanlon’s Razor states: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

I’m saying Reddit is incompetent in this case, rather than stupid. Not quite sure what you’re getting at?

[hunter2_]

Oh, my mistake. For some reason I thought it stated incompetence.

[goykasi]

I 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."

[veave]

That's impossible. You can't see comments you made in private subs, therefore you couldn't have deleted them.

[didntcheck]

Which is itself a problem IMO. Discord is the same, but at least they have a tiny excuse (being very charitable here) in that they'd have to add a new UI view for that, but Reddit already has the profile view where a user should be able to see all the comments they've made

[swed420]

Hopefully the top organizers of the reddit strike consider arranging a "delete day" where all subs temporarily go public again for this purpose

[popey]

Ok, r/funny just went public, and one of my comments re-appeared in my profile. So I am confident that what's happening is the deletion of comments isn't happening on subreddits that are private (as r/funny was when I ran my delete script). As soon as the subreddit goes public, they "re-appear"

[boomboomsubban]

Reading about Power Delete Suite https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

They don't mention being able to delete from private subs, and their method of deletion sounds like it would fail when the subs are set to private.

I'll admit Reddit barely deserves the benefit of the doubt at this point, but I have no idea how you would delete posts on private subs except through some GDPR way that must exist.

[unsupp0rted]

If I comment in a sub that has since been set to private, can I not see my own comments on my own profile page? If so, do those comments not have an edit/delete button under them?

[Glench]

Yes, comments you made in private subs don't show in your comment history. I recently made a browser extension that deletes your entire reddit history and ran into this while testing.

Edit: Adding the link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit...

[zikduruqe]

I've been using Shreddit for years, and thus far, all my deleted comments and posts have not shown back up.

[neatze]

It could be because people are selling there's accounts in protest.

[eek2121]

Use GDPR. Even if you aren't in the EU.

[derwiki]

CCPA for some of us, and refer to the CA AG if the business does not adequately comply

[juujian]

Also important to note that this is an indicator that Reddit has lost all trust from (this part of) the community. Even if that is a plausible explanations, many will not give Reddit's current management the benefit of doubt. I simply would not put it past Hoffman to be that petty that he would do it, he seems to be taking after Musk more and more lately. Wasted so much goodwill. That will be tough to navigate for them, because once you have lost your user base's trust even an untrue allegation will cause a stir.

[moomin]

The adage that “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” cuts both ways.

Musk and Hoffman seem to be intent on waging war with their own product. They both get a lot of unpaid labour producing their content and then complain that the unpaid labour isn’t paying for the privilege.

[qzx_pierri]

Huffman (spez) has his reasons for the reddit changes, but they do seem a bit short-sighted. But there comes a point where these online services have to make money. It's as simple as that. So is he waging war on users, or making a business decision?

Also, Musk is waging war against advertisers. Running a site that is controlled by advertisers is the epitome of extreme centralization, since the site's income can be halted if an advertiser gets upset. Musk is charging on Twitter so the users aren't the product.

As for reddit, I think limiting API access to accounts with reddit gold seems like it would've been fair. That would've solved the income issues (the stated reason for the API changes), but then reddit wouldn't get all the telemetry data associated with users on their first party app.

It seems like Huffman (spez) got greedy and wanted gold subscriptions, and the telemetry data from their first party app. It's usually one or the other (ads vs. user payment).

I also want to end this by saying that I'm not trying to start an argument, but I know a lot of users on this site are very trigger happy with the downvote whenever anyone speaks objectively about Musk. If you don't agree with me, just chime in and we can discuss it.

[Karunamon]

If it was indeed a business decision, then Huffman is breathtakingly incompetent. To the degree that, were the company public, I would be agitating for the board to remove him as his actions negatively impact my investment.

A number of ways this could have been handled better in no particular order:

1. Give more than 30 days notice to third party app developers.

2. Mandate that third-party clients display advertising as delivered by the API and return telemetry.

3. Keep the API changes but exempt paying subscribers.

4. Refrain from making bad-faith lies about the developer of the most popular application, which he then had to disprove using call recordings, and then after that, don't try to play off your actions as misunderstandings or mistakes.

5. Don't lie about deliverables for years and years to the point where the community memes on you for your history of lying.

6. Don't fuck around in the production database to edit comments critical of you.

7. Be a little forthright for once.

[juujian]

Even just a little bit of giving concessions to legacy customers would have been fine. It's not like you need to completely give up on your new pricing model just because your have existing customers. It's crab.

[Mindwipe]

8. Don't go on major news outlets and come across as being on crack.

[jmholla]

> Musk is charging on Twitter so the users aren't the product.

I think the adage is a little wrong. In Twitter's case users are still part of the product as the existing network effects and ability to communicate with users are part of the product, and thus it's users are. Not to such a significant degree as when advertisers are sweeping up every bit of data about you, but still to some degree.

[qzx_pierri]

> In Twitter's case users are still part of the product as the existing network effects

This is a nitpick. I'm speaking from the POV of keeping the site running, or not resorting to changing the site's essence to please advertisers.

[jmholla]

My point was more in reference to GP's comment where even on a paid service, waging war on on users is waging war on your product. Though, after typing this out, that would seem to be even more so the case since that's where your money is coming from.

[littlestymaar]

> But there comes a point where these online services have to make money.

Reddit is 18 old, and you're telling me that they are just thinking about making money now? How come 4chan and Wikipedia are both profitable, but not Reddit? And how is it a problem with their users and not their management?

[qzx_pierri]

> How come 4chan and Wikipedia are both profitable, but not Reddit

reddit has 1.7 billion visits per month[5], with an astronomical amount of persistent storage, with the content never being deleted. reddit is ranked #18 globally.

4chan has 51 million visits per month[4], has very little persistent storage (posts are deleted once the thread slides to the bottom of the board list), and strict size limits for the posts that exist at any given time. 4chan is ranked #708 globally.

Wikipedia does get 4.7 billion monthly visits[3], but they do have a public list of large donors[1], and the entire wikipedia catalog can fit onto a 20gb microSD card [2]

So I can't give a solid answer, but it seems like the other 2 sites you mentioned have a slightly better design when it comes to infra costs.

1: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/don...

2: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...

3: https://www.similarweb.com/website/wikipedia.org/#overview

4: https://www.similarweb.com/website/4chan.org/#overview

5: https://www.similarweb.com/website/reddit.com/#overview

[Eisenstein]

If reddit had stuck to what it is good at: threaded, in-depth text conversations and links, it wouldn't need such a large amount of storage or bandwidth. Yes, I know that 1.7 billion users is a lot of text, but (1) there wouldn't be 1.7billion users if it were only text and links (2) the users who wouldn't be on reddit without multimedia offerings I am sure use a almost exclusively multimedia and account for the lions share.

Go back a few years, nix the 'let's host video and pictures and live chat and ignore every single thing the users are asking for so that we can bring in the eyeballs' idea and instead of that monetize the regulars using the their content and site's ability to guide google to it.

Keep 150,000,000 dedicated users who reliably generate valuable content for you and keep the site spam free for you, and all you have to do is keep some devs on hand to add tooling and site features that are useful. The caveat is that Stevey Huff has to live with one or two fewer commas on the balance in his bank account.

[jimktrains2]

That 20gb dump doesn't include history afaik and probably doesn't include images and other multimedia.

I don't think it invalidates your point, but I just wanted to clarify.

[littlestymaar]

> Reddit has 1.7 billion visits per month > […] > 4chan has 51 million visits per month[4],

This has an impact on their costs, but in an ad-driven business, it increases their revenues by as much.

> with an astronomical amount of persistent storage, with the content never being deleted

I'd like to know the actual amount of storage, but I really doubt it is actually “astronomical” (unlike Youtube).

Moreover, I suspect that the biggest part of that storage is actually video, which isn't really where the value (for the users at least) is.

Overall, if their costs are to high compare to other players their revenues, it's first and foremost a management and cost effectiveness issue, not a lack of revenues.

[moomin]

VC money. VC money gambles on big wins. They'd rather have a huge blow-out than a small success. So you take VC money, they want you to grow. They care about that more than making a profit. For a long time. Then, when you are huge, then they want money.

This sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. But Google and Facebook started out without a profitability plan.

[PragmaticPulp]

> Also important to note that this is an indicator that Reddit has lost all trust from (this part of) the community.

Assuming the worst, ignoring details that violate the narrative, and circulating ragebait without verification are all staples of mainstream Reddit content.

It’s not surprising that the Reddit outrage/grievance machine has turned on itself and is now assuming the worst and getting outraged at every turn.

[username332211]

I wouldn't read too much into it. It's not like the reddit community wasn't prone to paranoid suppositions.

Just ask that moderator accused of being Ghislaine Maxwell.

[zoky]

Yeah, so, at first I scoffed at the notion as well, but I kept following up on it, and… are we really so sure that it wasn’t Ghislaine Maxwell?

I kept looking for them to post something, anything… but nothing. https://old.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/

All it would have taken is a single post to prove that it really wasn’t her, but no. Radio silence. For over three years.

It’s not like somebody is protesting being defamed here either… nobody has any idea who this person is, if not Ghislaine Maxwell herself. Do you have some proof that this isn’t her? Other than the assurance of a single other person, I have never seen any.

I’ve been forced to re-examine my views on this, going from the idea that it’s utterly preposterous to, well, yeah, maybe it’s true. Do you have evidence to refute it? If so, please share. I really don’t want to believe it’s the case that an established sex-trafficker and pedophile/pedophile-enabler was one of the most influential mods on Reddit for over a decade, but at this point I’m having a hard time concluding otherwise.

[nkrisc]

This attitude is exactly why if I was the mod in question, I would just ditch the account. You're asking them to prove a negative, no amount of proof they could provide would ever be enough. They'd be forever hounded by internet lunatics.

[zoky]

Not at all. A single post on the account would be enough to completely disprove the theory. The whole reason the theory exists is that the account was previously extremely active, and all activity stopped abruptly when Maxwell was arrested. I don’t think you can say “no amount of proof would ever be enough” when no proof at all has been provided.

[DismantleMars]

I think the lack of activity since the conspiracy theory started could be easily explained by the user being creeped out by the witch hunt and abandoning their account. I know if I was accused of secretly being a hated figure like Maxwell on an account that wasn't connected my real identity, I wouldn't come out and deny it, I'd just ditch my account and make a new one.

It also seems unlikely to me that someone like Ghislaine Maxwell would have the time to be such a prolific Reddit user, and that she would write like a Redditor - for example calling someone "butt-hurt" in one comment.

[zoky]

> I think the lack of activity since the conspiracy theory started could be easily explained by the user being creeped out by the witch hunt and abandoning their account.

The problem there is that nobody made the connection until after the activity on the account stopped abruptly, coinciding with Maxwell’s arrest.

> I know if I was accused of secretly being a hated figure like Maxwell on an account that wasn't connected my real identity, I wouldn't come out and deny it, I'd just ditch my account and make a new one.

If you’re a power mod that has spent years building up influence and control over numerous subreddits, that’s not so simple. You could leave, of course, but continuing with an alternate account wouldn’t really be feasible.

> It also seems unlikely to me that someone like Ghislaine Maxwell would have the time to be such a prolific Reddit user, and that she would write like a Redditor - for example calling someone "butt-hurt" in one comment.

Who knows? It also didn’t seem likely that someone like Ghislaine Maxwell was engaged in a massive sex trafficking operation.

I’m still not 100% convinced the account actually did belong to Maxwell, but at first I scoffed at the idea as ridiculous and insane, and now I’m not so sure about that.

[mandmandam]

Seconded.

Sounds crazy, but the more you look into it [0]... And don't forget the blackmail! You know, which Huffman projected onto Apollo's developer, even after being proved a liar by Christian's recordings.

This is actually quite important, because Huffman and 'maxwellhill' go way, way back.

0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/r45a5n/here_is_...

[nottorp]

I don't think the delete function actually deletes anything. At best sets a flag.

If i wrote public forum software, that's how I would do it and batch delete only comments that no one asked to undelete in at least a few months...

[rcxdude]

For a while it seemed that while this was true, edits were at least destructive: so a lot of mass-deletion tools would edit the comments, then optionally delete them. But I wouldn't be surprised if this is no longer the case (TBH, making the edit history of comments public is a good idea in general).

[Tao3300]

I disagree. Making edit history public would turn the discussion into a total shitshow. Reddit would drown in stuff like: "I see from your second edit you said ... so clearly you're a ignoramus and a bigot."

[swaggyBoatswain]

It's just a soft delete behind the scenes usually (a flag in a table as you say)

They usually store some history in a logging database that can be reverted at some point in time

Nothing is really truly hard deleted on the web most times

[explain]

You can request your Reddit data under the GDPR, and this includes all of your deleted content. It is visible from your profile to Reddit staff.

Might have changed in the past 2 years, but unlikely.

[jabroni_salad]

Delete Suite's main feature is actually that it edits your comment to be junk, rather than just deleting it. I come across some corpses linking to it every now and then.

[DavideNL]

Note that Shreddit first edits the comment, then deletes it.

So the question would be, if Reddit also stores comment edit history.

[dghughes]

Hey so I guess this is an opportunity to overwrite past "deleted" comments. A second chance lol

[m-p-3]

I doubt that is GDPR-compliant.

[kvdveer]

A 30-day lag in deletion is compliant IF you communicate that that's what you do (i.e. write that down in your privacy policy).

[notimetorelax]

Yes, but after that there should be a wipeout.

[wongarsu]

You could argue that it's not the comments themselves that are personally identifiable, but the association between comment and username (and IP etc). Following that argument, you could retain the comments as long as you delete the username and other identifying info.

Not sure if that would hold up, as some comments can be pretty identifying. But it's a compromise that a company could try.

[derwiki]

Is GDPR only for PII? My understanding was that it applied to your data, regardless of PII status

[ddalex]

Does reddit have any kind of business presence in the EU ? How would the EU law be enforced?

[dotnet00]

They sell their Reddit Gold in the EU and sell advertising space to European companies.

[sebzim4500]

Presumably there are EU companies paying them for ads

[369548684892826]

If reddit employees want to travel to europe then a way to enforce it can be found

[jorams]

Yeah, 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.

[atomicfiredoll]

From my observation you're right about how comments work regarding private communities, so this is plausible. Before going straight to a conclusion, I'll just caution it's also possible that both things are true.

I'll wait and see how this plays out (while deleting my comments from the previously private communities.)