[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.

[Eisenstein]

> Investors aren’t that dumb

Maybe not individually, but this is an IPO and the P stands for Public, and when you aggregate everyone together then intelligence is a moot concept.

[hackinthebochs]

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

[hammock]

The point stands…more comments, more content, more value, higher exit price

[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).

[xp84]

It is in this case. They don't "need" the data themselves, they need Googlebot to see it to get traffic, which is their lifeblood both in general and for IPO.

Have you heard the recent popular saying that Googling things barely even works anymore unless you append reddit to the query, which tends to bring up actual information instead of SEO trash?

[wongarsu]

Arguably the perception of the size of their knowledgebase is more important than the actual size, at least when talking about the upcoming IPO.

[Daneel_]

If it’s not visible to other users or paying LLMs then it’s worthless. That’s what I’m getting at.

[reaperman]

Strong incentive also exists to undelete.

[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