That 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.
I don’t think backups were used, likely all comments are just soft deleted and versioned.
So I think they just toggled off soft deleted comments, and reverted to older comment versions. That might show up as comments missing their added “edit:”s.
Another commenter here said they think this was an accident, I’m inclined to agree
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.