2y ago

Reddit undeleting comments and hiding them

I came across today one of my own comments on Reddit with a search on duckduckgo. It was still intact. The problem is I used shreddit to randomise and delete the entire contents of my account. My account comments and posts all show empty on my account pages on reddit so there should be nothing.

I did a site:reddit.com search using my username and found ~50 comments that Reddit has undeleted but also hide from my own account. I could still edit and delete them. Its curious that they don't appear on my accounts content on Reddit and yet a search engine can find them and they are still served by Reddit. Ex Reddit users who deleted their account contents should be aware this is happening and report it as a GDPR breach to their respective agencies if they are in the EU if they too find this has occurred.

111 comments

Several of us have noticed this since the protests and mass exodus started. It did seem that editing then deleting might protect against Reddit's restoration of posts and comments.
Update: Just checked. They've restored a lot of my old posts. This may turn into a years-long game of whack-a-mole trying to actually get our material deleted from that site.
- This is exactly why (plus laziness) that I haven't even bothered. They're just going to put them back anyway.
  I do have a post pinned in my account directing people to Lemmy though.
  
  I PMed someone on Twitter asking them to use Mastodon. As soon as I sent the PM, Twitter temporarily locked my account for "suspicious activity". I had to basically fill out a captcha to get my account back, but it didn't send the message.
  I rewrote it while being more careful with my phrasing and misspelling "mastedon" the second time.
- I manually deleted everything reddit chose to show in my profile over the course of a week. I only stopped once absolutely NO comments or posts were shown in "new" reddit, old.reddit, and all types of sorting (old,new,top,hot,controversial). Waited an additional day and then checked again, just to make sure I really got everything. There simply was nothing left in my profile anymore.
  Afterwards(!) I used "shreddit" and it found nearly a thousand effing more things to delete (981 comments to be precise). Ran it twice, and the second go didn't find any more comments or posts.
  My account is deleted now, and I can STILL find comments that are definitely mine but no longer attributed to my account (it says [deleted] where the username originally was) but since the account no longer exists, I can not edit/delete them again.
  There is definitely something fishy with that site.
  
  Any script or service you used can only access the most recent 1000 comments in your history.
  This isn't quite 100% true. Shreddit supports getting its comment list from a GDPR request, and if you do that, then it CAN access the older comments and delete them, it just doesn't have any other way than that data request file to know about their existence.
  
  I'm manually deleting everything and still seeing the same thing.
  
  Yes, I noticed this as well. I had to feed my GDPR export into a program to delete comments as the scripts that used reddit to find comment history didn't go back far enough and did a terrible job. Even with that some comments caused errors which may have been due to some subs still being private at the time so I will do another pass.
  
  And predictably the only guy in the thread who understands how Reddit's listings work was downvoted. I guess some things never change.
I’m in the US and deleted all my posts & comments months ago. I also deleted my account when the whole ruckus started over there. Just tried this search and low and behold, my old posts came up. Not happy about this.
- Should be illegal. Is it not due to GDPR in Europe at least?
  
  It totally is illegal. We just need someone with a good lawyer to push through.
- low and behold
  *lo
  
  *low and belowed
  
  But this is funnier. :)
Search engines do not scrape the entire internet every single time someone searches. They do routine scrapes of web content and create a cache of what was there, and search that cache. This is why updates to websites do not always reflect on searches.
You're contents are findable on Google because the last time they bothered to scrape that particular Reddit post was when your comment was intact, and they have not had a need to scrape it again since then.
- They are finding comments through Google and are then able to view, edit, and delete them on Reddit. They are not able to view them on their profile page.
  
  They said the originals do not appear on their account on Reddit. They also said they edited their original posts to be empty. They're able to edit and delete their modified (empty) comments based on what I understand of their post.
  I don't see anything in OP's post that indicates Reddit.com itself is displaying the originals, only the search engines are, and the cache would be the reason why.
- They also appear when you click through the link and look at the Reddit site. They can be editted and deleted. These are not cached search results Reddit is genuinely showing those comments and yet they can not be found in your account that shows you have no comments at all. That is not what is happening here.
  
  Do the comments still show after you empty your own browser's cache too? That seems less likely to be the culprit, but worth a check to be certain.
  Elsewhere in this post there's also a helpful user who notes that the mass-editing programs can only handle a thousand comments. Is it possible this is why some of your comments are still there?
- OP is not saying that Google's scrape still retains his reddit comments. He's not referring to seeing this information on Google, but on Reddit.
  He's saying that reddit is retaining his comments and still serving those comments up when refreshed directly. They're de-linked from his reddit account so he doesn't see them through his reddit account, but the information is restored throughout the reddit site to be viewed.
The EU needs to smack Reddit with those fat GDPR-violation fines.
- Is there a way OP can report reddit for this?
  
  I have done but from past experience they don't do their job at all.
- This doesn't account for the post being hidden from your post history on accounts that aren't banned, which I've seen firsthand.
- Is it really a GDPR violation if no article 17 request was sent AND those comments contain no PII? PII is the key for GDPR, your "IP"/contribution to Reddit means nothing
They literally rolled back subreddit comments posts and all by weeks and years. so doesnt surprise me. We were their "item sold" and they aint giving that up. Sadly seems like the protests didnt do much. Some of us left but that about it.
They’re doing It to mine too.
Cries in American
- F murica.
  As an American.
How about instead of deleting, you edit the comment so it's taken completely out of context. Nonsense words, random poems, list of colors, etc.
- They did.
Do you see them from a throwaway account?
- Yes, you can. Or, at least I can see some of my (deleted, not visible in my profile) main’s comments from my alt account.
  
  Something tells me that isn't GDPR compliant.
I thought some of my old posts were restored but it turned out that those subreddits were still dark when I ran the delete script and had since reopened. Don't know if this is the same situation as you but maybe check if that is the case?
- Do the comments show up in your account profile under your comments?
  Many of these were deleted long before the protests actually and some not in subs which went private. There is no obvious reason why these particular comments are detached from my accounts comments and yet still owned by me and not accessible from the reddit account page.
  
  They did, I was able to run the shred script again and remove the comments.
  I'm going to try the same search as you and see if my comments are there..... you got me spooked!
  Edit: looks like I'm good across all my old accounts. There was cached data but that's expected.
  
  Sometimes comments are just not properly linked to your profile for whatever reason, I’ve had it happen a number of times throughout the years. You can view them and edit them, but they don’t show up on your profile - exactly like you’re describing here.
  I’m not saying Reddit isn’t doing something fucky here, but rather that it’s absolutely not a guarantee of anything malicious.
- Comment made for raising a useful post.
OP said they did exactly that using shreddit.
Edit: Lemmy acting weird, this is supposed to be a comment to user ricecooker.
Sigh, whatever.
- You're allowed to delete comments on Lemmy :)
  (They'll still be visible to third-party app users but that's another topic, it should be fixed eventually)
This is more a function of how Reddit’s databases and listings work. Automated tools can’t find all of your content because of the limitations on listings. It’s really funny though that people are ascribing abilities to a company with a very low competency level.
- They also can't access posts/comments on private subreddits. Guess what a lot of subreddits were doing when a lot of people decided to delete their comments.
  
  These were not in subs that went private. More importantly when they became unprivate you would expect the content to be attached to the account.
  Also many of these comments were deleted prior to the protests by a year or more.
- Those comments it was not able to delete should presumably still show up in your profile.
  
  The fact that they are too old to show up in your profile is WHY it can't delete them. The only way to delete those automatically is to feed in a GDPR data request into a tool like Shreddit that supports getting its comment list from that source rather than the profile.
same, i used Power Delete Suite and confirmed i deleted everything, but searching my old username pulls up a lot of posts and comments. all the posts still seem to be deleted but i'm seeing comments where the username is deleted but the comment is back.
- If you deleted your account the name will appear deleted presumably then you no longer have the ability to edit them? I see them associated with my account still since I never deleted the account just all the posts and comments.
  
  Yea, the account is deleted so I can’t log in to try and edit.
I replaced all of mine with “fuck spez” and then deleted my account but not posts, so they’re still there. I went back and checked lol
Would it be better to edit posts and change them to nonsense? Random poems, list of dog breeds, song lyrics, random SQL code...
- I changed all my comments over 5 karma with multiple pages of lorem ipsum placeholder text.
  
  Underrated comment. Beautiful!
- I tried to do this with a script but there's a rate limiter on it for editing, but not for deleting. And I had a fuckload of comments.
- Yes. Preferably something the LLM people can't easily identify as garbage. Make your data less valuable.
An easy test would be to load that thread in incognito and see if it shows the undeleted version.
- They don't seem to have an issue showing it to you logged in, its just it doesn't appear in your content under your account so the only way to find your own comments is with an external search engine. You don't need incognito.
  
  Search engines are not live services. That's old data that Google may or may not ever purge from their index. Using a search engine to determine if your comments are deleted is not going to work.
  Just open up threads you've posted on in an incognito window. If you're really paranoid, do it from a VPN, too. If you still see your comments on the live Reddit page, then Reddit un-deleted them. If you don't, then they're deleted, but search engines still have that data cached indefinitely.
It's a known issue, only your last 1,000 comments are shown in your user profile so scripts like PowerDeleteSuite won't catch the older ones. Also some of the comments go through, but then you just run the script again. Not much you can do about the older ones though.
Shows as deleted to me: https://www.reddit.com/r/ValveIndex/comments/145277f/valve_index_and_linux/
I also deleted using shreddit...
ive been using Powerdeletesuite for reddit routinely for years. this is nothing new. it's confusing bullshit and inconsistent but not new, at least
Maybe someone that has this problem can contact The Verge to provide information to write an article, they are doing a good coverage on Reddit's news.
- Done, I have provided an example still live on Reddit and asked for an email to prove my comments page is blank.
Funny when the product sees itself up in the store window!
- I did a site:reddit.com search using my username and found ~50 comments that Reddit has undeleted but also hide from my own account. I could still edit and delete them.
  Perhaps you should re-read the post, and/or the comments here. The posts referenced are still live on Reddit, hence they can still be edited - OP is not talking about a cached view from the search engine.
Are they amp caches?
Hope these posts will age and the dearth of new content will bite.
Instead of deleting, you gotta put links to cheese pizza on all your comments to throw them off. Per chance
Honestly who gives a fuck?
- You'd think reddit was these people's lives or something else important.

111 comments