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.
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 pretty sure they got downvoted for being rude
No, people understand. They’re seeing comments that they did delete appearing back on reddit. Not comments that they didn’t delete because they didn’t show in their profiles - comments that they did delete.
It appears Mlem doesn’t allow you to edit comments. Weird.
deleted by creator
here you go, this is my account overview
And here is a comment which I cannot find on my account overview, posts, or comments, no matter how I sort it all.
Now explain to me the tech illiteracy or the mundane reason this is happening. I deleted EVERYTHING off my account a month ago, and have created a single post since.
I’m leaving it up just so people can see that this is indeed happening. I would instantly delete it otherwise. I found it just like OP found his posts.
Edit: Here’s a Pic of the comment, just in case. Notice the time on my phone, I took this after posting this comment.
Edit 2: I can keep going, just keep asking me for more proof and I’m more than happy to find more shit, from my phone, from my PC, old reddit, new reddit… Go ahead and find my account on reddit and do the searches yourself if you want. First posts are duds, but you’ll find more content of mine if you keep looking through Google.
It’s not you It’s reddit profiles, they don’t show more than the top N posts in whatever sorting order
You can delete everything in /user/new, then sort by “top” and notice there’s still stuff there. There is no way to list it all and delete it all. And if you delete the whole account to at least anonymize the comments, they might bring stuff back (that you deleted) and there’ll be no way to remove them anymore.
As I mentioned, I went through the whole process a month ago, when I did see this exact behavior and I understand it perfectly. Right now, though? Why wouldn’t it show up at all? After a month with my account mostly empty, I’d expect to be able to see such comments. Yet, no matter how I sort it all, I don’t see those comments.
When you edit or delete your content, it remains in Pushshift (the database) and all that changes is the access. This is the way it has been for years, and why you could easily view moderator removed comments via Ceddit, Unddit, Reveddit, and the like. User delete and moderator remove are just hide buttons for the content.
Keeping that in mind, how hard would it be for Reddit to fuck around with that hiding just a bit more so as to not lose its content: not hard at all, as easy as mass approving comments when admin unbans someone (this is a frequent complaint on r/modsupport, lol).
When Reddit restricted the API, they restricted the ability to view hidden data via making calls to Pushshift, but that does NOT mean the backend has changed at all.
Anyone facing this problem should look at r/reveddit, where its creator u/rhaksw has urged people to continue viewing their own data via Reveddit even though they cannot now see everyone else’s because of the API restrictions. He explains it a lot better than I could, and how to get your own API key.
EDITED TO ADD (and remove direct Reddit link):
https://teddit.hostux.net/r/reveddit/comments/1502sb3/temp_fix_to_continue_using_the_extension_acquire/
YouTube short on how to get your own Reddit API key: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-ogv3ZU6dg
There are those of us using our GDPR data request output with shreddit or redact.dev, and that bypasses the profile altogether, as the .csv tells shreddit or redact what to delete.
Reddit has given us plenty of legitimate reasons. It’s disappointing seeing people fall for conspiracy theories. Reddit doesn’t care that you’ve deleted your comments. It really reveals something I think, and that is a self centered-ness that people have that reddit would find their comments so valuable that they would create a mechanism to restore them after deletion. People who propagate this conspiracy theory reveal more about themselves than anything else.
Why would comments not show up on your overview but show up on threads they were posted on? How hard can it be to do a SELECT WHERE on a db? Even if you assume things get cropped for performance, eventually the comments should show up in your account overview. I found one today, which just didn’t show up in my account overview, and I deleted EVERYTHING on my account a month ago.
Reddit uses something called listings which contain 1000 items. If you have more than 1000 comments on your account, you will only ever be able to view the last 1000 of them on a page like that. If you delete 50 comments, the listing is now only 950, it does not refill.
Tell me you’ve never done any web dev without telling me.
Here’s a hint - when you “delete” your comment, it’s not actually deleting it. It’s still there in the database and in the backups. Restoring comments is trivial.