A few days ago I deleted all of my posts and comments from reddit, but today they somehow reappeared.
I don’t know if that’s a bug or the admins themselves are restoring content, but I’m sure they’d have incentives to do so considering that they make money from your content, whether that is from generated clicks to the website or from selling those data to other companies to train AI models.
The creator of tildes.net is a former Reddit backend developer, and believes this is likely due to how Reddit caching works (or doesn’t work), rather than an intentional subversion of user intent:
Yes, this is almost certainly a technical issue. The way reddit caches things probably isn’t the standard way you’re thinking of, like a short-term cache that expires and refreshes itself. There are multiple layers of “cached” listings and items for almost everything, and a lot of these caches are actually data that’s stored permanently and kept up to date individually.
For example, when you view your comments page, Reddit uses a cached (permanent) list of which comments are in that page. There is a separate list stored for each sorting method. For example, maybe you’d have something like this with some made-up comment IDs:
Deimos’s comments by new: 948, 238, 153
Deimos’s comments by hot: 238, 153, 948
Deimos’s comments by controversial: 153, 238, 948
If I post a new comment, it will go through each list and add the new ID in the right spot (for example, in the “new” list it always just goes at the start). If I delete a comment, it goes through every list, and removes the ID if it can find it in there.One of the problems with this system (which is probably what’s causing @phedre’s issues, and affecting many other people trying to delete their whole history) is that all of these listings are capped at 1000 items. If you already have more than 1000 comments and you post a new one, the 1000th comment currently in the new list gets “pushed off the end”. The comment still exists, but you won’t be able to see it by looking through your comments page, because it’s no longer in that listing.
Deleting comments also doesn’t cause previously “pushed off” ones to get re-added. If you have 5000 comments, your listing will only include 1000 of them. If you delete 50 of the ones in the listing, your listing now has 950 comments in it. If you delete all 1000 from the listing, your comments page will appear empty, but you actually still have 4000 comments that will be visible in the comments pages they were posted in.
And this is only one aspect of it. There are also multiple other places and ways that comments are cached—comment trees are cached (order and nesting of comments on a comments page, for all the different sorting methods), rendered HTML versions of comments are cached, API data is probably cached, and so on.
All of these issues are probably just some combination of all of your posts being difficult to find and access due to the listing limits or certain cached representations of posts not being cleared or updated properly.
It could be that. It’s just weird that it happened three days after.
I’ve been experiencing this on my comments too. I specifically kept my account open for now because I figured this might happen, and I want to be able to keep editing and deleting them.
FYI: if the issue is using a bot to delete as some speculate, you can sort your comments by top and delete those manually. Those are highest visibility.
PDS automatically looks for everything in your new, top, controversial, and hot. Hot seems to be limited to 200 i think??? so the max you could get in theory is 3200, but what I found is that many entries show up in multiple places, unfortunately.
I modified one of the bots (using API key) to do the same thing and got a few hundred more comments overwritten that way.
I plan to replace all of my comments with useless nonsense or whatever (as if they aren’t already); have there been any reports of comments being restored from that?
Those were the posts that I deleted first manually, and they were among the posts that reappeared. I think I’ll wait for a couple weeks to see if anything pops back up, then I’ll send them an email to request they delete everything (just to make sure they delete data from their backups too).
I deleted my top posts manually a week ago and they haven’t popped back up so I wonder if it is because people are using bots.
Someone who have done it manually are reporting undeletes, while I used the API (like a bot) but haven’t had this issue. (I did overwrite first and then delete, however.)
Assuming this isn’t just a temporary caching issue like someone else has suggested, denying people the right to delete their own data risks bring a GDPR nightmare down no the company.
Reddit sees “anonymized” data as being okay via GDPR. Thus Reddit thinks they can comply with GDPR by simply deleting your name off of the top of all the comments you leave behind.
This is why you occasionally see comments marked as written by
[]with the comment body intact - that user used the GDPR to wipe their account.I’m not an expert on any legal system, let alone the European one, and so I can’t say if that’s sufficient by the letter of the law. But Reddit seems to think so, and thus if you “delete” your stuff it really just deletes your username (basically).
Removing the name isn’t enough. Some posts might contain stuff like “my real name is … and i live in so-and-so city” or “my birthday is today too!” which would all count as PII. This would need to be scrubbed too.
For the “[deleted]” part - there’s another way that happens. If you delete your reddit account w/o deleting the comment/post, then your text stays, but “[deleted]” is reported as the user who wrote it.
That’s true, but that’s not how Reddit sees it. Reddit says they have a “legitimate interest” in keeping your posts around, no matter what those posts say. They say that just removing the username is enough.
Again, I can’t speak to whether that’ll hold up in court, but that’s what Reddit is saying.
Yeah. So the general consensus here is that it wouldn’t hold up in court, see for example https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/41129/Just-started-the-process-of-editing-all-of-my-Reddit#entry-comment-174724
Such a stance would be particularly ironic considering one of the reasons that reddit cited for cutting off Pushshift from the API is because they felt Pushshift wasn’t honoring requests by reddit users to have their content deleted.
Actually, doubly ironic since Pushshift used to be a common way to get around the 1000 indexing limit on reddit and make sure you actually deleted everything.
They have the right to delete data that’s about them. Perhaps Reddit will make the case that the contents of their comments aren’t that, and once an account has been deleted so that those comments are no longer associated with a username then the identifiable personal information has been removed.
Assuming this isn’t just crappy caching issues.
I’ve noticed that some posts and comments are appearing in my scrubbed profile once subreddits that were private open back up. And just the posts/comments in those subreddits. I’m keeping my account open until the 30th so I can periodically check back and make sure there isn’t anything else that needs removing.
Are you using Power Delete Suite? You can overwrite comments with an edit before deleting them and it makes things a bit easier than doing it by hand.
Are you using Power Delete Suite? You can overwrite comments with an edit before deleting them and it makes things a bit easier than doing it by hand.
Yes, I chose the option to edit the comments before deleting them this time.
Me too! I’ll see you on the 30th! (Not literally - we’ll just be deleting our accounts on the same day.)
We will be comrades in deletion.
Are you 100% sure? Have you verified (with e.g. a screenshot including the permalink in the URL bar) that the comment/post was deleted previous, and it’s showing up again?
Also is it again showing up in your profile, or is it missing from there?
This comes up a lot: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/47320/PSA-If-you-have-more-than-1000-posts-more-than
And if the above PSA turns out to apply to you, here’s how to get everything everything: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/65260/PSA-Here-s-exactly-what-to-do-if-you-hit-the
Are you 100% sure? Have you verified (with e.g. a screenshot including the permalink in the URL bar) that the comment/post was deleted previous, and it’s showing up again?
I definitely am. No hidden posts and comments, all deleted. I did it I think three days ago. Now I deleted everything again, let’s see what happens.
So you have fewer than 1000 posts and fewer than 1000 comments overall?
Sorry if I seem pushy. I just want to help establish an accurate timeline of what reddit is doing and when, see https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/65688/this-magazine-is-really-important-for-documentation-purposes-it-d-be
Importantly, I don’t want reddit to be able to claim “oh, that’s just the 1000 indexing limit” if they really are doing this. So far no one has had the forsight to take a before-undeletion and after-undeletion picture, unfortunately.
So the way it works is, if these posts are past the limit, they never show up in your profile. Not before and not after. If they are really being undeleted, the ones under the limit would have showed up in your profile before you deleted them. I’m not sure if they’d show up or not after undeletion, but if they do show back up in your profile then definitely they have been undeleted because posts and comments outside the limit can’t ever show back up there.
One person reported something even more extreme - had an account, deleted, had a habit of mindlessly logging on so kept getting login failures. Then one day it worked - the account was completely and entirely undeleted and the old login worked again. See https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/55335/Reddit-keeps-undeleting-my-account-and-posts-Is-there-anything#entry-comment-239492
I’m not sure if I had more than 1000 comments, but I did manually delete everything that Power Delete Suite didn’t catch. My account was completely empty except for a few comments that I posted after.
I think this needs more visibility though, maybe a sticky or something. If people delete their accounts after they think they’ve deleted everything, there’s no way to go back and delete the stuff that reappears. Maybe if you’re in the EU you can ask reddit to delete your old posts and comments but I’m not sure.
The word seems to be that reddit is claiming that they don’t have the ability to do this after your account is deleted. They need you to make the GDPR request for deletion first, and then only delete your account once all your content is deleted.
I’m pretty sure that this is not GDPR compliant (they’d have to invest the effort - at their own expense - to find all the now unlinked content that used to be part of your account) but if you haven’t deleted your account yet, you might have less of an uphill battle in getting reddit to comply.
The support page literally says that you have to delete everything manually. Their privacy policy has a bit more details and from what I can understand you can send them an email to request data deletion, but I’m not sure if they’d have to comply unless you’re a EU or California user.
Depending on where you live, you may also have the right to request access to or ability to port, deletion/erasure of, or correction/rectification of, your personal information […]
Instead of deleting the comments try editing them to some standard text, then go back and edit them all again to some slightly different boilerplate, etc. etc. I wonder if that might overwhelm their saved cache of your comments…
Delete everything then delete the account. Only way to resolve all this!
Nope. Then they just restore the comment and it lists the author as [deleted].
tHEY ARE ALSO REMOVING COMMENTS AND POSTS THAT ARE CRITICAL OF sPEZ
They’ve restored my posts and comments twice now, both times after I used Power Delete Suite to edit and delete them. First time, they restored everything. Second time, they restored a couple of my more recent posts and the comments on those threads.
It’s not caching or any 1000 item limits. My account is 16 years old but I didn’t have that many comments.
What did you use to delete all the posts and comments?
Power Delete Suite and manual deletion.
