After the blackout I deleted all my posts and comments on reddit using the PowerDeleteSuite, and since then I’ve come back weekly to find comments existing on my account. I’ve been deleting them by hand now that the API is unusable. Does reddit pull these out of a backup? Do I just now see all of my comments? What’s the reason these comments keep showing up?
It’s quite clear that King Steven considers all posts the property of the Crown. Even if your deleted post is not recovered right away, if a backup is available it will be eventually.
If you live in the EU, you may have more traction with a GDPR complaint. It seems Europeans have some institutional memory on how to handle Royalty.
I do live in the EU. Does a GDPR complaint help? As far as I know this only applies to personal data, such as emails, names, addresses etc. not comments and posts.
It applies to comments and posts to the extent that they are attributed to you, about you and/or their content is specific enough to render you identifiable. In practical terms, this means that a data controller can in most cases keep the content of your post by anonymising it, which is why when you delete your account it shows “[deleted]” in place of your user name above your old posts. If the content of the deleted posts, even in aggregate, allows me to find out who you are, then you would have grounds to insist that the content be deleted (or sufficiently anonymised).
Source: I was a DPO for 5 years.
It applies to everything you post. The GDPR is supposed to level the power between you and organisations like Reddit. It give you the power to know what data they have on you, correct and delete it. If they don’t let you have this power, you can file a complaint with you data protection office. It doesn’t have to be a formal complaint. Just write them a mail with your problem.
From my experience, your posts on private subs are hidden so PowerDeleteSuite can’t delete them. When they open back up, those comments and submissions suddenly appear on your profile.
2 sources to this:
-You cannot see/edit/delete comments/posts that are in currently private communities.
-Reddit only caches ~100 items each in your profiles various lists (posts, comments, summary, and all their different sort options), so once those lists are empty it appears you have no content left but there’s still plenty that have just fallen off the end of those lists.
You can delete it… If you can find it. Reddit doesn’t give you the tools to find all of your own content.
There is an app called redact, you can use it not just delete but also replace all your comments with fuck you u/spez . For your whole account , that’s what I did and it held.
Pretty sure that doesn’t work anymore now that the API is gone, right?
Let me try it on my second account now and see. But I just did my porn Reddit account on Monday and worked.
Just ran it now it’s a little slow but connects and goes just fine. Here’s a link if anyone needs it - https://redact.dev
Can confirm, purging my account as I type this.
There are many Grease Monkey scripts that will do a mass ‘replace then delete’ on your Reddit comments. Since Grease Monkey is a browser script engine, no API access is required.
Okay I’m not entirely sure you know what an API even is based on that last sentence, nevermind the privileged access a browser plugin is all of a sudden supposed to have. However riddle me this: How is a Grease Monkey Script going to find all my comments if the Reddit Website isn’t even showing all of them to me?
Of course I know what an API is. No need to be a dick when people are just trying to be helpful.
The browser script will only be able to delete what is drawn on the page, so you will need to wait for dark subs to come back online so your comments and posts can be displayed in your history. You will also need RES on that browser for the “endless” feature. I deleted almost twelve years worth of content this way but still go back every few days in order to catch stragglers as subs come back online.
No need to be a dick when people are just trying to be helpful.
Yeah I’m a little reluctant to take help from people who make my bullshit meter go to 180 in as little as 13 words.
The browser script will only be able to delete what is drawn on the page, so you will need to wait for dark subs to come back online
It’s not only the dark subs though. It’s mostly that Reddit is caching a reduced list of my comments and only shows me those, and it doesn’t give me a new list when I deleted all of them until like a day later.
I’ve replaced all my comments with lorem ipsum using PowerDeleteSuite fork and they haven’t reverted them - maybe that would work for you? Overwrote them too just in case
Initially I did use PowerDeleteSuite to replace my comments with a message, but they were reverted as well, ultimately I started to delete my comments in the hopes they wouldn’t show up again, but sadly they do. And now that the API is gone PowerDeleteSuite doesn’t work anymore.
Are you sure they were reverted. If you used the original Power Delete Suite it was not reacting to the current 5-second-per-edit limit. And so it would look like stuff being reverted.
Many of the forks implemented some sleep timing to ensure all comments stay edited.
I used a forked version and said goodbye like the dolphins.
Thousands of comments (and a couple of days later) edit on a 4-pass cycle to ensure Reddit hadn’t implemented some kind of revision depth - and they’re all still edited.
I used the fork with the delay but I recognized the same comment showing up again and again, so I am pretty sure at least some were reverted.
I ran PowerDeleteSuite a week or two ago initially, and since then I’ve seen the occasional post or comment reappear every few days. That seems to have stopped now for me though.
I’m genuinely curious what the cause is, especially since I had them overwritten before deleting, and they would still come back to the unedited content.
I read somewhere that it could be a consequence of communities that were once private being ‘reopened’. I’m gonna check my own account in a few days, to see if any content has popped back up on my profile.
Actually I just ran a search on Google with my user name and restricted to reddit and I found loads of comments undeleted that do not show up in my comment view. I think Reddit just does not show me all my comments to begin with. Maybe they have some sort of caching of recent/top/controversial comments and it just get’s updated slowly.
I’ve seen a couple of my comments popping back up- from my understanding it’s just the ones that are in previously privated subreddits.
I’m glad I didn’t delete my entire account now, though.
Based on what I have read, the root cause is probably that Reddit doesn’t actually delete comments, it just marks them in the database as “this is not supposed to be displayed” or something like that. That means that it’s pretty easy for “deleted” comments to reappear without anyone actually trying to revert them, because the “deleted” flag gets lost somehow. That can happen in any number of ways, and it’s unlikely that it’s admins deliberately undoing user deletions, but it is happening. I have been manually deleting, so it isn’t just because scripts don’t get all the comments the first time (though that seems to be a common problem), and I can confirm that some comments in private subs couldn’t be deleted until after the subs opened up again, but that some things also popped back up with no changes to the subs in question. Yes, a lot of comments are “reverting” because they weren’t deleted in the first place, but that definitely doesn’t cover all of the issues people are having.
I am not positive that “delete” flags rather than actual deletion is what’s happening technologically, but it would explain how often deleted material is popping back up for people. Properly deleted comments shouldn’t show back up even if subreddits are toggled from private to public and back, because deleted comments should be gone as soon as you are able to delete them in the first place. This kind of fake deletion is apparently not unusual for sites that store and display content, but it doesn’t comply with EU privacy laws, precisely because it’s so easy for “deleted” material to become public again.
And that’s really the point: it doesn’t matter exactly why specific content is popping back up. The fact that any content is popping back up after a user tries to delete it means something is wrong, and if enough EU users complain, there will be grounds for a lawsuit against Reddit, regardless of whether anyone at Reddit is deliberately doing anything wrong.
I just had to do another sweep; most of my comments stayed edited but some from more popular subreddits (likely the ones that Reddit cares the most about profit wise) were uneditted. And most were un-deleted.
Ran PowerDeleteSuite and I’ll check in about a week.
