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.
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.
Well, if they did suspend my account for doing that, I doubt I’ll ever find out.
They haven’t restored anything. Any script or service you used can only access the most recent 1000 comments in your history. The problem is half of you people rushing to use these tools for the first time have no idea how they work.
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.
I understood that you cannot view, edit, or delete posts and comments from communities that are set to private. So if you run shreddit and a community later becomes public again, your posts can resurface.
Yes, but I definitely found comments that were mine, which didn’t show up in my account but showed up in the threads where they were posted, purely through Google searches just like the one described on this post.
The community wasn’t set to private anymore during that time tho: r/breath_of_the_wild reopened immediatly after the protests.
It’s not fishy (at least not intentionally so). It’s a limitation of their database. It can only show 1000 comments. So it won’t find your very old posts when you sort by them.
So they’re not restoring comments. It’s just very difficult to find your old comments to actually delete them.
I am talking about comments that I manually deleted tho. I saved certain comments first before deleting so I know that they’re the same ones that I manually nuked.
Just an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Breath_of_the_Wild/comments/mzcqja/comment/gw13ppt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
The answer to that post is mine, and I saved that comment because I wanted to use it for a guide later. It was definitely DELETED the day I closed my account, and it is the 1:1 same text as the saved comment, so I defo didn’t just confuse it with a different / similar comment.
Please ELI5 to me how it is “just a limitation of their database” that this comment exists, even tho it did originally pop up in the comment list AND was deleted.
PS: this is just one example of many many others - a whole lot of my longer in-depth comments are simply back again. And that sub was no longer set to “private” during that time.
>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.
That’s exactly what I did with redact.dev. You plug in the zip file and it uses the enclosed .csv files to find the posts and comments to delete. Has nothing to do with arbitrary db limitations or profiles at all.
It should also be noted that California, where Reddit is based, also has some GDPR-style privacy laws. People were posting the sources last month when Reddit first started undeleting deleted content, and that guy posted a video on YouTube of himself manually deleting comments and then having Reddit restore the exact comments he had deleted, which is supposed to be impossible.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out. Oh, and obligatory fuck Reddit, and fuck the shills who come here to defend that corrupt shit.
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 who Reddits listings work was downvoted. I guess some things never change.
I’m pretty sure they got downvoted for being rude