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.
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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.
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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.
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 how Reddit’s listings work was downvoted. I guess some things never change.
I’m pretty sure they got downvoted for being rude
It appears Mlem doesn’t allow you to edit comments. Weird.
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here you go, this is my account overview
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):
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.
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.
How is it illegal
Read GDPR, Art. 17 GDPR Right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’)
It’s even worse because people deleted the content themselves and it still shows up and is editable. (Not to be confused with cached by search engine)
Agree. Under GDPR this is totally forbidden. Issue a take down request and when that is not being followed up they will have major issues in the EU.
They do this by removing the username from the content but they’re allowed to keep the content
What if the content identifies you?
It’s not illegal, they don’t have to provide this feature to you for you to edit your own comments.
They do have to delete it if you ask them tho.
Technically all they have to do is anonymize you by disassociating your comments from your profile
What if your comment identifies you?
Good point
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.
I just did a search just like OP said and while it’s true that most results are just outdated scraped content where my posts and comments have been deleted, I did find one just now that doesn’t appear on my account overview, but that I could see, edit, and delete on the reddit thread itself.
The second and third sentences of the second paragraph are talking about Reddit itself. OP does not see the comments in their own Reddit page, mass edited and deleted them at some point, but is still about to find them through a search engine actively on Reddit.
Maybe try reading it again
This is fine due diligence. You just need to frame it as such instead of confidently saying these things happened.
Skepticism is fine. Just assuming Reddit didn’t do something this egregious (when they probably did) is poor form.
This is not the first account I’ve heard of comments rising from the grave.
they are still served by Reddit
🤔
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?
Yes, I happen to be incidentally be finding this on a brand new install of Windows as my motherboard failed last week so its super duper clean.
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.
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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
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Yes strong protection will make me cry so hard.
If my reddit comments are helping troubleshoot something technical and unrelated to me, that still isn’t personal data. Valuable comments will be available on reddit and generating them traffic from Google searches regardless of how much people here scream about GDPR.
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Not American. You misunderstand the concept of “personal”.
Edit: also it doesn’t really matter if you are in the US (or where you are at all). If you deal with European customers (their data) you have to obey GDPR. That’s why some sites have opted to simply block European visitors.
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Whatever makes you feel better. Keep screaming GDPR at everything…
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.
If I were European, I’d be very angry right now. Actually, I’m angry anyway…but there’s less that I can do as an American.
Though I do have an avenue as a Virginian, its not one where I control the enforcement. I would have to get my corporate bootlicking Attorney General to do something about it, and that will never happen.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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I deleted my own comment above, what do you fellow Lemmings see?
I see ‘deleted_by_author’, nothing else. Your username is still above the comment along with a rough time of when it was posted.
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.
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.
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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.
OP of this post said they used Shreddit
You need to specifically use a GDPR export with shreddit though, it’s not magic, and if you don’t have a GDPR export, it can’t get around the 1000 post limit on the profile.
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
