this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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Folks, it's not that Reddit is undeleting comments or anything. I fought this all day today (see https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/45417/Anyone-have-experience-with-deleting-comments-to-see-older-comments#entry-comment-190482 ) and I figured out exactly what is happening.
Reddit is so dumb! They have an 1000 limit (on posts, comments, saved, etc). See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17647915 and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42940262/getting-more-than-1000-search-results-upper-bound-with-praw and even in PRAW's own docs, for example in https://praw.readthedocs.io/en/v3.6.2/pages/getting_started.html
So what happened is that redact.dev can only delete the most recent 1000 comments of OP. But those subreddits have comments from OP beyond the limit, which no longer display in OP's own profile/comment views.
https://shreddit.com/ reports the same thing but they are more open about it.
They explicitly say that you need to give them an archive upload (from reddit's data retrival request) in order for shreddit.com to delete everything.
About six months back I requested my data dump just out of curiosity, to see what it had about me. Even though the form says "allow up to 30 days" it came to me almost immediately, I seem to recall it was just a matter of hours.
About a week ago I requested another data dump, this one to be my nostalgic "that was my Reddit career I guess" archive. It still hasn't come through. Either their systems are genuinely so poor that they're being overwhelmed and can't generate all those data dumps being requested now, or more likely they're stalling in an effort to prevent exactly this sort of activity.
Sadly I expect that we will all get them within that 30 day window - on day 39, after the new api pricing breaks these tools.
That may be the case, so I think it's a temporary answer to this mystery. Though recently some of my comments ranging from 7 and 10 months ago (update: as of 6/19/23 my 18 days old comments are now reappearing) have been reappearing again, so it's become a kind of a whack-a-mole situation right now.
There's hope I think, someone pointed me to a script on github that uses Pushshift's api and archive to bypass the reddit limit and get everything everything. See https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/47320/PSA-If-you-have-more-than-1000-posts-more-than#entry-comment-202228
Thank you!
Update to this, https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/65260/PSA-Here-s-exactly-what-to-do-if-you-hit-the
Do we know of this will impact Power Delete?
Yes, since even on the website on mobile or desktop, you have the 1000 indexing limit. PDS relies on hitting the delete button on each comment/post that's visible. So if you can't see a comment because it's past the 1k limit, then PDS can't see it either and can't delete it.
Now, the changes to the API probably won't. Power Delete Suite is a javascript plugin on the browser and when I look at it, there's no api calls. Rather it just simulates you clicking manually on the edit / delete button of each submission / post.
However, PDS relies on the old dot reddit dot com layout (and goes to there automatically), so it might stop working if we lose old reddit.
The other thing is that I tried PDS and have had a very bad experience with it. Compared to the scripts out there like shreddit, I found PDS to be unreliable (no way to verify it deleted successfully if a rate limit stopped it, also it doesn't save all content and returned a truncated CSV file).