this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Reddit Migration

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I just found out that not all of my Reddit comments had been deleted despite my profile page showing otherwise. (kbin.social)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by anon@kbin.social to c/RedditMigration@kbin.social
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TL;DR: even if your delete script confirms a full wipe and your Reddit profile page shows zero comment, there may still be comments left over (that you can find through a search engine and delete manually on Reddit).

Weeks ago, I used redact.dev to delete all my Reddit comments (thousands of them over 10+ years). Redact.dev confirmed a full wipe, and my Profile > Comments page on Reddit confirmed I had no comment left.

Yet, as of today, Google still returns dozens of results for “$myredditusername site:reddit.com”. It’s not just Google’s crawler lagging; when I follow those links, those comments are still visible on the Reddit website, under my username, where I have the ability to manually delete them.

Thankfully, I hadn't yet nuked my account, because I knew of other users whose deleted comments got reinstated (although that was thought to be caused by the deletion script exceeding the API rate limit; supposedly a different case, as those missed comments would still show in the Profile page).

spez: edited for clarity.

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[–] Pandantic@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I believe that “0 comments” you can see is limited to about 1000. There’s a list of your comments that are viewable by your profile page, and that only caches the first 1000 in any category (top, new, controversial, etc).

[–] ono@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Close.

Each of Reddit's listings (top submissions, recent comments, etc.) is generated from a database index. Those indexes are limited to 1000 entries, by dropping older ones as new ones arrive, and they don't re-index for deletions.

That means that once a listing goes over 1000 items, the oldest items can no longer be found through it. The messages are still in the database somewhere, but can only be reached from some other index (different sorting order) or a search or a direct link.

So, the messages are not being deleted and then restored; they're not being deleted in the first place, because the tools have no way to find them.

This is why a formal data deletion request is often more effective than a deletion tool on Reddit.

[–] ColdCreasent@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But they have refused in the past to comply with a formal deletion request. They say, you may delete your account, but if you want your comments/submissions deleted, then you will have to do all of them yourself. My source is Louise Rossman on YouTube talking about how Reddit is willing to do illegal things to stop people leaving their platform.

[–] abff08f4813c@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For the path of least resistance, getting the copy of the archive and then using a tool like github shreddit to delete works 100% without needing to do anything beyond setting up an API key manually.

To refuse to comply with a formal deletion request (where reddit does the deleting instead of you (even via a tool like shreddit)) is illegal, and reddit should lose in the end, but it will take some years go to through the courts and such.

[–] ColdCreasent@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

I appreciate the input of a link/name of the GitHub that can delete comments. I agree they should lose in the end for refusing to delete all content and it’s just a matter of getting them there.

Also, anyone still planning to delete their comments and then delete their account: make sure your comments are gone and then wait a few weeks to make sure the comments stay gone.

[–] Pandantic@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you for the clarification!

And I think if you get your GDPR data request from Reddit, you can get the direct links and that allows some of the comment deletion/editing tools to do their full job, but I’m not sure on the full details on that.

[–] abff08f4813c@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Correct, github shreddit for example can do this, it has builtin support for checking the GDPR archive and finding comments and posts to delete/overwrite that way.

[–] anon@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Interesting - do you have more details about that? I would expect the “top 1K” query to show the leftovers, which would have become the next most top/controversial/etc after the original top 1K got nuked.

[–] Pandantic@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Okay, I’m not sure where it originated, but here’s a link to a relevant comment. I read it in a post about deleting Reddit comments when I first started exploring the fediverse, and I’m not sure I can find it but iirc, a Reddit admin confirmed that when you check your posts, it only shows the top 1000 and comments are only pushed off this list for “new” additions, and the list is not repopulated when you delete things. Therefore, if you delete all your comments, then check the list, it will show none (or if you delete 100 comments, it will show only 900, etc). Something about how these lists are populated in Reddit’s system. It is also relevant that some of the Reddit delete programs out there use this list and so will never delete all your comments.

I will keep looking for the original post tho.

[–] anon@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you. I’m boosting your reply as I hadn’t heard of this behavior before (as I’m sure many others) and it’s the most plausible explanation for what’s going here, i.e., not malicious intent from Reddit but rather sloppy design of the profile’s comments feed and how it pulls data.