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

I'm not familiar with redact.dev and can't comment on its accuracy, but your comments from earlier in this thread make it seem like you only found out about how the limitations of reddit's profile page work about 11 hours ago. They probably weren't deleted to begin with.

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

That’s right, they were most likely never deleted in the first place, despite Reddit’s indication to the contrary.

[–] quirzle@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Can you show this indication? Otherwise, this looks like a pretty clearcut case of user error.

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

I mean, it’s pretty straightforward. Go to reddit.com, click on your profile page, then on Comments. This will show you a list of your comments. If that list is empty, and it wasn’t prior to you deleting all your comments with an API tool like redact.dev, you can reasonably conclude that all your comments are gone. Yet it’s not the case.

I can show you a screenshot of the blank Comments page, but I’m not sure what it would add.

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

This comment (which you've replied to, so ostensibly have already seen) does a good job of articulating how this only shows the top thousand comments at a time and doesn't update as you delete them.

Depending on which tool you deleted with, it may or may not have done a decent job of working around this reddit limitation to actually delete them all.

So it's not necessarily pretty straightforward, especially if you commented a lot.

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

I had indeed read and understood the earlier comment that you linked.

I just got confused by your “user error” suggestion, because I don’t see how this qualifies as one.

First, the Reddit API is broken, because the select query sent by the deletion tool receives less than a full set (as if there was an implied LIMIT clause on the server side). This leads the deletion tool to erroneously announce it has processed all comments.

Two, the Reddit UX is broken, because the profile’s Comments page incorrectly returns an empty set due to a silent design limitation (as described in the linked comment).

There is literally no mechanism to find leftover comments through either the Reddit API or UX, because both are broken. The only workaround is to use a search engine that had indexed those leftover comments.

That’s the whole point of my original post, and I don’t see where the “user error” may come in.

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

I just got confused by your “user error” suggestion, because I don’t see how this qualifies as one.

Because you're both claiming to understand the failing of reddit's UI and claiming the same UI as a reliable indicator of all comments getting deleted. Rather, it seems some comments were likely missed because of the shitty UI. Relying on reddit's UI for this is the specific user error to which I was referring. I hope that's clearer.

First, the Reddit API is broken, because the select query sent by the deletion tool receives less than a full set (as if there was an implied LIMIT clause on the server side). This leads the deletion tool to erroneously announce it has processed all comments.

I don't see anywhere that goes into what redact.dev does behind the scenes (closed source on something like this is a huge red flag to me, but more relevant here is that there's no indication whether it was using an app-specific api key or just using a hidden browser under the hood), though I do see where the reddit service page states:

Reddit stores posts in comments in a weird way. If you’re trying to delete thousands at once, we may not be able to find all of them.

You also mentioned that's how you confirmed all your comments were deleted. One could argue using a tool that admits it can't see all your comments to confirm whether your comments are all deleted could be considered an error as well.

There is literally no mechanism to find leftover comments...

Best approach I've seen that's still standing for a post-API reddit is using the GDPR request as input for one of the tools using it, so it's not relying on the janky UI.

[–] abff08f4813c@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Hands down this is the right answer.

Just FYI someone else used redact.dev in the past and found that comments got missed too, see https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/46805/Strange-phenomenon-while-deleting-my-comments

Also, while GDPR archive + github reddit works out of the box, if for some reason you don't want to wait that long or are skeptical that reddit will get back to you (perhaps you live in a place that has no GDPR/CCPA), then there is a backup method to get around this limit, using the pushshift archives available via torrent.

https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/65260/PSA-Here-s-exactly-what-to-do-if-you-hit-the

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

Because you're both claiming to understand the failing of reddit's UI and claiming the same UI as a reliable indicator of all comments getting deleted. Rather, it seems some comments were likely missed because of the shitty UI. Relying on reddit's UI for this is the specific user error to which I was referring. I hope that's clearer.

Thanks for clarifying. I understand the failing of Reddit’s UI from reading about it in the replies here. I didn’t know about it when I first posted, so there is no contradiction there. I also had no reason then to believe that either the redact tool (which reported deleting all comments) nor the Reddit UX (which reported no comment left) were inaccurate in their reporting.

Had either displayed wording similar to that service page you linked to, I would agree with you that it would have been user error to ignore it.

Barring that, I think it’s a stretch to claim user error when an obscure technical limitation of Reddit makes its UX misleading in a non-obvious way.