Don’t get me started man, currently organizing a 6+ year old spaghetti code Javascript app. It was running a version of node below 1
This app had git versioning and I am seeing shit like “filenameNew” “filenameOld” there’s also multiple old versions of the app that were just chilling in nested upon nested folders of themselves.
The horror of the single inheritance that forces you to use composition instead.
The boredom of knowledge which exception every method throws.
The narrowness of generics that don’t allow duck typing.
The oppression of monads and pattern matching.
The poverty of a central package repository and only 2 package managers.
The pressure of choice between dozens of garbage collectors for different workloads.
The promiscuity of the single platform that interconnects various programming languages and allows all of them to use features like state-of-the-art profile-guided optimizations.
“Welcome to gaslighting 101! Please take a syllabus from the pile you will [not] find by the door, which will [not] include your instructor’s contact information and office hours.”
⚠️⚠️⚠️ WARNING: TVTROPES LINK ⚠️⚠️⚠️
IMMINENT DANGER OF CROSSING EVENT HORIZON
exercise extreme caution when clicking the above link
⚠️⚠️⚠️ WARNING: TVTROPES LINK ⚠️⚠️⚠️
That’s pretty dubious, otherwise why would I get all these replies from 3-7 years ago? Not new replies on dead threads, but the replies were posted that long ago, and I’m being notified about them now as “new” comments. Seems a lot like deleted posts coming back.
Yes, comments are being restored, but what they’re saying is it’s not something they’re doing deliberately. The scripts people were running were basically failing and comments got restored automatically. That message literally encourages you to run them again or try different ones
Yeah… My comments which were restored were deleted for several days before they started reappearing. That doesn’t sound like a flaw on the scripts, but a flaw on how reddit handles bulk comment deletion.
Fwiw this is not necessarily a new problem. As a mod I’ve seen it before, if you go through hitting “remove” on a whole bunch of comments in a row often some of them will be visible again when you refresh the page. Something similar could be what’s happened here. Reddit’s backend has never been very good.
I can understand seeing them after a refresh, but visiting my user profile not logged in from Tor and showing everything deleted then having it all come back 2-3 weeks later is a little shady. I just checked my account again after my 3rd powerdeletesuite run since the shutdowns and I had one single comment restored (despite shredding before delete but maybe that failed)
I wouldn’t be surprised. This is the kind of problem that would usually only affect a small number of users. They should probably have done something about it before it had a chance to come back and bite them…
It doesn’t. A Reddit script just sends a request to delete the comment. At that point if the comment is deleted and then restored due to a timeout it is 100% on them.
It would be different if they would send back an error code without any changes being made, but the fact that the comment was first deleted is proof enough that their system received and at least started to process the call.
If you ran those scripts while subreddits were dark, the script can’t see those comments you made in those particular subs, (they’re hidden along with the sub) and can’t delete them. Then later when the sub comes back to public mode, your comments will appear as well. So comments you thought you wiped were simply hiding.
Just to add, also check the other sections on your comments when deleting (eg: hot/controversial) because sometimes those ones get missed by the scripts as well.
Not to say that’s the only thing going on… wouldn’t surprise me if they are bringing back some stuff considering their history of shenannigans.
The issue is reddit doesn’t store all the data in one indexed and centralized location. It was pointed out that “hot” and “top” sorting aren’t just a sort, but literally TWO LISTS that are constantly being updated and adjusted. So if you remove a comment from one list or location, it still might exist in other places. Then when reddit software gets around to reconciling these differences, the copy that still exists gets pushed onto the other lists and returns.
I’m not trying to justify the system; it sucks and reddit is directly responsible for that. But it does seem like they’re not intentionally restoring content, it’s just a side effect of their bungled system.
That makes absolutely zero sense. The scripts issue individual delete requests for each comment. If a comment is deleted, it should stay deleted, even if the script ultimately fails.
Why do you assume that reddit saying that’s the explanation, means that that’s the explanation? Christian’s done a pretty good job of documenting multiple instances of Reddit lying about what’s going on, and spez has been observed editing other people’s comments, so I wouldn’t assume that they’re telling the truth in this instance either.
Except that’s crap, because I have been manually deleting my Reddit comments weekly at minimum for years, and I’ve had several that repopulated a few weeks ago, after being deleted for multiple weeks.
I’m a web developer, that is absolutely not how any of this works.
Their claim that the scripts are failing causing comments to be restored is not possible. When you make a request to a website the site returns a success or fail status. The scripts are getting success statuses, the users are manually checking and seeing that their posts are deleted and then they reappear later. This means there is a mechanism between step 2 and 3 being run by Reddit affecting an already completed action.
Don’t comment on stuff like this unless you have any idea what you’re talking about.
Whether they’re doing it on purpose is not relevant to the legal aspect of the situation. They have a responsibility to honor deletion requests. If a user complains, the appropriate response is “sorry you had a problem, we’ll fix it,” not “sorry, we will only honor our legal responsibilities if you follow our preferred [but not stated until now] procedure for requesting deletion, try again.” Having database problems opens you up to legal liability whether you like it or not, and trying to convince users that you are not responsible for your own database is… inappropriate.
Besides, there have been bugs with manual deletion, too. This is at least partly a problem with their own systems.
This is why Power Delete Suite edits the comment before deleting it. If Reddit is keeping a record of deleted posts and comments, then theoretically they’d only be left with a bunch of comments that say nothing. But I’m pretty sure that if they’re keeping deleted comments, then they’re also keeping edit histories.
Yeah I think people are looking for a conspiracy here when this seems like much more of a technical thing. I think the person that put together one of the scripts even acknowledged that comments being “restored” were because the script was bad and needed a delay of some kind? Because Reddit has safeguards against mass deletion or editing in this manner in the event of trolls or compromised accounts and so on.
Like, comments were never meant to be mass deleted in this fashion, and we don’t actually know exactly how reddit handles the requests on their end, so it makes sense some of them got kicked back automatically.
Reddit is doing more than enough terrible shit we can point to at the moment, don’t need to wind this particular thing up into something it isn’t.
I definitely do not believe any of these stories of comments intentionally restored. Not one piece of concrete proof of it happening has been submitted by anyone. It's definitely one of those "do your own research" things.
But also, Reddit is responsible for this situation by not having a first party tool for self-service full account deletions. They deserve all these conspiracies hitting them for omitting such an essential feature.
Your comment misses the very important point that nobody who experienced this issue had the clairvoyance to screenshot their cleared profile on Day A to prove that their comments were restored on Day B, C, or D. You’re expecting someone to have explicitly predicted that exact circumstance and deliberately documented it before it ever happened to them. That’s like complaining to your neighbor they they can’t prove the scratch wasn’t already in their car door after they watch you hit it with your own.
These rumors of restored comments have been going on since the start of the reddit blackouts. And they're largely not happening anymore now that the blackouts are over. It was the blackouts. I checked my comments and deleted new ones almost every day during the blackouts, and whenever they "came back" they were all on a previously-private sub and they "came back" as a bloc. It was private subs having comments be private, then turning public/restricted and "restoring" the previously-inaccessible comments.
Literally just one confirmed case of someone who knew about the "restorations" and took some kind of backup before deleting to prove it happening. Just one case. But there isn't.
There is absolutely zero chance Reddit would be restoring only certain comments. It would be widespread if they were doing it. They aren't going to send out one of the professional sitewide mods with admin tools to review deletions and randomly restore only certain comments.
Spot on. Even when they've been caught doing things most people thought was shady (e.g., last year's /r/place manipulation), they tend to not outright deny it, but rather admit it and offer a half-assed explanation and end the conversation at that.
They wouldn't do something that flagrantly disregards EU/CA privacy laws. If they did it, they'd have have a justification they thought would hold up in court. If they had a justification that held up in court, they'd happily plop it in a comment that's pinned with a few dozen rewards and ignore any responses after that.
Regarding PowerDeleteSuite it’s because it hasn’t been updated in multiple years and since then (like a year after the last PDS update) Reddit added a cooldown for editing comments. I assume the same exists for deleting.
So when you run the script, occasionally you hit the 5-sec cooldown but the script just keeps moving, thinking everything is okay.
I just used the tool last week and it deleted 3500 comments successfully. A couple of times it encountered errors, but it stopped and asked what I wanted to do before proceeding.
So those things only matter as search engine discoverability right? Doesn't Google cache and keep them for pretty long though, so does it matter if user deletes their old content?
Let's say I do a google search for "how to frobitz a widget" and the top result (because as you say it's in Google's cache) points me to a post on /r/WidgetFrobitzing.
I then click through and find that the post is deleted or has been changed to say "lol Spez sucks use Lemmy" or whatever. I'll almost certainly close that tab and go back to google to find another link. That deprives Reddit of clicks through its ads, of time spent on site, and it also means that user is less likely to follow links to Reddit in future as they will know they're not as useful as Google thought they were.
If you’ve got an old account and active account, you’ll need to use your export to iterate through all comments to delete. Any script or app not using the export will be severely limited by the way the API (and this website) return comment listings for users.
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