Reddit appears to be restoring edited/deleted comments
kbin.social
kbin.social
This seems like such an unwise thing for them to do that I feel like there must be another explanation.
* edited the content of user comments without acknowledgment,
* threatened to or has removed or installed moderators into communities to circumvent the blackout
* threatened to "un-private" communities
Why are you so sure that he wouldn't authorize un-deletion of comments?
Still happened, though.
That would be unprecedented in the history of social media to only allow permanent comments. Im also very skeptical comment deletion is happening at such a scale to be meaningful vs the billion new comments they get a year.
This all smacks of low quality speculation thats mostly a consequence of the current outrage cycle of the week.
his recent behavior suggest that's a possibility
Also, why do people who are defending him always refer to him being drunk? Is he granted some sort of “blame the booze” pass for those actions?
Ok, so how do I delete my HN comments?
Even so, that still may not save you. Say you decide you want your post here deleted. Say HN does so, but leaves my reply. And say my reply looks like this:
> We'll see about that the minute someone makes a GDPR request to delete their stuff.
Well, Paul-Craft, I don't think it's going to work like that...
[End of pretend reply.]
Now your post is quoted by mine, and your name is mentioned in mine as the author. Now you cannot delete all traces of your post without editing mine.
Now what?
gdpr =/= right to be forgotten (I'm not even sure if the latter cares about that. That's more about search indexing than perfectly scrubbing your history). GDPR is there to ensure your data can't be stored indefinitely on some private server without your ability to withdraw it.
Paul-Craft being quoted saying something that one time on June 17th 2023 is 100x less valuable to a data harvester then a directly post from Paul-Craft himself.
>Im also very skeptical comment deletion is happening at such a scale to be meaningful vs the billion new comments they get a year.
I don't think GDPR cares about scale so much as compliance. Scale just affects the fine.
>This all smacks of low quality speculation thats mostly a consequence of the current outrage cycle of the week.
Sure, I don't disagree. As long as we agree we are both dabbling in speculation. could be an honest mistake, could be the next phase of panic from a sight that is flailing about to keep its valuation from dropping further. I won't claim any authority on the topic.
I do find it entertaining how thoroughly they are stumbling over this tho. And we still have over a week until the real action.
I hope its that and not something more dubious.
I run forums and have done for +20y.
Reddit may have a user agreement that allows them to use the data forever, but historical versions that were not visible (effectively soft-deleted on edit) puts this into a risk area as it removes the ability for someone to control the data thus transferring ownership far more explicitly to Reddit.
Reddit should be very cautious here... you only get a lot of protections (EU eCommerce Act, etc) but being mere conduit. Arguably volunteer moderators took on a lot of the liability by their act of moderating, and Reddit were able to distance themselves from a lot of the content on the platform.
But once Reddit go intervening in the content, choosing to make some old revisions public, they're now taking editorial decisions that strip them of a lot of the things that protect them.
This is an incredibly naive move in the big picture.
That's shockingly small. Like, can we just build some retro love-child of unison and NNTP, and just keep a copy of all the news groups on our laptops / the ones we care about on our phones?
Anyway, from a liability perspective, undeleting stuff older than that seems to be a moot point.
If they don’t comply, they’ll get fined, and I have the feeling it will not be a small one given how they handle things
But Reddit is a bit off the rails right now, I mean it is clear they aren't making good or smart choices, so even if this is solely bound to the confines of the EU, I don't think they are going to follow the rules, until they are made to.
Could be an intentional small-scale data rollback that has accidentally had far wider effect. Or some “eventually consistent” anomaly where nodes that never saw the changes/deletes have reasserted the version of reality they still see.
But back to the previous hand…
> seems like such an unwise thing for them to do
Doing unwise things then doubling down on them seems to be Reddit's MO at the moment, and that has been the case for a while so each re-doubling currently means a notable jump in unwiseness, so I'm not surprised enough by any given apparent iffy decision that I reach for other explanations by default.
This more or less tends to confirm that Reddit management handed down a mandate to restore everything being deleted, not only recently but going back as far as they have backups.
The restoration isn't perfect; it doesn't patch back the posts into your timeline, so when you search for your own posts, it appears empty. That is probably deliberate, the idea being that people don't notice the reverts.
When I re-delete a post manually, that action seems to stick. But for how long; they will probably be repeatedly restoring old posts from backups from now on.
Luckily, I have every single link to each one of my deleted posts. I told Shreddit to save them. The numerous .json files have all the info to re-delete the posts. Shreddit can be modified (or else a new program written) to use the .json files as input rather than obtaining a list of posts from the API.
So I think they just toggled off soft deleted comments, and reverted to older comment versions. That might show up as comments missing their added “edit:”s.
Another commenter here said they think this was an accident, I’m inclined to agree
It’s basically like making a post asking a really obscure question and then just writing nvm figured it out.
At the same time, I want Reddit to fail
The rest served its purpose at the time, but isn't something I will ever want to look back on again. What do you find so interesting in your old work?
Other times I want to get a summary of a new topic so I will find an applicable subreddit and sort by top from the last year to get an idea of what is interesting for this community.
As the saying goes, work is done for those who pay for it. When I, like you, write comments on sites like these I am the one paying for it. I derive entertainment value for the cost I am sinking, so I find it to be an acceptable trade, but beyond that small window the entertainment is over and the value of what was produced is gone. To keep it around beyond that is just hoarding data.
I can appreciate that one might find value in feeling like they are helping out a greater community by allowing others to read their work. I commend those who see that value. But even that seems fleeting. If your work disappeared without you noticing, the value derived from that would not be lost. It is not the perpetual existence of the data that provides that value.
Although, I think the greater question here is: What value is there in allowing a for-profit company like Reddit to get rich selling the work you paid for?
Also comments don't rot on the internet, nothing is ever "past its prime". Why do you think comments lose value to other people? In fact, there's quite likely a long tail of future users who would benefit, who are even larger than the short tail of people in the current 24h.
Why do you feel entitled to the work I have paid for? It is one thing if I generously offer it to you, but to expect it?
And you're going out of your way to delete something you already wrote. That's extra work for you. Why do you hate the future users who might find value?
Other people don't enter the picture. There is no hate towards them, they simply don't exist in the sphere the comments are created in. It is a false premise to think that they are involved.
It would be easier to write them and then close the tab before hitting the button to post them. If you truly only derive value from writing them and none from anybody reading them.
And then it still "costs" you to delete them, by your logic. What is the value you get from that? If it's not from a desire to remove value for others, which you claim it isn't?
The forum software which outputs those silly outputs does provide value. For instance, Reddit and I established an agreement where if I pay even more of my time to look at their ads, which gives them value, they will provide me with those silly outputs, which I find valuable. It has been a mutually beneficial trade.
Should the cost of using Reddit go higher, as it seems it will, then the calculator will come out and I will have to determine if the cost is still in line with the benefit. With only 10% of the value coming from there, there isn't a whole lot room for them to play with, especially when you have HN graciously offering essentially the same service for a much lower cost.
I still don't understand why you delete them afterwards when that takes effort. That has a cost, and it negatively impacts others.
It is quite possible that those outputs originate from people, but there is nothing in the service to indicate that they do come from people. They could just as easily come from a cleverly designed random number generator (think GPT). There is no real way for me to really know for sure, and it really makes no difference so long as I am sufficiently entertained by the silliness of the software outputs.
Such implementation details are well beyond my concern and not a part of the value being exchanged between me and Reddit. As they say in the world of software, "nobody cares that you used language X". While the developers writing the software may find value in "X", it makes no difference to the end user. The same applies here.
Cleaning out your fridge takes effort. I have never been happy any time I have relaxed on those efforts, though. While I am sure there is someone starving in the world that would enjoy the food about to be tossed, that does not provide sufficient reason to hoard that which is past its prime.
Deleting your comments provides no benefit. Comments don't take up space of yours. And comments don't rot.
There must be a reason you're deleting comments, but it's doesn't make sense that it's because of a flawed fridge analogy.
There's no "foul stench" of comments more than a day old, that's nonsensical.
You're obviously under no legal obligation to leave your comments up, but it's simply not playing nice with others.
I'm not going to comment here any more but I sincerely hope you're able to think about this. And take in the fact that there are actual real-life people having a conversation with you. We're not "software". And you might have a more rewarding experience online if you're able to take that in. Good luck.
There very well could be people involved, but that is just an implementation detail hidden from the user. These services only present arbitrary characters of faceless and unknown origin. What lies beneath is a mystery. Which, in fairness, is a lot of the appeal. Going outside will always provide a better experience for when you want to involve other people! We come here because we want to spend some time away from other people to collect our own thoughts just for ourselves.
The foul stench is the continued silliness that persists after the entertainment is over. The design of HN is not so bad for this, but Reddit will put it right in your face if it has more to output. Once the entertainment is over, it's too much. I don't care. Silly is only entertaining for a short period of time and needs to end when that time has elapsed.
Although, of course, what you say about money is true. In fact, I can see from my not deleted HN history that I wrote that money is just an IOU only three days ago. I guess there is some value in being able to look back on my work! But is it value enough?
Human nature is to be transactional. If I offer you my time to write a comment for you, I am going to expect something in return. That in return could be nothing more than the smile you give me when you read it. It doesn't have to be some elaborate, grandiose thing, but there has to be some kind of payment or one will quickly sour to the ordeal.
If I were to write for you now, what would you give me in return? I suspect nothing because there is nothing of value I could offer you with my writing. Conversely, I offer you nothing. Will you write something for me? I expect not. Why would you?
you're not making the best case yourself. You'd be the person coming that the host would spend half the party trying to separate from certain others becuase you'll just get into a huge fight over a bike shed and ruin the night for every.
A person on the internet deletes their comments. It's not that deep.
That's exactly why they put in dirty hacks to defend against this.
Reddit depends on all the old content because it's indexed by search engines. People add "Reddit" when they search and then they navigate to the site. Old content brings in visitors.
I'd rather not get harrased from old comments in arguments I long forgotten about. Because some redditors will stalk you that persistently. I just don't want to bother to begin with.
If that cost some useful advice, I apologize. Rotten apples and all that.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/avoidchineseproducts/comments/eh80f...
I believe KitchenAid stand mixers [assembled in America](https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0qKp-0h9P18), and the parts (edit: excepting the motor) do not appear to be sourced from China.\n\nHave a look around your local Ikea; a lot of their stuff, especially kitchen tools, are from Europe, Taiwan, etc, and not China. They label the source of all their stuff, so you can avoid stuff from China.\n\nZojirushi is a Japanese brand that makes all manner of appliances. Good quality. Work well. Hold up over time. Top-quality engineering.\n\nBlendtec blenders are also assembled in America. Their website casually avoid mentioning where parts are sourced, but they're at least an American firm.\n\nJapan also makes some pretty good knives, if you're in the market for those.\n\nFinally, there is always eBay. And for some appliances, such as toasters, you may in fact be able to get a better product than is available on shelves now.[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/avoidchineseproducts/comments/eh80f...
Some rando post from 2 years ago, too. Deleting them after 24 hours just kinda takes away the value prop for reddit. If I want a real-ish-time convo with someone then i'll get on Discord; the value of reddit is the posts live on.
That's not the case here because I consider HN to be the equivalent of a single Subreddit, so the information is less diverse. I don't talk about every facet of my life here.
On the other hand, I'm the kind of person who uses a different username on every forum. It's a habit I picked up in the early days of the internet.
This is especially useful in this era where even news organization websites will quote your online username to add to their stories.
Not all, because that would be a bother, but between accounts where I'm a moderator and those where I'm a normal user, I make sure to change my mindset.
On some accounts, I translate everything I write twice for greater anonymity.
Beware, in some cases uncommon or unique anonymization techniques may make you _easier_ to de-anonymize.
So, for example, if you have unique anonymous accounts for multiple online communities but use an identifiable "anonymization" scheme (and with the right heuristics and AI "magic" this need not be a targeted attack), I can correlate and build a profile on you: Military history enthusiast, knife owner, lives in Maine, Boston U alumni, class of 2001, active hours imply working 9-5, age 39, etc.
Which is probably enough to compare against public records, leaked data, whatever, to pinpoint a single individual.
I switched my outlook on life a while back.
I take somewhat Buddhist Lite approach to life and consider possessions as misery and so on.
I extend that to online conversations.
I just delete them and clear my history. I don’t feel everything I’ve ever written online, every message and every email should live online forever.
It’s a mental burden that I don’t want.
So I auto delete where I can.
It’s cathartic. I think I started doing it during my burnout nervous breakdown phase after exiting corporate life.
I found I’d write things on Slack and then delete them. The anxiety of having my thoughts out there weighed on me.
Thoughts and conversations should be transient, I feel.
Each to their own! :-)
Folks, close your tabs. Close them all. Don't even check if they're important. They're not.
Long long story short, I probably made some comment on some apparently "bad" forum years ago (let's say, 2012). And hell, I was dwnvoted vehemently and was arguing a storm against it. But because those mass taggers just care about where you post, and not what you post, I was labeled as a bigot. No big deal. Years later (maybe 2015) I deleted most of my older comments anyway as some transition phase as I left college.
Then in 2018 or so some person called me that specific bigoted phrase. Remember, this would be 3 years ago, and I commented heavily. No way any human on a video game subreddit cared enough about me to dig through 3 years of comment history (which by then would be mostly video games and anime) to find comments they disagreed with. Especially when those comments don't exist on my profile. I was clearly mass tagged and someone wanted an easy insult.
So I just threw that all away. grabbed the saved posts I cared about, deleted some 6 year old account and restarted in a new handle. I didn't want to bother with any future drama that was already well behind me. Because reddit doesn't care if my account is 6 days old or 6 years old; there's no difference. Why bother trying to redeem some crude handle I made up on the spot in the beginning of college?
----
TLDR there are very annoying redditors who will troll histories and tag you without context and I was tired of dealing with that.
Clearly not, as the data and links to user profile has been restored.
> but it is not as if reddit has no way to keep deleted comments and still be GDPR compliant.
They would have to prove that the data is irreversibly anonymized - which is tricky. Say they keep threads by supplanting an opaque (guuid) user id - and a single message in a single thread mentions a users full name, phone number or email in a reply? Now all of that users messages are associated with a person....
Does publishing the dataset as CC sidestep GDPR? Because Reddit has published their dataset via fh-bigquery:Reddit in the past etc.
Using GDPR adversarially like this is interesting and I’m not sure where it stops. Technically all IP is originated by a human at some point and then sublicensed to an employer etc. Can you just ragequit and demand your workplace GDPR everything? How is the consideration of cash employment fundamentally different from the consideration of using the social network?
Not saying it should or shouldn’t be upheld but under maximalist interpretations GDPR is incompatible with IP sublicensing in general, if the originator always has the option to take back their content how do you ever reach an enforceable license?
Typically, a sentence fragment cannot be protected by copyright. The average edit is little more than that.
That said things like the talk pages might fall under the GDPR - though one could argue that talk pages and edit history has a public value and so overrides the GDPR.
As for logging IPs, that is something no one is generally allowed to do indefinitely - you need an overriding reason - like an audit trail for security and spam/abuse prevention - but that will generally only allow for 6 months at a maximum.
If I demand that all my posts reviewing and discussing vacuum cleaners and sharing DIY home remodeling tips be removed, then that diminishes the public good, just as with wikipedia, and really can't even be entirely done (what about fragments of your comments that are quoted in other comments?).
GDPR being used to protect personal information is a bit different than GDPR being used as a hammer to retroactively undo the licensing agreements you make with these websites even if GDPR regards that content as being personal information. And those licensing agreements are not dissimilar in kind to many other licensing agreements. Sure, you retain the copyright, but you also granted Reddit an unlimited irrevocable perpetual license, so does that really matter? Can GDPR be used to undo these perpetual licenses? At the end of the day someone always created it, machines cannot be copyright originators, can they always just invoke GDPR and break any license contracts they wish?
Again, I'm generally pro-GDPR but at the maximalist interpretation of "I can use GDPR to revoke the license to any content I've ever created from any licensee if it was ever input into a computer" is a bit of a cliff, and in many cases there is not a clear brightline for sites like Reddit (and HN). Are youtube comments a "public good"? They're intended for other people to interact and reply to, for sure.
BTW if you send a GDPR request to HN you're going to get the same explanation from dang, HN simply do not allow you to "shreddit" content by blocking edits after a certain point, and does not honor GDPR takedowns. They'll remove your username and specific PII from the content but they regard the actual interaction as being a public good. Other people considered it and replied to it and it's unfair to the other users to allow that content to be yoinked from the public sphere after it's been made part of the communal discourse. And they are a for-profit company too. Same thing as Reddit.
If Reddit does the same, and strips your username off the posts, and responds to requests to takedown any PII that's leaked into other comment (username mentions etc) doesn't that satisfy GDPR's requirements to remove PII? Do they have to take down the public-good portion of the content, even if it's non-PII, simply because you generated it? And if so, how can durable IP licenses ever exist under that model if GDPR revocations completely vacate all licenses no matter how irrevocable you word them to be?
And again, to make it worse, Reddit has already published the comment dataset under CC via the API, and it's archived by fh-bigquery:reddit and Pushift in forms that can't really be taken down. It's already in torrents around the net, what do you want them to do about it? And does mere openness change any of the licensing/public-good aspects of this? How can you draw a line here without also clobbering wikipedia?
https://academictorrents.com/details/7c0645c94321311bb05bd87...
And even if they contain personally identifiable data, the user would need to request the deletion of these ¨PI data from reddit. I am not sure simply deleting your messages yourself counts as requesting the deletion of personal data under GDP.
the concept of 'personal data' under GDPR is quite broad. the mere presence of a username relates those messages to a possibly identifiable person. and asking for something to be deleted is asking for it to be deleted.
I'm curious, why do you do that?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...
Reddit will anonymize -- well, "anonymize" -- the data by disassociating posts and comments from the username. This is potentially gdpr compliant (anonymity is a valid way to do things!). There's separately a balancing act: eg a post is valuable to everyone who commented in the thread.
So it's not clear that this is wrong, and forcing them to go further will be a slow process involving complaining to a country-specific DPA; getting that DPA to take on what will be a very low-priority case; letting the DPA process play out; and seeing if Reddit will appeal.
Anyone who has used Reddit for any period of time (or basically any similar site, which includes FB, Twitter, and even HN), has seen data consistency issues during high load (like periods of activism). Shards die or fall out of quorum, work queues get purged, etc. That's the reality of systems with a lot of very low value data.
Eventually consistent, but also perpetually inconsistent.
I care more about what a 'deleted' post says, than any other post in a thread. I imagine there is a good reason for that.
Of course this isn't "heavily regulated". No law demands 100% consistency when you run some third party script during an outage. Clicking "delete" on a comment, or having a script do it, is not some GPDR enforced action.
The more posts we see deleted the less likely it is that it's an accident. I just checked and found out that posts from an account that I scrubbed and deleted 5 years ago are popping back up. That stretches "eventual" pretty thin.
We also have a large amount of external information that suggests that reddit is not acting in good faith, much of it from Spez himself.
Between the two of those, malice is more likely than stupidity to be the motivating factor.
No database shard would ever have been left that far out of date due to high load.
The only Hanlon's razor I can imagine here is somebody wrote a query to try to undelete something small (intending a single user or something) and forgot the WHERE clause and started to undelete everything. And didn't realize until the query had been executing for several minutes.
Yikes.
(I do actually think this is the most likely, not because of spez's motivations, but because there's zero benefit for Reddit here. It might make sense for them to force subreddits back to public, but undeleting old comments has no strategic value right now.)
The obvious benefit would be to artificially keep interaction rates high by "grave robbing" old comments and accounts.
"Nobody is ever going to notice, those accounts are long dead!"
The metrics you use to attract investment are things like monthly active users, and whether a comment was deleted after it was made doesn't affect that at all.
People are going back to revisit things they think they deleted a long time ago to find it not deleted.
It's possible that those items were deleted, and then suddenly undeleted over the past few days as Reddit plies its nefarious plans. Far more likely, they were never deleted in the first place, or had the same temporal issue and reappeared a short while after deletion, but long long ago. The person thought it was deleted, but it wasn't for the same reason people are finding deletes not to stick now in some cases.
It's still possible that this is innocent(ish), but at low enough probability that malice really does seem like a compelling alternative explanation. After all, spez has been caught doing something very similar before. There's proof of malicious nature, not just an assumption. When a component in a system has a certain known behavior or limit, you don't just discard that knowledge due to some handy rule of thumb.
(Of course this is assuming pushsift has gotten the majority of comments)
> Deleting Your Account
> You may delete your account information at any time from the user preferences page. You can also submit a request to delete the personal information Reddit maintains about you by following the process described below this table. When you delete your account, your profile is no longer visible to other users and disassociated from content you posted under that account. Please note, however, that the posts, comments, and messages you submitted prior to deleting your account will still be visible to others unless you first delete the specific content. After you submit a request to delete your account, it may take up to 90 days for our purge script to complete deletion. We may also retain certain information about you as required by law or for legitimate business purposes.
If you say you are deleting information and they don't do it, they are violating their privacy agreement.
Of course, that is in clear conflict with their TOS. [1]
> When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy
[1] https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-september-...
I, for example, deleted every comment I ever posted on Reddit, but left my account itself in place. As of this morning, many of my comments appear to have been restored.
Then I used shreddit to edit/delete my comments, and kept viewing that page to confirm comments were being removed. I also picked a handful of comments and confirmed they appeared as “deleted/removed” in the threads in which they appeared.
When shreddit was done, I checked my profile comments list to confirm it was empty. I double checked 1 and 12 hours later in case there was some cacheing.
I also use old.reddit but I believe on the new.reddit you can limit a search to only a defined user comment. Maybe with some wildcards or regex one can get to them? Otherwise you'd need to know of a submission or a direct link to your comment.
The privacy policy is explicitly saying that deleting your account does not delete your comments.
Changing the username to indicate the deletion of an account is helpful to show that a user cannot be interacted with any more, but no deletion process could truly remove content a user had created from the internet.
That specifically states that content you deleted will NOT be visible.
Having said that - people are scraping and archiving Reddit all the time for both good and not so good purposes - so maybe it's not a big deal?
> Repost deleted/removed information. Remember that comment someone just deleted because it had personal information in it or was a picture of gore? Resist the urge to repost it. It doesn't matter what the content was. If it was deleted/removed, it should stay deleted/removed.
Plus of course the rest of the internet still likely has your deleted/edited comment. So nothing public is really lost, with any assurance at least heh.
Obviously it gets into the weeds, but where does it stop? Clearly there's some boundaries. If i have an app actively open/selected, what does it have access to?
I could see an argument where if the user didn't think they were sending it, then the user has not acknowledged to transferring "ownership" of data. As nebulous as ownership is in this context, i'm simplifying.
I'm not making any statement here. Just posing a hypothetical to attempt to illustrate where privacy arguments could be made.
And some online shops do that too at checkout; if you fill in your email but then abandon it, you might get an email that says "Hey, you didn't finish your purchase!". My worst experience was with a phone provider, I just wanted to see how much a mobile package was priced, but I had to add it to a cart. I put in my real number and email and the fuckers added me to their marketing database, sending me SMS ads. Fuck youuu salt.ch!
While that would be nice, I doubt it. The quality of content might suffer and smaller subreddits will finally be where large ones have been for a long time, but for the vast majority of users who doomscroll and share memes, nothing much will change and reddit will continue.
this might be true, but this content is not what made reddit valuable
as with twitter, the fundamental question is: where do the large numbers of contributors of quality information / discussion (a small fraction of billions is still a huge number) go for a sane, long-term sustainable online platform that will not turn into the next Library of Alexandria
It's just the same cycle over and over. As time has demonstrated dozens of times, HN isn't good at forecasting nor is representative at all of most end-users. The great majority of Reddit users (and this doesn't include me) use the official app or the official website and therefore besides this very short protest which will end soon as like many other protests in the past for different reasons, Reddit will just continue to be as popular.
As time has demonstrated dozens of times, platforms, behaviors and manias come an go in regular (though not quite predictable) bursts.
Betting that nothing ever changes is not consistent with the general arc of developments in the broader technology space.
Actually the opposite is likely true. The digital landscape is very "disruptable" and relies on various dark patterns (oligopolies, user illiteracy) to lock-in some "stability".
The individual events you mention are not the flood, they are the thunder indicating a thunderstorm is brewing.
I'm not saying things don't change because it'd be dumb to believe that given known human history. However I just despise the fact that even here in HN, any event happening in corporate that's otherwise minor outside of these doors is confidently defined as the tipping point ("fastest suicide" is maybe one of the most dramatic ways) and the company will go bust. Just wanted to clarify that, I agree with your sentiment.
The other major difference is content. On WA you only care about the content your direct friends/family create, on Reddit the masses are dependent on a few to submit comment (and even comment, there are a ton of lurkers who never comment, might not even up/down vote). If WA content goes to shit you can tell your BIL to stop sending you crap, if Reddit content goes to shit (due to loss of power users or moderation) it's a much harder problem to solve.
The WA exodus always struck me as way too difficult, getting friends/family to switch messaging platforms is super hard. Reddit? Might be unlikely but I was in the Digg->Reddit migration and I'm 100% looking for where I want to move now that Reddit is acting this way.
See the other Reddit post (one about Reddit punting mods if they act against the interests of Reddit itself, which has always been true it's worth noting) with 100s of comments, folded into pages and pages of continuations.
I mean does anyone honestly seriously believe Reddit purposefully undeleted this guy's comments? Reddit suspends accounts en mass, and when they do they nuke their entire history of comments on the site [I have been corrected, though I've strangely seen accounts get removed and all of their comments disappear too, though maybe they're running a script]. Reddit just really doesn't care about this guy's comments as much as he thinks they do.
That's not quite true, if an account is permanently suspended, the user page is unavailable for viewing, but the comments still remain in their respective threads.
It's only if an account is shadowbanned site-wide that all the comments are automatically removed too. This is intended only for spammer accounts, but can hit genuine users who are both newly created and end up being downvoted below a certain threshold.
Ask me how I know
It seems unlikely that their comments specifically were targeted, but it seems entirely plausible that a site-wide restoration took place that included their comments.
It also could be a bug.
Twitter and Facebook still seem to be doing okay.
The cycle continues.
I don't think I will be returning to reddit. Just deleted a decade and thousands of comments. There are clearly many other ways to build online communities and I think a lot of people are more motivated than ever to develop those alternatives now. Eventually one of those alternatives will possibly kill reddit but I don't think the current exodus and subreddit protests will.
You have the right to ask for deletion of personal information they store, and even that has certain limits. You don't have the right to force the company to delete content unless they granted you that right via the licence somehow.
Whether this is a good or bad idea for a company to do is a different question. But I don't see a legal issue here like the linked post claims.
And that is the heart of one the problems with reddit or any other site that encourages people to post everything under the sun. You are giving up control of what then happens with your content.
In the EU, you definitely do.
The content of a post is not personal data (in general) but the things like user name etc are. The content is not relating to an identifiable person (in general) while the user name is.
Shakespeare's poems are not personal data.
From my post history on Reddit, you'd know where I live, my age, gender, job, relationship status and a good amount about places I've been and my interests. There are already websites that collate that info from a profile to give a summary of the user. Under GDPR, that quite possibly adds up to personal data relating to an identifiable person.
What I'm saying is, in general it isn't. If you sign up to platform XYZ and make a post, in general, the content of the post is not personal data. It certainly can be. But by default it isn't. That's a misconception I want to dispel.
The words "Hello world" posted on any subreddit is not personal data. In this case the company could simply delete the information relating to you such as user name, IP etc.
The content you post is not, in general, personal data. It certainly can be.
I can post my name publicly, but it’s still considered personal data. It doesn’t magically become a free for all just because it’s out there.
Personal Health Information is only applicable in a specific setting (a covered entity). You telling your boss/friend/form about your health information does not make it PHI. You willingly disclosed that information.m, it loses its protected status.
‘Personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’).
Note the weight of the word “any” here.
For a clear example of the difference: I don't have the right under GDPR to tell Apple to reach into everyone else's iCloud address books to delete my phone number out of them. Neither I nor Apple put my phone number into other people's address books; those other people manually entered that info into their address books themselves. Which makes that their data, that they created — which just happens to reference me (and which is held in trust by a third party.)
If GDPR worked the way you're imagining, then someone deleting their WhatsApp account would require WhatsApp to tell my phone to delete my locally-saved WhatsApp chat-logs of conversations with that person.
You are sharing a lot more than you think you do. Here is a good example of how much can me determined from a single short video: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gabrielfriedlander_youve-got-...
Of course, HN itself kills your edit window after a certain time limit, so there is some legal way of doing it, I assume.
A freight company is generally not liable for contraband shipped without its knowledge. That does not mean that all shipments become the property of the freight company. Same thing.
If Reddit says "your content is yours but you cannot delete it" they're in a bit of a cake-and-eat-it-too scenario.
I'm entirely sure it's legal (as other forums/HN/etc do it too) but I'm not sure it's right.
Yes, but the user is also in a cake-and-eat-it-to scenario: they get to own the content and have it distributed for free.
Both sides of this come from the perpetual non-exclusive license that posting to Reddit or Twitter or anywhere confers. "Ownership" is too reductive a concept for IP, which is why the section 230 thing is a non sequitur.
Only if your personal posts are important for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific research, historical research or statistical purposes where erasure is likely to render impossible or seriously impair the achievement of that processing.
So, this seems like a case of the law not 100% matching reality. Sometimes the EU adjusts their laws to keep up with reality, I think? (The idea of trying to make sensible laws is pretty foreign to me, but then I’m an American.
Thus, anything you wrote on any site, if it is not anonymised and still linked or could be traced to your account is a personal data.
And even when it is anonymised: >Personal data that has been de-identified, encrypted or pseudonymised but can be used to re-identify a person remains personal data and falls within the scope of the GDPR.
[0] - https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
I suppose this would constitute indirect identification of a data subject under GDPR?
The funny thing is that this is all over a stupid API that was causing more harm to Reddit than it was functioning as a public service. Apps were functioning as alternatives to the Reddit website and app.
The whole thing about API back in 2000s is it allows users to interface with Reddit programmably. Remember the first Web3.0? Who would have thought it would be used to create an entirely alternate app market?
Every platform eventually pivots to paid APIs. Twitter did a long time back by buying all of the alt apps.
Lesson: APIs are expensive to maintain and no real P̶r̶o̶f̶i̶t̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ (edit: profit-driven) business is going to keep them around unselfishly.
First of all: if Reddit really is doing this, then it is committing an illegal act. At least in the EU, I'm sure in other jurisdictions also. There are in fact laws protecting the users. Second of all: Reddit cannot force users to post and moderate, and without those things there is no Reddit. Have you heard of Digg, by any chance?
> The funny thing is that this is all over a stupid API that was causing more harm to Reddit than it was functioning as a public service.
It was absolutely functioning as a public service, because third-party apps are the only ones that are actually usable. Especially so for moderator activities (that Reddit depends on to exist) and even more especially so for blind people, to whom Reddit official app does not cater.
Do you know what else functions as a public service? Unpaid moderators!
> The whole thing about API back in 2000s is it allows users to interface with Reddit programmably.
I remember those times very well, and that was not "the whole thing" at all, there was a "bait and switch" from independent forums to centralized services based on a promise of openness forever. But I digress. Who cares what the "whole thing was about back in 2000s"? It doesn't matter what it was about, the only thing that matters is what the situation is now, and the situation is that Reddit as we know it is an interdependent partnership between a company and an extensive international community. This is what survived to 2023 and this is what matters in 2023.
> Lesson: APIs are expensive to maintain and no real profitable business is going to keep them around unselfishly.
Another lesson: a profitable business cannot extract value from the unpaid work of enthusiasts while at the same time expecting to be able to treat said enthusiasts as valueless replaceable cogs.
Digg lost because they changed the website, Reddit has not changed here.
> third-party apps are the only ones that are actually usable
In your opinion. Millions of users just use the site and official app.
> valueless replaceable cogs.
Which they are. Plenty of mods are ready to take care of popular subreddits.
Some users will be lost, but they are the minority.
The only mistake Reddit is making is by waiting too long to reign in the popular subreddits and allowing people to protest on Reddit’s own homepage.
Yes, but restoring user generated content that was deleted by the creator without their consent is. That is what we are talking about here.
You seem to have a crystal ball and know the future, so who am I to argue.
Then ask for that, similar to youtube red? You estimate how much each person would net you in ad revenue and ask them to contribute that much.
It could be phrased as "do you like reddit? contribute to its upkeep."
They just seem to be doing things out of order. Another example: alienate long-time users and mods by making it abundantly clear that they're product and free labor really should have come after the IPO.
Better: it's about introducing pricing for said API without proper advance, so apps consuming it couldn't in turn adjust their pricing because they had plenty people on annual subscriptions.
With enough forewarning the market would have adjusted to the new pricing, but that didn't happen.
Click context on my recent comment.
I suspect it's more likely the site didn't process the deletions properly, rather than maliciously bringing them back, or as you suggest, that they were private.
Edit: It's possible that the deletion only worked on public posts, after all, it seems?
But would the current upset userbase even believe reddit if they came out and said "our deletes arent working right now. please try again later."
I’m saying Reddit is incompetent in this case, rather than stupid. Not quite sure what you’re getting at?
I very much doubt Reddit cares at all about the small number of us that have done this.
Not sure if this would complicate a restore process by Reddit.
They don't mention being able to delete from private subs, and their method of deletion sounds like it would fail when the subs are set to private.
I'll admit Reddit barely deserves the benefit of the doubt at this point, but I have no idea how you would delete posts on private subs except through some GDPR way that must exist.
Edit: Adding the link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit...
Checking just now I see that comments up to 3 - 4 years old have been restored.
I'm not going to speculate as to why (beyond agreeing it's more likely to be incompetence than malice) but in my case at least there are definitely long deleted comments that have been restored.
Same guy who un-personed Aaron Swartz, claiming he wasn't a cofounder after Swartz died, and removing him from Reddit's founder page.
Maybe not individually, but this is an IPO and the P stands for Public, and when you aggregate everyone together then intelligence is a moot concept.
Have you heard the recent popular saying that Googling things barely even works anymore unless you append reddit to the query, which tends to bring up actual information instead of SEO trash?
Unless the objective isn't to deescalate.
If there's no due process, reddit doesn't deserve to be held innocent.
Oh, the sleighthanded irony.
It's what normal people did before the internet.
People who didn't were known as lynch mobs, and were considered bad.
Thanks to the web, it's now perfectly normal to believe the worst of people for no better reason than to fuel one's own anger issues.
I believe that in this case it's more that Reddit's management has completely lost any sort of trust, it's not so much to fuel one's own anger issues but give the current context there's very little in terms of Reddit's management being trustworthy, transparent. Spez was caught lying in the open, how can one still have any trust they aren't lying in other aspects?
Let's agree that this particular case is not a baseless witch hunt, Reddit's management own dishonest actions have brought a dissatisfied lynching mob to them.
I think it makes sense for anyone who values objective truth above any other agenda. "Benefit of the doubt" is just acknowledging that we don't know for sure.
I wouldn't put it past Reddit to restore old comments given sufficient motivation, I just have a hard time imaging how the cost/benefit analysis would say that this is a good idea at this specific point in time.
It seems plausible that with all the other churn going on at Reddit - and as others have noted a large number of people deleting comments and accounts and maybe subs - that they accidentally restored some data-store to the wrong snapshot or something.
I just don't understand how the difference between "we HAVE N million comments" and "N million comments HAVE BEEN posted" in some investment deck could be worth the risk to reputation and good will, not to mention potential GDPR violations or bad press from doxing stalking victims or whatever.
Someone else mentioned SEO as a possible motivation. I might buy that. If Reddit is losing PV and DAU and restoring a bunch of old content would offset some of that with organic search traffic, that seems like something they might do.
I do seem to recall that their database schema is mostly a big unstructured key-value table, so it's possible that this is part of the explanation - and they've never cleaned up any garbage/orphans in at least 3 years?
Meh. You're not exactly wrong but I think it's pretty common for user-generated content sites to follow a logical delete strategy. It holds open the door to being able to restore data deleted by end-user error, and within the bounds of their data retention policy keeps data around that may be useful for internal analysis.
Actually come to think of it seems plausible that they only have ~3 years of logically deleted data, having purged deleted records older than that.
It's also plausible they had all the is-logically-deleted information in some redis datastore that wasn't being reliably persisted to disk and the process had to be restarted for the first time 3 years.
I'm actually leaving my restored comments untouched for now out of curiosity about what they'll do about it now that the issue is known. I think that will probably answer the question about whether this was accidental or intentional.
For most users this isn't going to be a problem but my guess is there is a rather big chance for a number of the comments that were restored there were really good reason why they were deleted and now Reddit are responsible for them being online again.
how did you check? profile page?
If i wrote public forum software, that's how I would do it and batch delete only comments that no one asked to undelete in at least a few months...
Not sure if that would hold up, as some comments can be pretty identifying. But it's a compromise that a company could try.
Might have changed in the past 2 years, but unlikely.
They usually store some history in a logging database that can be reverted at some point in time
Nothing is really truly hard deleted on the web most times
So the question would be, if Reddit also stores comment edit history.
Musk and Hoffman seem to be intent on waging war with their own product. They both get a lot of unpaid labour producing their content and then complain that the unpaid labour isn’t paying for the privilege.
Also, Musk is waging war against advertisers. Running a site that is controlled by advertisers is the epitome of extreme centralization, since the site's income can be halted if an advertiser gets upset. Musk is charging on Twitter so the users aren't the product.
As for reddit, I think limiting API access to accounts with reddit gold seems like it would've been fair. That would've solved the income issues (the stated reason for the API changes), but then reddit wouldn't get all the telemetry data associated with users on their first party app.
It seems like Huffman (spez) got greedy and wanted gold subscriptions, and the telemetry data from their first party app. It's usually one or the other (ads vs. user payment).
I also want to end this by saying that I'm not trying to start an argument, but I know a lot of users on this site are very trigger happy with the downvote whenever anyone speaks objectively about Musk. If you don't agree with me, just chime in and we can discuss it.
I think the adage is a little wrong. In Twitter's case users are still part of the product as the existing network effects and ability to communicate with users are part of the product, and thus it's users are. Not to such a significant degree as when advertisers are sweeping up every bit of data about you, but still to some degree.
This is a nitpick. I'm speaking from the POV of keeping the site running, or not resorting to changing the site's essence to please advertisers.
Reddit is 18 old, and you're telling me that they are just thinking about making money now? How come 4chan and Wikipedia are both profitable, but not Reddit? And how is it a problem with their users and not their management?
reddit has 1.7 billion visits per month[5], with an astronomical amount of persistent storage, with the content never being deleted. reddit is ranked #18 globally.
4chan has 51 million visits per month[4], has very little persistent storage (posts are deleted once the thread slides to the bottom of the board list), and strict size limits for the posts that exist at any given time. 4chan is ranked #708 globally.
Wikipedia does get 4.7 billion monthly visits[3], but they do have a public list of large donors[1], and the entire wikipedia catalog can fit onto a 20gb microSD card [2]
So I can't give a solid answer, but it seems like the other 2 sites you mentioned have a slightly better design when it comes to infra costs.
1: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/don...
2: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...
3: https://www.similarweb.com/website/wikipedia.org/#overview
I don't think it invalidates your point, but I just wanted to clarify.
Go back a few years, nix the 'let's host video and pictures and live chat and ignore every single thing the users are asking for so that we can bring in the eyeballs' idea and instead of that monetize the regulars using the their content and site's ability to guide google to it.
Keep 150,000,000 dedicated users who reliably generate valuable content for you and keep the site spam free for you, and all you have to do is keep some devs on hand to add tooling and site features that are useful. The caveat is that Stevey Huff has to live with one or two fewer commas on the balance in his bank account.
This has an impact on their costs, but in an ad-driven business, it increases their revenues by as much.
> with an astronomical amount of persistent storage, with the content never being deleted
I'd like to know the actual amount of storage, but I really doubt it is actually “astronomical” (unlike Youtube).
Moreover, I suspect that the biggest part of that storage is actually video, which isn't really where the value (for the users at least) is.
Overall, if their costs are to high compare to other players their revenues, it's first and foremost a management and cost effectiveness issue, not a lack of revenues.
This sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. But Google and Facebook started out without a profitability plan.
A number of ways this could have been handled better in no particular order:
1. Give more than 30 days notice to third party app developers.
2. Mandate that third-party clients display advertising as delivered by the API and return telemetry.
3. Keep the API changes but exempt paying subscribers.
4. Refrain from making bad-faith lies about the developer of the most popular application, which he then had to disprove using call recordings, and then after that, don't try to play off your actions as misunderstandings or mistakes.
5. Don't lie about deliverables for years and years to the point where the community memes on you for your history of lying.
6. Don't fuck around in the production database to edit comments critical of you.
7. Be a little forthright for once.
Just ask that moderator accused of being Ghislaine Maxwell.
I kept looking for them to post something, anything… but nothing. https://old.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/
All it would have taken is a single post to prove that it really wasn’t her, but no. Radio silence. For over three years.
It’s not like somebody is protesting being defamed here either… nobody has any idea who this person is, if not Ghislaine Maxwell herself. Do you have some proof that this isn’t her? Other than the assurance of a single other person, I have never seen any.
I’ve been forced to re-examine my views on this, going from the idea that it’s utterly preposterous to, well, yeah, maybe it’s true. Do you have evidence to refute it? If so, please share. I really don’t want to believe it’s the case that an established sex-trafficker and pedophile/pedophile-enabler was one of the most influential mods on Reddit for over a decade, but at this point I’m having a hard time concluding otherwise.
Sounds crazy, but the more you look into it [0]... And don't forget the blackmail! You know, which Huffman projected onto Apollo's developer, even after being proved a liar by Christian's recordings.
This is actually quite important, because Huffman and 'maxwellhill' go way, way back.
0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/r45a5n/here_is_...
It also seems unlikely to me that someone like Ghislaine Maxwell would have the time to be such a prolific Reddit user, and that she would write like a Redditor - for example calling someone "butt-hurt" in one comment.
The problem there is that nobody made the connection until after the activity on the account stopped abruptly, coinciding with Maxwell’s arrest.
> I know if I was accused of secretly being a hated figure like Maxwell on an account that wasn't connected my real identity, I wouldn't come out and deny it, I'd just ditch my account and make a new one.
If you’re a power mod that has spent years building up influence and control over numerous subreddits, that’s not so simple. You could leave, of course, but continuing with an alternate account wouldn’t really be feasible.
> It also seems unlikely to me that someone like Ghislaine Maxwell would have the time to be such a prolific Reddit user, and that she would write like a Redditor - for example calling someone "butt-hurt" in one comment.
Who knows? It also didn’t seem likely that someone like Ghislaine Maxwell was engaged in a massive sex trafficking operation.
I’m still not 100% convinced the account actually did belong to Maxwell, but at first I scoffed at the idea as ridiculous and insane, and now I’m not so sure about that.
Assuming the worst, ignoring details that violate the narrative, and circulating ragebait without verification are all staples of mainstream Reddit content.
It’s not surprising that the Reddit outrage/grievance machine has turned on itself and is now assuming the worst and getting outraged at every turn.
I'll wait and see how this plays out (while deleting my comments from the previously private communities.)
Not only is the post accessible, but when you go from that to the entire Reddit submission, you can clearly see that it's not deleted.
Reddit not only does not have a bona fide implementation of deletion, but has hacks in place to thwart deletions that replace text by random "lorem ipsum" before deleting. These changes affect your post timeline only, not the in-thread originals.
Not to mention, even in a hypothetical world where the regulator actually did their job, Reddit can still ignore them as they have no EU-based presence to be fined.
* Unregistered users: Public, non-age restricted content(whether that be as a subreddit requirement or post-specific thing).
* Registered users: same as above, minus content that was published by individual users and deleted afterwards, content removed by moderators or in more extreme cases reddit themselves(last one is a bit of a special case, I'll come to that part later).
* Moderators: they see everything that was posted by other users and subsequently removed by the moderators for whatever reason. If a user deletes their contribution personally, then moderators won't see it either.
* Content removed by reddit: visible by reddit employees, appears as "Removed by Reddit" to anyone else. In this particular instance, reddit may remove contents that was removed by moderators already.
I'm a moderator of 2 large subs and a few smaller ones. Luckily I developed a backup system, which effectively backs up everything that was ever published on the sub(plus a ton of other stuff, including image recognition, lightweight nlp and tracking what reddit removes. Without saying which subreddit I'm talking about, I can tell you that a lot more is happening in large communities(20+k people online at any given time) than you might think.
So in the case mentioned here, it's simply a case of some "status" field in some database that was flicked. Which is kind of concerning, given the amount of contents me and the other mods have removed. Truth be told, the moderation tools that reddit provide are rat shit. I ended up developing a ton of custom ones(completely nuking a specific user's history, chained comments or entire comment sections. Things, which reddit has been promosing for years but never delivered. Funny enough, all of those are a question of 30 lines of code in total, if we are talking about a single-script type of thing. But it is worrying that stuff like this happened. Just earlier today I used one of those scripts to nuke 300+ comments in a post. I also keep a backup of the mod log so in theory I could undo the damage. Question is, how long would that take. We are talking about 500k action we've collectively taken over the past year. Some through a script, plenty manually however.
Despite all the drama lately, I don't think that's a deliberate retaliation from reddit due to the blackout, more likely a "woops" moment that happened at a very inconvenient time for reddit.
Stupid question, but did anyone ever /trust/ online social sites to do what they claimed when it came to managing user data?
Not everyone wants everything archived for potential future use. Some people not only want, but are also mandated by law to have an appropriate archive of their communications.
My point is that we should be able to figure out options for both and anything in between, where user has control over it. This is the important part. As a user, I used to be able to have some modicum of control over what happens on the machines I own and the data I send to others. Over the years, that control was slowly wrangled from the population under various guises ( cloud, convenience and so on ).
But instead of discussing protocols that would, hopefully, behave in deterministic and predictable ways, we discuss platforms and their pinkyswear promises not to do something.
It is a lot to ask these days, because a lot of people got really used to 'easy' and 'free' internet. And that is before we get to the technical issues you mention.
User data has always been the core of freemium apps and “aggregators”: land-grab as many users as you can with a free, great product, so you can own a lot user data. We just didn’t have an obvious use for all that data until now.
Reddit won’t budge on the API pricing because they can make more selling datasets. But if they are smart, they’d rate limit free API access, and charge for the firehose — because then they’d have a user-generated content farm. But you still have the issue that people keep expecting their free apps to be free, not realizing they have been selling their data all along.
Remember FourSquare? They started as a neat way for people to socially compete in “checkins” for a place. They found their profit in selling that location data for business analytics and real estate analysis. The implications extend beyond commercial concerns when datasets like that are purchased by governments to circumvent wiretapping warrant requirements.
They are, up to 100 requests per minute is still free post change
Someone could make a lot of money by building a paid Reddit app with everything people want, and a BYO API key, similar to what people are doing with OpenAI keys
I learned the lesson the very first time I've seen it happen.
Probably not. Of course, the mental test is very extreme, but it proofs that the guarantees offered will fail and be violated when some threshold is exceed. It's not a sign and done deal.
By undeleting comments they are violating the copyright of the authors by engaging in unauthorized use
Even if Reddit was the one that deleted it, the user needs to be informed if Reddit renews their use of the copyrighted work.
Where the user deleted it, the violation is beyond obvious.
Trying to delete things is an exercise in futility.
I'm curious how this would apply to the fedverse.
I can confirm that they are back.
However I don't see them on my profile, which is even more sneaky and infuriating. It makes searching for them (to delete again) hard.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit...
Other deletion tools I've tried also don't work because of this.
I.e what unddit.com did for reddit
What're reddit decided to do here is almost certainly against european law and I expect we'll hear more about it over the following months.
I do like legislation that stops big players from using their resources to be exploitive, and I understand the right to be forgotten for individuals.
The other edge of the sword is all the reasons why information wants to be free. I am biased towards this side.
Either way, I think it's important to remember to operate under the axiom that nothing is deleted from the internet. Deletion (by legislation or by privacy tools and services) is a cludge, and saving and resharing is the natural force.
If they don't respect your consent, why should anyone respect theirs?
How do you reconcile the differences between the private nature of communications like text/emails vis-à-vis comments on a public forum?
> If they don't respect your consent, why should anyone respect theirs?
I'm interpreting "they" as Reddit (or any large media corp.), would I be wrong to interpret "anyone" in this context as a state actor?
I firmly believe that in the future, what you say doesn't matter. What matters is what you can prove you've said.
What's the difference between the following two? (a) You say something and someone takes a screenshot of it, and (b) Someone just conjures up a fake screenshot of you saying something. These are indistinguishable. With LLM and SD, these fakes will become easier and easier.
The solution is some crypto that allows you to do two things: (a) Be able to prove that you said something, and (b) later revoke it, such that your prove doesn't work anymore and there's no trace it was ever used.
not sure if this meant as sarcasm or not
What they've done though it go way too far - so far they are undeleting posts from over a decade ago. Reddit didn't actually delete anything, only soft deletes.
In the image posted there are also cached thumbnails from YouTube - those videos no longer exist.
I've already had one trans person confirm there are posts appearing from before their transition.
The IPO is really going great for them with such a huge GDPR Privacy violation...
"Post: xxxxx
Parent comment: xxxx
Consider the above post and parent comment. Write a a 50-word reply to that comment which is full of inaccurate information."
That way the discussion is still there for people in the diture to follow but someone can't go through your comment history to learn about your political view or wealth or whatever people look for.
That accounts seem of normal people engaging in normal conversations. But they spit hate everywhere they go, it is just not reflected in their history.
Several logins from '127.0.0.1' attributed to my account: Reddit staff logs in and performs actions as users without their knowledge or consent.
So I just ran Nuke Reddit History and deleted them all again.
https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/nuke-reddi...
If so, this seems like an impulsive miscalculation, based on how easy it would be for any determined actor to scrape reddit. So why annoy users in order to attempt to do something that has a high probability of failure?
The situation sounds a lot like news website paywalling circa 2010, which was a flop for most sites.
Magic algorithm for everyone’s benefit I’m sure …
> I said it before and I say it again: if you have the patience to do so then make sure you overwrite your content with chatgpt generated content, as the future AI that will feed on your post HATE feeding on already AI generated stuff. It makes the AI diverge.
People should not be deleting their posts but actually just replacing them with random AI generated content. This will make Reddit a mess.
The AI thing is clever.
The last thing we need is for the internet to be harder to tell truth from fiction
It hasn't been maintained in a while, but I can confirm that it still works.
EDIT: Here is another alternative. I haven't used this one myself but it seems legit: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
Ares can be installed manually but the building process has a few holes, namely, you need to rollback your node version to 13.14.0 and it's not mentioned in the readme. You can use nvm to do that (nvm install 13.14.0 && nvm use 13.14.0), then the normal stuff (npm install && npm run build)
I looked for a reddit history editor a while back and found those two as well, it's sad it's hard to make them work unless your account happens to have the throttle it expects
Let me know if you try it! Still developing and would love feedback.
Wouldn't be the first time, won't be the last time.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
This definitely isn’t passing any reasonable code review.
This goes directly in production, force pushed by spez.
In modern chaotic world usually the best weapon against something you don't like is to just ignore it (there are exceptions of course).
There's many different things to do that could trash the data and make it worthless for training AI. With the right tools, this sort of automation can also be made very difficult to detect (randomize the time interval between edits and the time of day on which they occur [normally distributed during prime time]).
People will get bored with manipulations and they can just ignore current timespan.
Even currently, creative individuals is 0.01% of users which is easy to spot with simple heuristics especially given such a small percentage and the fact that false positives don't hurt.
Detecting automated / fake content and silently marking it is probably 90% of what coders do there even without the drama. I think they are pretty decent at it.
Even if they couldn't distinguish fake content, there's a good chance neither could its buyers so nobody cares.
I just think it's a bad fight to choose.
UPDATE comments WITH SKIPLOCK
SET _soft_deleted_time = null
WHERE _soft_deleted_time > '2023-05-01'However, if this catches on and becomes more prevalent (and I could see that happening), then I'd expect some kind of cyber-vandalism law to be enacted. They can't prosecute based on hacking, because it isn't. But it could be argued you're 'defacing/destroying' digital property by editing to add content that knowingly will mess with their algs. Sooner than that though will be an addition to the EULA, that users cannot enter AI generated content or they agree to get fined, or some such nastiness.
The Cyberpunk RPG came out in 1988, and I was in my early 20s. Each decade since I've marvelled at how much closer to that dystopian world we've gotten, and the slope of the downward slide increases every decade.
Why do I say that?
Because the image of Reddit that's been in my head until today is of an Open Source type thing started by Aaron Schwartz. He was a founder, but that is not today's Reddit. I did some cursory digging and found Reddit is primarily owned (majority shareholder) by Advance Publications, Inc. These are the same people who own, or majorly own (primary or major shareholder): Conde Nast and all its subsidiaries (which now owns Ars Technica), American City Business Journals, Charter Communications, Warner Bros. Discovery, the Ironman Triathlons, many newspapers, Turnitin.com, and probably more. In 2019 Advance Publications was named the largest privately owned American company.
But it's your comment. While I'm sure there's legalese in the T's & C's that you hand over all rights to your comment over to Reddit or release it under a permissive license, that doesn't make it right or just.
And I think reddit and other communities rely on keeping up the appearance that they respect you and your works, even if they're just shitpost comments.
And TBH the perception of owning your comments doesn't really matter in the short term... people don't care, they just want to post.
In the long term the actual content creators won't like it, but that is a problem for another owner.
1. It means the cyber-vandalism law that the grandparent proposed wouldn't have any teeth here because it legally still belongs to you.
2. They can't change that provision because a good chunk of the TOS is about how the fact that it's your content means they're not liable for it. Their nonliability looks a lot fishier if they're also claiming copyright.
> The Services may contain information, text, links, graphics, photos, videos, audio, streams, or other materials (“Content”), including Content created with or submitted to the Services by you or through your Account (“Your Content”). We take no responsibility for and we do not expressly or implicitly endorse, support, or guarantee the completeness, truthfulness, accuracy, or reliability of any of Your Content.
> By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms. Because you alone are responsible for Your Content, you may expose yourself to liability if you post or share Content without all necessary rights.
> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:
This applies to all their users, not just EU. Only difference is that US TOS make you waive your moral rights. I grant Reddit a right to copy them, but they're mine. If I destroy them, Reddit no longer has them.
Which is really just one more proof that reddit's added value is about zero and that looking to profit from _my_ content shows really the kind of leeches that they are.
It cannot. Source: Reddit's ToS and reality:
>d. User Content. Reddit user photos, text and videos ("User Content") are owned by the users and not by Reddit.
If I want to replace what I posted with seventy five consecutive poop emojis, I am fully in my right to. Coupled with the right to be forgotten and the illegality for reddit to prevent me from doing so, it serves as a perfect tool to poison LLMs.
I predict that if they want to do something about this they'll go the HN route and just make posts uneditable/undeleteable after some time.
EDIT: found the pic https://i.imgur.com/45M3a8c.png
Worse, the data is already archived by the data collection services. The people who suffer are going to be average users trying to find some answer to a question by searching Reddit, only to discover jumbled messes of words that don’t make sense.
I already notice this just with the blackout. Some stuff I find on Google is in private subs now, so I can't view it on Reddit. Sure, there might be ways around it, but regular people won't know that.
I would also be surprised if Reddit didn’t add such logic if they figure out this (editing older content to replace it with gibberish) is happening. It seems like reasonable logic to have in place anyway.
To be clear, I’m not siding with Reddit on this. Just saying it seems odd they even allow it in the first place, especially for comments — the top level post may make sense to allow edits, but even then there’s usually a publicly visible edit history.
Maybe even an option to keep it running and randomly update posts with GPT nonsense over time?
What was accomplished?
It’s user hostile, and prevents the spread of knowledge.
They don’t owe you anything.
Didn’t think so.
But the site is under no obligation to keep your deleted content deleted.
Unfortunately, to protect user privacy we don’t know or store your IP address so you will have to provide some other proof that you are actually in the EU. An IP of course is also easily doubted, you need to provide legal documentation.
IF that was their past behavior when this happened (what you describe has been happening since the inception of Reddit) that would be one thing.
Neither of those things are the case, Reddit has shown they have always had the ability to create these features (vote out mods, fix modding tools, improve accessibility, prevent comment deletion) but refused to do so until it actually hurt their bottom line. That's scummy.
Edit: On further inspection, maybe so. It’s possible they’re still in process or maybe I had it cached.
It's technically impossible to identify correct personal information in users' posts.
you can have some real fun with companies with it
This is the way we're going - totally the opposite way.
For a people that seem to think we're synonymous with 'freedom,' the paths we choose sure seem to indicate a fucked up vision of what 'freedom' looks like going forward.
Too many attitudes feel defeated and resigned to abusive things today.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/
Maybe Reddit users don't qualify for "Right to Erasure" because Reddit is still going, their data is being used, they technically didn't revoke "consent" and so on?
The right to keep data beyond when a user requests it's deletion is contingent on it being needed for ongoing business requirements like tax and other audit requirements, not for content.
It's not possible under GDPR to automatically license user submitted content via a ToS or something. If you want to keep content beyond when a user clicks a delete button you would need a contract that provides reasonable compensation for licensing that content.
(I am not trying to be combative, I am just unfamiliar with GDPR)
That said. IANAL.
> the data subject withdraws consent on which the processing is based according to point (a) of Article 6(1), or point (a) of Article 9(2), and where there is no other legal ground for the processing
> Processing of personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person’s sex life or sexual orientation shall be prohibited.
But perhaps deleting an account + posts does not qualify as revoking consent?
I dunno anything about GDPR, but Reddit would have to be confident about every condition in Article 17. It makes me think these undeletions are a considered decision, not a knee jerk response.
I understand that the GDPR allows you to request deletion of your private data, but content you’ve published isn’t quite the same. At the very least, Reddit’s TOS claim a perpetual irrevocable license to that content
Does the GDPR have a separate provision for requesting the deletion of published content, or are people just assuming it falls under the private data rules?
Reddit is up against the laws that even bigger assholes had made to fuck over people who use copyright material without explicit permission...
The reddit FAQ around deleting your account[0] suggests that they'll just 'dissociate' your posts from your account (so the user says [deleted]) and remove your account data which should be fine for GDPR purposes.
This[1] support page says mods/admins can't recover your deleted posts for you but stops a little short of saying that it's impossible for them to do it for themselves.
So pretty scummy behaviour but I don't think anything they're doing is illegal (IANAL!).
[0] https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004304793... [1] https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004348345...
[0]: https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/
They repeatedly chose short term gain over the long term health of their platforms/users, and the debt is catching up with them.
This, of course, assumes this is intentional action, which I'm not wholly convinced of. Malice, incompetence, and all that.
Is it possibly they are specifically geotargeting IP's to undelete stuff and therefore avoid GDPR?
Tangent: I used to love reddit, i would actively pay for reddit gold just to support the site. I still have a hard time moving on, but this latest fiasco has set things in stone for me. RIP Reddit.
This would disable my users / victims from deleting their stuff (thus decreasing the value of my platform temporarily) while probably complying with GDPR.
I would also consider copying Twitters URL shortener.
Muhaha
If Reddit were to fight this in Europe (which is what would happen) I imagine they would loose
It's equivalent to a librarian restoring some of their books that have been vandalised by a disgruntled author.
Reddit never paid anybody. Reddit is made up of comments made by people, and those people can decide to delete these comments. Reddit is a for profit company looking to squeeze maximum shareholder value from the value provided by others people comments, and doesn't enjoy the same leniency that a public library would, IMHO.
No, your analogy is idiotic.
Librarian had a sign up: Authors are allowed to vandalise their books. Then they restored it.
Every single reddit post has a "delete" link. If Reddit doesn't want people to delete their posts ... then I will go out on a limb and will suggest to ... remove the "delete" link?