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?
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.
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.
Same guy who un-personed Aaron Swartz, claiming he wasn't a cofounder after Swartz died, and removing him from Reddit's founder page.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
I’m saying Reddit is incompetent in this case, rather than stupid. Not quite sure what you’re getting at?
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."
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
I don't think it invalidates your point, but I just wanted to clarify.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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_...
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...
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
Might have changed in the past 2 years, but unlikely.
So the question would be, if Reddit also stores comment edit history.
Not sure if that would hold up, as some comments can be pretty identifying. But it's a compromise that a company could try.
I'll wait and see how this plays out (while deleting my comments from the previously private communities.)