From my experience, your posts on private subs are hidden so PowerDeleteSuite can’t delete them. When they open back up, those comments and submissions suddenly appear on your profile.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
55 points (100.0% liked)
SNOOcalypse - document, discuss, and promote the downfall of Reddit.
180 readers
1 users here now
SNOOcalypse is closing down. If you wish to talk about Reddit, check out !reddit@lemm.ee, !reddit@lemmy.world and !RedditMigration@kbin.social.
This community welcomes anyone who wants to see Reddit gone. Nuke the Snoo!
When sharing links, please also share an archived version of the target of your link.
Rules:
- Follow lemmy.ml's global rules and code of conduct.
- Keep it on-topic.
- Don't promote illegal stuff here.
- Don't be stupid, noisy, obnoxious or obtuse (S.N.O.O.)
- Have fun, and enjoy the popcorn! 🍿
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
2 sources to this:
-You cannot see/edit/delete comments/posts that are in currently private communities.
-Reddit only caches ~100 items each in your profiles various lists (posts, comments, summary, and all their different sort options), so once those lists are empty it appears you have no content left but there's still plenty that have just fallen off the end of those lists.
You can delete it... If you can find it. Reddit doesn't give you the tools to find all of your own content.
I ran PowerDeleteSuite a week or two ago initially, and since then I’ve seen the occasional post or comment reappear every few days. That seems to have stopped now for me though.
I’m genuinely curious what the cause is, especially since I had them overwritten before deleting, and they would still come back to the unedited content.
Actually I just ran a search on Google with my user name and restricted to reddit and I found loads of comments undeleted that do not show up in my comment view. I think Reddit just does not show me all my comments to begin with. Maybe they have some sort of caching of recent/top/controversial comments and it just get's updated slowly.
I've replaced all my comments with lorem ipsum using PowerDeleteSuite fork and they haven't reverted them - maybe that would work for you? Overwrote them too just in case
Initially I did use PowerDeleteSuite to replace my comments with a message, but they were reverted as well, ultimately I started to delete my comments in the hopes they wouldn't show up again, but sadly they do. And now that the API is gone PowerDeleteSuite doesn't work anymore.
Are you sure they were reverted. If you used the original Power Delete Suite it was not reacting to the current 5-second-per-edit limit. And so it would look like stuff being reverted.
Many of the forks implemented some sleep timing to ensure all comments stay edited.
I used a forked version and said goodbye like the dolphins.
Thousands of comments (and a couple of days later) edit on a 4-pass cycle to ensure Reddit hadn’t implemented some kind of revision depth - and they’re all still edited.
I used the fork with the delay but I recognized the same comment showing up again and again, so I am pretty sure at least some were reverted.
Based on what I have read, the root cause is probably that Reddit doesn't actually delete comments, it just marks them in the database as "this is not supposed to be displayed" or something like that. That means that it's pretty easy for "deleted" comments to reappear without anyone actually trying to revert them, because the "deleted" flag gets lost somehow. That can happen in any number of ways, and it's unlikely that it's admins deliberately undoing user deletions, but it is happening. I have been manually deleting, so it isn't just because scripts don't get all the comments the first time (though that seems to be a common problem), and I can confirm that some comments in private subs couldn't be deleted until after the subs opened up again, but that some things also popped back up with no changes to the subs in question. Yes, a lot of comments are "reverting" because they weren't deleted in the first place, but that definitely doesn't cover all of the issues people are having.
I am not positive that "delete" flags rather than actual deletion is what's happening technologically, but it would explain how often deleted material is popping back up for people. Properly deleted comments shouldn't show back up even if subreddits are toggled from private to public and back, because deleted comments should be gone as soon as you are able to delete them in the first place. This kind of fake deletion is apparently not unusual for sites that store and display content, but it doesn't comply with EU privacy laws, precisely because it's so easy for "deleted" material to become public again.
And that's really the point: it doesn't matter exactly why specific content is popping back up. The fact that any content is popping back up after a user tries to delete it means something is wrong, and if enough EU users complain, there will be grounds for a lawsuit against Reddit, regardless of whether anyone at Reddit is deliberately doing anything wrong.