Reddit restored my posts and comments. : reddit

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

that’s why I overwrote all ofmy comments with gibberish 10 times before I deleted them, so even if they un-deleted them and/or restored previous version, they’d have real trouble finding a version that wasn’t total gibberish. I just knew they’d pull this crap.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Oh that's great 👍. What a great idea 💡. Everyone should be doing that!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Maybe they delete our comments only to us but everyone still sees them? But yeah, if you re-did your comment like 10 times and another commentor redid theirs 5 times, how would they know what is the correct set? I can only think that maybe they go with the comments that survived the longest time. Or the first comment?

[+] [email protected] -8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not too hard to defeat this solution though: put your comments through something like ChatGPT and if it can understand what you wrote, it’s probably good enough for em to restore it.

Maybe the answer is to write some nonsensical answer that’s understood by human readers as utter nonsense, but still recognized by LLMs as a “good comment”.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

it was randomly-generated letters and numbers. it would be impossible to divine what te original comment was. I then did this, over and over 10 times, so the edit history was overwritten with blocks of randomized text.

what you suggest would just spit out more garbage, or, at best, completely fake comments.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You misunderstood my comment. Reddit probably has every version of your edits, so all they need to do is to put all your past comments through ChatGPT or something, by time in descending order. The first sensible one gets accepted. In some sense, that’s just like how a person would do it. This way, they don’t have to deal with individual approaches to obfuscating or messing with their data.

I was gonna just wait till this whole fiasco dies down, let it sit for a couple of months to a year, before going ahead and slowly remove my comments over time. It’s easy to build triggers for individual users to detect attempts at mass edit or mass deletion of comments after all, which may trigger some process in their systems. Doing it the low profile way is likely the best way to go.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

the amounts of cost and resources for all of that would be profound. when they’re already complaining about profitability, I doubt they’d dumb huge amounts of additional funds into a project like that. they clearly have at least one level of backups, and I wouldn’t be shocked if they had 2 or 3 revision backups, but anything past that - let alone what you’re suggesting - would be too much to be a manageable cost.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It’s hard to say that without knowing what their infrastructure’s like, even if we think it’s expensive. And if they built their stack with OLAP being an important part of it, I don’t see why they wouldn’t have our comment edit histories stored somewhere that’s not a backup, and maybe they just toss dated database partitions into some cheap cold storage that allows for occasional, slow reads. They’re not gonna make a backup of their entire fleet of databases for every change that happens. That would be literally insane.

Also, tracking individual edit and delete rates over time isn’t expensive at all, especially if they just keep an incremental day-by-day, maybe more or less frequent, change over time. Or, just slap a counter for edits and deletes in a cache, reset that every day, and if either one goes higher than some threshold, look into it. There are probably many ways to achieve something similar in a cheap way.

And ChatGPT is just an example. I’m sure there already are other out-of-fashion-but-totally-usable language models or heuristics that are cheap to run and easy to use. Anything that can give a decent amount of confidence is probably good enough.

At the end of the day, the actual impact of their business from the API fiasco is just on a subset of power users and tech enthusiasts, which is vanishingly small. I know many that still use Reddit, some begrudgingly, despite knowing the news pretty well. Why? Cause the contents are already there. Restoring valuable content is important for Reddit, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t want to sink some money into ensuring that they keep what makes em future money. It’s basically an investment. There are some risks, but the chances to earn em back with returns on top of the cost is high.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

what we can do is apply some common sense, however, and realize the amount of work to do this is ridiculous. and, yes, tacking the changes isn’t that complex, but tracking that many changes and storing them for tens of millions of users’ comments for 18 years IS. Then doing what you proposed with ChatGPT is beyond absurd with regards to cost, too, considering the scale of computing work required to process so many deleted comments.

so, despite how many theoreticals you propose regarding the possibility of it, the fact remains that it’s unlikely in the extreme such an effort would have been made because of the resource, time, and cost involved.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Kinda don’t like how my handwavy idea is just taken for the most naive turn. I’m not even trying to give precise solutions. I’ve never worked with software at scale, and I expect the playing ground to be pretty different, but I think you’re exaggerating.

Storing all 18 years worth of data in all its iterations is ridiculous in the first place, and should never cross the mind of any dev worth their salt for more than a mere nanosecond. Cut off all that data down to to 3 years, 1 year, or even just a few months, and that’s probably all Reddit needs for backup and analytics. Have separate strategies for backup and analytics if needed. They’ve been doing ads and analytics stuff for a while now, so I expect them to have some architecture in place for that.
Dealing with deleted comments is easy — just unmark them for deletion (hard delete is generally not a thing). It’s most probably not in a backup. It’s just not a user accessible feature to unmark deletion. Even if they do get deleted eventually, what’s the time frame for a cleanup like? Every day? A few months? They still need an entry for that comment for the threads feature to work, so at best, they null the content of the comment out.
ChatGPT is just an example. No need to beat a bad example to death and use that as an argument against a whole argument. And I’m pretty sure you’ve not read the rest of the last comment.
I think you’re over-estimating how much of an impact the API pricing fiasco had, and once again, you don’t seem to have read my previous comment and acknowledged that. Nobody in their right mind is going to do this comment read and scan for every single Reddit user. Not manually for sanity. Not programmatically for cost. It’s why they need some way(s) to identify which users to watch out for. They’re not going to do that manually though, right? That would be costly too, from a manpower’s perspective, and human labor is expensive, and scales much worse than programs.
Common sense would ask that if all they did is to restore their database to a certain state, how do they deal with new comments and changes that were added between the PiTR and whenever they make the restore? Are they just gone now? Isn’t that bad, cause they’re potentially losing new, quality content?

Look buddy, all I want to say is that I don’t think your method against Reddit would work. It’s basically gamble though, so I’m definitely not against attempt at it. I just want to point out the possibility of it not working. I don’t think there are surefire ways against their attempt at restoring content.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I’m sorry you don’t like that I think you’re being ridiculous, but getting upset and doubling-down every time I say so isn’t likely to change my mind.

move on.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Instead of bulk deleting you should bulk change your comments directing people to Lemmy.

[–] panchzila 9 points 1 year ago

I deleted everything by hand and then left reddit. My account doesn't exist anymore so it seems like I can do shit about it. But your recommendation still holds, I wish I've done something like that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Even that didn't work for me. My old comments kept popping back up. I had to delete them mulitple times and then manually whackamole the ones that popped up to finally get rid of them.

[–] overzeetop 2 points 1 year ago

And they’re probably still there. I haven’t gone back and looked lately, but I did the delete whack a mole for about three weeks until my account was empty save for my up/down votes. It’s still empty.

But I looked up something a couple weeks ago and went to the Reddit link …and one of my comments was right there in the thread. There were others I could find via google, but not search on Reddit. They’re only there in context.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Genius

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Yeah, that whole nonsense Spez the lemur boy was spewing about Reddit users being entitled to delete their own content was bullshit. I literally got suspended for a few days because a comment I regretted got put back up after I removed it myself.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I noticed that too when I was bulk deleting. Since a couple of weeks ago I delete about 10-20 comments/ posts every other couple of days. Tedious yeah but none of them have resurfaced yet

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit needs attention, that's why they became like TikTok. Reddit needs content, that's why they restored content.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The spice must flow

[–] billbasher 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Damn this happened to me too. There has to be some legal recourse for this somehow

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

GDPR or something?

[–] billbasher 1 points 1 year ago

I mean yes but : I don’t live in the UK. A request to get rid of an individual’s data doesn’t mean anyone else’s is safe. It’s a game of whack a mole

Class action would maybe be the only viable way

[–] Vlyn 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Are you sure you properly deleted them? Reddit rate limits you to about one edit/delete every 3 seconds. If you go faster than that the deletes fail.

All the comments I have overwritten stayed that way, it was just difficult to reach them all (as different comments show up under "Top", "Controversial", "New" and so on).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've been running an app that lists, edits then deletes all comments and posts every 2 hours for about a month. It does this within the rules of the API and confirms all is deleted each time.

It is still finding restored (pre edit) comments today.

[–] panchzila 1 points 1 year ago

Yes I did. They were still deleted a few days after I erased my account. Now they are back.

[–] ChunkMcHorkle 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I know I'm kinda late here, but you should know that you can still take your images off Imgur. Imgur is still totally independent of Reddit, and Reddit can't restore what you remove from a third party image hosting site.

That won't solve everything, but it will completely rob this particular post of its value to Reddit. (Excellent CGI work, btw.)

These are the two I saw linked in the post and its comments, but if you log into Imgur you can unlink everything you ever posted from there to Reddit:

https://imgur.com/keF08rh
https://imgur.com/a/qIG6A

[–] panchzila 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you, I will delete them from imgur. I was more focused on my frustration with reddit than on a solution.

[–] ChunkMcHorkle 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

deleted by creator

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Same, although I thought it was due to some subreddits being private when I deleted and later coming back public. Took like 10 times to go through my profile and remove everything.