Reddit Migration

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I just found out that not all of my Reddit comments had been deleted despite my profile page showing otherwise. (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by anon@kbin.social to c/RedditMigration@kbin.social

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TL;DR: even if your delete script confirms a full wipe and your Reddit profile page shows zero comment, there may still be comments left over (that you can find through a search engine and delete manually on Reddit).

Weeks ago, I used redact.dev to delete all my Reddit comments (thousands of them over 10+ years). Redact.dev confirmed a full wipe, and my Profile > Comments page on Reddit confirmed I had no comment left.

Yet, as of today, Google still returns dozens of results for “$myredditusername site:reddit.com”. It’s not just Google’s crawler lagging; when I follow those links, those comments are still visible on the Reddit website, under my username, where I have the ability to manually delete them.

Thankfully, I hadn't yet nuked my account, because I knew of other users whose deleted comments got reinstated (although that was thought to be caused by the deletion script exceeding the API rate limit; supposedly a different case, as those missed comments would still show in the Profile page).

spez: edited for clarity.

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[–] Pandantic@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I believe that “0 comments” you can see is limited to about 1000. There’s a list of your comments that are viewable by your profile page, and that only caches the first 1000 in any category (top, new, controversial, etc).

[–] ono@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Close.

Each of Reddit's listings (top submissions, recent comments, etc.) is generated from a database index. Those indexes are limited to 1000 entries, by dropping older ones as new ones arrive, and they don't re-index for deletions.

That means that once a listing goes over 1000 items, the oldest items can no longer be found through it. The messages are still in the database somewhere, but can only be reached from some other index (different sorting order) or a search or a direct link.

So, the messages are not being deleted and then restored; they were never deleted in the first place, because the deletion tools have no way to find them.

This is why a formal data deletion request is often more effective than a tool.

[–] Pandantic@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago

Thank you for the clarification!

And I think if you get your GDPR data request from Reddit, you can get the direct links and that allows some of the comment deletion/editing tools to do their full job, but I’m not sure on the full details on that.

[–] anon@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Interesting - do you have more details about that? I would expect the “top 1K” query to show the leftovers, which would have become the next most top/controversial/etc after the original top 1K got nuked.

[–] Pandantic@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago

Okay, I’m not sure where it originated, but here’s a link to a relevant comment. I read it in a post about deleting Reddit comments when I first started exploring the fediverse, and I’m not sure I can find it but iirc, a Reddit admin confirmed that when you check your posts, it only shows the top 1000 and comments are only pushed off this list for “new” additions, and the list is not repopulated when you delete things. Therefore, if you delete all your comments, then check the list, it will show none (or if you delete 100 comments, it will show only 900, etc). Something about how these lists are populated in Reddit’s system. It is also relevant that some of the Reddit delete programs out there use this list and so will never delete all your comments.

I will keep looking for the original post tho.