I came across today one of my own comments on Reddit with a search on duckduckgo. It was still intact. The problem is I used shreddit to randomise and delete the entire contents of my account. My account comments and posts all show empty on my account pages on reddit so there should be nothing.

I did a site:reddit.com search using my username and found ~50 comments that Reddit has undeleted but also hide from my own account. I could still edit and delete them. Its curious that they don’t appear on my accounts content on Reddit and yet a search engine can find them and they are still served by Reddit. Ex Reddit users who deleted their account contents should be aware this is happening and report it as a GDPR breach to their respective agencies if they are in the EU if they too find this has occurred.

  • CaptObvious@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Several of us have noticed this since the protests and mass exodus started. It did seem that editing then deleting might protect against Reddit’s restoration of posts and comments.

    Update: Just checked. They’ve restored a lot of my old posts. This may turn into a years-long game of whack-a-mole trying to actually get our material deleted from that site.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is exactly why (plus laziness) that I haven’t even bothered. They’re just going to put them back anyway.

      I do have a post pinned in my account directing people to Lemmy though.

      • Serinus@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I PMed someone on Twitter asking them to use Mastodon. As soon as I sent the PM, Twitter temporarily locked my account for “suspicious activity”. I had to basically fill out a captcha to get my account back, but it didn’t send the message.

        I rewrote it while being more careful with my phrasing and misspelling “mastedon” the second time.

    • Dankry@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Several of us have noticed this since the protests and mass exodus started.

      They haven’t restored anything. Any script or service you used can only access the most recent 1000 comments in your history. The problem is half of you people rushing to use these tools for the first time have no idea how they work.

      • Wolf Link 🐺@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I manually deleted everything reddit chose to show in my profile over the course of a week. I only stopped once absolutely NO comments or posts were shown in “new” reddit, old.reddit, and all types of sorting (old,new,top,hot,controversial). Waited an additional day and then checked again, just to make sure I really got everything. There simply was nothing left in my profile anymore.

        Afterwards(!) I used “shreddit” and it found nearly a thousand effing more things to delete (981 comments to be precise). Ran it twice, and the second go didn’t find any more comments or posts.

        My account is deleted now, and I can STILL find comments that are definitely mine but no longer attributed to my account (it says [deleted] where the username originally was) but since the account no longer exists, I can not edit/delete them again.

        There is definitely something fishy with that site.

        • slipperydippery@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I understood that you cannot view, edit, or delete posts and comments from communities that are set to private. So if you run shreddit and a community later becomes public again, your posts can resurface.

          • JGrffn@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yes, but I definitely found comments that were mine, which didn’t show up in my account but showed up in the threads where they were posted, purely through Google searches just like the one described on this post.

      • mothringer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Any script or service you used can only access the most recent 1000 comments in your history.

        This isn’t quite 100% true. Shreddit supports getting its comment list from a GDPR request, and if you do that, then it CAN access the older comments and delete them, it just doesn’t have any other way than that data request file to know about their existence.

        • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          That’s exactly what I did with redact.dev. You plug in the zip file and it uses the enclosed .csv files to find the posts and comments to delete. Has nothing to do with arbitrary db limitations or profiles at all.

          It should also be noted that California, where Reddit is based, also has some GDPR-style privacy laws. People were posting the sources last month when Reddit first started undeleting deleted content, and that guy posted a video on YouTube of himself manually deleting comments and then having Reddit restore the exact comments he had deleted, which is supposed to be impossible.

          Will be interesting to see how this plays out. Oh, and obligatory fuck Reddit, and fuck the shills who come here to defend that corrupt shit.

      • shirro@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        Yes, I noticed this as well. I had to feed my GDPR export into a program to delete comments as the scripts that used reddit to find comment history didn’t go back far enough and did a terrible job. Even with that some comments caused errors which may have been due to some subs still being private at the time so I will do another pass.

      • Bucky@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        And predictably the only guy in the thread who understands how Reddit’s listings work was downvoted. I guess some things never change.

        • Dankry@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, the tech illiteracy in this thread is depressing. But people don’t seem interested in the mundane reason this is happening. They just want to be mad at reddit.

          • JGrffn@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            here you go, this is my account overview

            And here is a comment which I cannot find on my account overview, posts, or comments, no matter how I sort it all.

            Now explain to me the tech illiteracy or the mundane reason this is happening. I deleted EVERYTHING off my account a month ago, and have created a single post since.

            I’m leaving it up just so people can see that this is indeed happening. I would instantly delete it otherwise. I found it just like OP found his posts.

            Edit: Here’s a Pic of the comment, just in case. Notice the time on my phone, I took this after posting this comment.

            Edit 2: I can keep going, just keep asking me for more proof and I’m more than happy to find more shit, from my phone, from my PC, old reddit, new reddit… Go ahead and find my account on reddit and do the searches yourself if you want. First posts are duds, but you’ll find more content of mine if you keep looking through Google.

          • Bucky@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Reddit has given us plenty of legitimate reasons. It’s disappointing seeing people fall for conspiracy theories. Reddit doesn’t care that you’ve deleted your comments. It really reveals something I think, and that is a self centered-ness that people have that reddit would find their comments so valuable that they would create a mechanism to restore them after deletion. People who propagate this conspiracy theory reveal more about themselves than anything else.

            • JGrffn@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Why would comments not show up on your overview but show up on threads they were posted on? How hard can it be to do a SELECT WHERE on a db? Even if you assume things get cropped for performance, eventually the comments should show up in your account overview. I found one today, which just didn’t show up in my account overview, and I deleted EVERYTHING on my account a month ago.

              • Bucky@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Reddit uses something called listings which contain 1000 items. If you have more than 1000 comments on your account, you will only ever be able to view the last 1000 of them on a page like that. If you delete 50 comments, the listing is now only 950, it does not refill.