I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence, but I raised a case with the ICO in the UK, and today they got back to me asking for all my communication with Reddit. Also today - after a month of silence - Reddit also emailed me with this
If you’re in the UK and had been affected by posts being restored, I’d recommend contacting the ICO. It takes less than 5 minutes
That doesn’t even make sense. How could a script failing to delete a post have this outcome?
Yeah… My comments which were restored were deleted for several days before they started reappearing. That doesn’t sound like a flaw on the scripts, but a flaw on how reddit handles bulk comment deletion.
Mine weren’t bulk deleted (I manually deleted weekly) and still respawned weeks after deletion.
Fwiw this is not necessarily a new problem. As a mod I’ve seen it before, if you go through hitting “remove” on a whole bunch of comments in a row often some of them will be visible again when you refresh the page. Something similar could be what’s happened here. Reddit’s backend has never been very good.
I can understand seeing them after a refresh, but visiting my user profile not logged in from Tor and showing everything deleted then having it all come back 2-3 weeks later is a little shady. I just checked my account again after my 3rd powerdeletesuite run since the shutdowns and I had one single comment restored (despite shredding before delete but maybe that failed)
Yeah that’s quite a bit more sus. If it’s showing up as disappeared after a couple of minutes, it should stay removed.
The issue is reddit doesn’t store all the data in one indexed and centralized location. It was pointed out that “hot” and “top” sorting aren’t just a sort, but literally TWO LISTS that are constantly being updated and adjusted. So if you remove a comment from one list or location, it still might exist in other places. Then when reddit software gets around to reconciling these differences, the copy that still exists gets pushed onto the other lists and returns.
I’m not trying to justify the system; it sucks and reddit is directly responsible for that. But it does seem like they’re not intentionally restoring content, it’s just a side effect of their bungled system.