this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration

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Strange phenomenon while deleting my comments (kbin.social)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by XiELEd@kbin.social to c/RedditMigration@kbin.social
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Last night, I used Redact to delete all my comments, then altered the settings to make an exception for one and only one subreddit. To check if I even had comments left in that subreddit, I kept an eye on my comments through Infinity. At first the comments were being deleted one by one, then suddenly it showed a "No comments found" screen half-way through the deletion. So I looked through a post in that subreddit where I entered a discussion, and it turns out that my comments there were still up, despite my comments tab showing nothing. I then checked RiF and it didn't show my comments through my profile. Today (after having deleted everything), I checked through my comments in my post in another subreddit, and it turns out they were still up, despite the fact that I didn't make exceptions for it. Still found no comments through my profile.

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[–] abff08f4813c@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Folks, it's not that Reddit is undeleting comments or anything. I fought this all day today (see https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/45417/Anyone-have-experience-with-deleting-comments-to-see-older-comments#entry-comment-190482 ) and I figured out exactly what is happening.

Reddit is so dumb! They have an 1000 limit (on posts, comments, saved, etc). See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17647915 and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42940262/getting-more-than-1000-search-results-upper-bound-with-praw and even in PRAW's own docs, for example in https://praw.readthedocs.io/en/v3.6.2/pages/getting_started.html

Any single reddit listing will display at most 1000 items.

So what happened is that redact.dev can only delete the most recent 1000 comments of OP. But those subreddits have comments from OP beyond the limit, which no longer display in OP's own profile/comment views.

https://shreddit.com/ reports the same thing but they are more open about it.

They explicitly say that you need to give them an archive upload (from reddit's data retrival request) in order for shreddit.com to delete everything.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

About six months back I requested my data dump just out of curiosity, to see what it had about me. Even though the form says "allow up to 30 days" it came to me almost immediately, I seem to recall it was just a matter of hours.

About a week ago I requested another data dump, this one to be my nostalgic "that was my Reddit career I guess" archive. It still hasn't come through. Either their systems are genuinely so poor that they're being overwhelmed and can't generate all those data dumps being requested now, or more likely they're stalling in an effort to prevent exactly this sort of activity.

[–] abff08f4813c@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Sadly I expect that we will all get them within that 30 day window - on day 39, after the new api pricing breaks these tools.

[–] XiELEd@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That may be the case, so I think it's a temporary answer to this mystery. Though recently some of my comments ranging from 7 and 10 months ago (update: as of 6/19/23 my 18 days old comments are now reappearing) have been reappearing again, so it's become a kind of a whack-a-mole situation right now.

[–] abff08f4813c@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's hope I think, someone pointed me to a script on github that uses Pushshift's api and archive to bypass the reddit limit and get everything everything. See https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/47320/PSA-If-you-have-more-than-1000-posts-more-than#entry-comment-202228

[–] wildeaboutoskar@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do we know of this will impact Power Delete?

[–] abff08f4813c@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, since even on the website on mobile or desktop, you have the 1000 indexing limit. PDS relies on hitting the delete button on each comment/post that's visible. So if you can't see a comment because it's past the 1k limit, then PDS can't see it either and can't delete it.

Now, the changes to the API probably won't. Power Delete Suite is a javascript plugin on the browser and when I look at it, there's no api calls. Rather it just simulates you clicking manually on the edit / delete button of each submission / post.

However, PDS relies on the old dot reddit dot com layout (and goes to there automatically), so it might stop working if we lose old reddit.

The other thing is that I tried PDS and have had a very bad experience with it. Compared to the scripts out there like shreddit, I found PDS to be unreliable (no way to verify it deleted successfully if a rate limit stopped it, also it doesn't save all content and returned a truncated CSV file).

[–] FrickAndMortar@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I haven’t tried deleting my comments, but I’ve seen a lot of posts about comments being restored, left subs being re-subscribed to, etc… the evidence seems to be mounting that Reddit is trying to prevent the loss of content by keeping users from removing their own content.

I’ve seen people talking about overwriting their content instead of deleting it. I think I’ll go that route myself soon, hopefully that will stay under the radar.

[–] Rhaedas@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

Even overwriting might be getting undone, but that's the best way to try it.

[–] terath@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Wonder how much of this is due to the various caches they have being in different states. I expect it might take a while for all the caches to invalidate and reflect the current database state.