this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
513 points (100.0% liked)

Reddit

17698 readers
1280 users here now

News and Discussions about Reddit

Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules


Rule 1- No brigading.

**You may not encourage brigading any communities or subreddits in any way. **

YSKs are about self-improvement on how to do things.



Rule 2- No illegal or NSFW or gore content.

**No illegal or NSFW or gore content. **



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-Reddit posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



:::spoiler Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] meggied90@lemm.ee 77 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Search engines do not scrape the entire internet every single time someone searches. They do routine scrapes of web content and create a cache of what was there, and search that cache. This is why updates to websites do not always reflect on searches.

You're contents are findable on Google because the last time they bothered to scrape that particular Reddit post was when your comment was intact, and they have not had a need to scrape it again since then.

[–] nan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 108 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They are finding comments through Google and are then able to view, edit, and delete them on Reddit. They are not able to view them on their profile page.

[–] meggied90@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

They said the originals do not appear on their account on Reddit. They also said they edited their original posts to be empty. They're able to edit and delete their modified (empty) comments based on what I understand of their post.

I don't see anything in OP's post that indicates Reddit.com itself is displaying the originals, only the search engines are, and the cache would be the reason why.

[–] JGrffn@lemmy.world 41 points 1 year ago

I just did a search just like OP said and while it's true that most results are just outdated scraped content where my posts and comments have been deleted, I did find one just now that doesn't appear on my account overview, but that I could see, edit, and delete on the reddit thread itself.

[–] nan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The second and third sentences of the second paragraph are talking about Reddit itself. OP does not see the comments in their own Reddit page, mass edited and deleted them at some point, but is still about to find them through a search engine actively on Reddit.

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Maybe try reading it again

[–] Serinus@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

This is fine due diligence. You just need to frame it as such instead of confidently saying these things happened.

Skepticism is fine. Just assuming Reddit didn't do something this egregious (when they probably did) is poor form.

This is not the first account I've heard of comments rising from the grave.

[–] basxto@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

they are still served by Reddit

🤔

[–] BrightCandle@lemmy.world 46 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They also appear when you click through the link and look at the Reddit site. They can be editted and deleted. These are not cached search results Reddit is genuinely showing those comments and yet they can not be found in your account that shows you have no comments at all. That is not what is happening here.

[–] meggied90@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do the comments still show after you empty your own browser's cache too? That seems less likely to be the culprit, but worth a check to be certain.

Elsewhere in this post there's also a helpful user who notes that the mass-editing programs can only handle a thousand comments. Is it possible this is why some of your comments are still there?

[–] BrightCandle@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

Yes, I happen to be incidentally be finding this on a brand new install of Windows as my motherboard failed last week so its super duper clean.

[–] yumcake@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

OP is not saying that Google's scrape still retains his reddit comments. He's not referring to seeing this information on Google, but on Reddit.

He's saying that reddit is retaining his comments and still serving those comments up when refreshed directly. They're de-linked from his reddit account so he doesn't see them through his reddit account, but the information is restored throughout the reddit site to be viewed.