anon

Title is borked - what was on sale were credentials to remotely view home cameras in which child nudity may occasionally be involved, and still pictures of the same. There is no mention of abuse nor deliberate exploitation of children. It’s still completely fucked up, illegal, and a massive privacy breach, though.

Ctrl-enter is your friend! Assuming you’re visiting a .com TLD.

Because you're both claiming to understand the failing of reddit's UI and claiming the same UI as a reliable indicator of all comments getting deleted. Rather, it seems some comments were likely missed because of the shitty UI. Relying on reddit's UI for this is the specific user error to which I was referring. I hope that's clearer.

Thanks for clarifying. I understand the failing of Reddit’s UI from reading about it in the replies here. I didn’t know about it when I first posted, so there is no contradiction there. I also had no reason then to believe that either the redact tool (which reported deleting all comments) nor the Reddit UX (which reported no comment left) were inaccurate in their reporting.

Had either displayed wording similar to that service page you linked to, I would agree with you that it would have been user error to ignore it.

Barring that, I think it’s a stretch to claim user error when an obscure technical limitation of Reddit makes its UX misleading in a non-obvious way.

I haven’t nuked my account yet and will only do so once I am certain that all my comments are permanently deleted (some were missed due to a design limitation in the way Reddit finds them). But practically speaking, I am no longer using that account, so it is functionally equivalent to having deleted it.

I have no regret so far. Deleting my trail of crumbs has assuaged my fear of doxxing (which, in all honesty, is orthogonal to the API shutdown fiasco and was worth doing selectively anyway). It has also given me back time that I would spend mindlessly doomscrolling on Reddit. I am now more deliberate in my use of social media and the Fediverse, which is an improvement in my online habits. For that I am grateful.

This is very good to know, thank you.

I had indeed read and understood the earlier comment that you linked.

I just got confused by your “user error” suggestion, because I don’t see how this qualifies as one.

First, the Reddit API is broken, because the select query sent by the deletion tool receives less than a full set (as if there was an implied LIMIT clause on the server side). This leads the deletion tool to erroneously announce it has processed all comments.

Two, the Reddit UX is broken, because the profile’s Comments page incorrectly returns an empty set due to a silent design limitation (as described in the linked comment).

There is literally no mechanism to find leftover comments through either the Reddit API or UX, because both are broken. The only workaround is to use a search engine that had indexed those leftover comments.

That’s the whole point of my original post, and I don’t see where the “user error” may come in.

I dont think getting banned will remove posts and comments from your history that haven’t been flagged as rule-breaking. All that will happen is that your banworthy comment will get deleted and you’ll lose access to your account, which is the worst outcome because then you can no longer manually delete your history.

I mean, it’s pretty straightforward. Go to reddit.com, click on your profile page, then on Comments. This will show you a list of your comments. If that list is empty, and it wasn’t prior to you deleting all your comments with an API tool like redact.dev, you can reasonably conclude that all your comments are gone. Yet it’s not the case.

I can show you a screenshot of the blank Comments page, but I’m not sure what it would add.

That’s right, they were most likely never deleted in the first place, despite Reddit’s indication to the contrary.

I used redact.dev and confirmed on reddit.com that all my comments were deleted well before the blackouts.

I just posted a similar story and a kind soul led me to your post. My story correlates well enough with yours.

Thank you. I’m boosting your reply as I hadn’t heard of this behavior before (as I’m sure many others) and it’s the most plausible explanation for what’s going here, i.e., not malicious intent from Reddit but rather sloppy design of the profile’s comments feed and how it pulls data.