Before I left Reddit, I used a plugin through the api to replace all of my comments with random gibberish and then delete them. Part of this was because (mandatory) fuck spez. But more importantly, it was to protect the anonymity of my account. After years of posting, there is likely enough personal information shared to potentially connect my Reddit habits to my online identity. I wasn’t planning on using Reddit again in the future on that account, but I left it open in order to maintain some security control over the account. I’m not really sure what to do at this point because I still consider it a security vector that’s a bit concerning. There’s no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail’s-pace reddit UI, and I have no ability to assure that my content will remain unavailable or at least not publicly displayed.
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I’ve been saying this from the start:
Any basic level competency backend team has change history on comments. Crack whatever jokes you like about Reddit but they at least have “basic level competency”
It’s trivial for them to build some filters to detect mass changes and just fuckin roll them back.
If you post ANYTHING on ANY server you don’t own: it’s out there. For ever.
https://media1.tenor.com/m/OUzcn0WrxFEAAAAC/sandlot-forever.gif
I learned this like 10 years ago at least
That’s pretty fuckin cool
I always assumed keeping a change history for comments would be cost prohibitive. I mean there are millions of comments and God knows how many changes.
But apparently it’s not a problem to keep versions of them. It doesn’t blow up the database?
Each change is less costly to store than each comment, and the system processes millions of comments per day.
If you’re storing change deltas rather than whole copies of comments, the changes for all of Reddit should be far smaller than the comments for all of Reddit.
Even storing full comments isn’t much more storage. Just consider it as another random comment from someone else. Doubt most people edit their comments so 95% of comments only have 1 copy. Hell they used (maybe still do) ignore edits in the first 5 min or something likely so people could fix typos/formatting before they start storing history separately.
So they keep the change logs. Just don’t provide them for the users’ benefit.
Sounds like what everyone else in all the spaces, does.
I just only did the first step: replace all I had written with random gibberish. And then I did nothing. Just left it there. And the gibberish is still there. Mission accomplished. One of the goals of this method was to feed KI with Nonsense. Obviously I wasn’t the only person who did so. And it looks like it has worked.
Actually using AI gibberish for this might be the best strategy of all, since Reddit seems hell bent on making money with AI training and feeding AI generated text into AI training has been shown to yield increasingly worse results over time. So you make the product Reddit is selling less attractive.
That may be worthwhile… But very time consuming.
Same thing like you did. The difference is I only edited the content and then I just left it. Deleting everything leads to reddit undeleting it. Leaving the Nonsense there did not trigger their alarm.
I just checked and Reddit did the same with my account. I spent hours editing and ultimately deleting my posts and comments, and the Spez Gestapo just undeleted years worth of content… I’m going to go through them again and this time I’ll leave the gibberish.
If you are from EU, you might try envoking the GDPR maybe? Though most make it incredibly difficult afaik
Are you a resident of the EU? If so, I believe you have the legal right to demand that reddit delete all of your data and user content, and by law they must comply.
If you are a US citizen, I believe you have very little recourse in forcing them to delete your data, unless you are a resident of California or Virginia.
I wonder what the legality of transferring ownership of the account to someone in the EU in order to request gdpr enforcement would be… Or I suppose you could become an EU resident but that would be rather difficult.
Most likely you could just hit it from a proxy and say you are from the EU.
Actually, the GDPR applies to EU citizens no matter where they are so you shouldn’t have to make your request from the EU for them to have to believe it
They’ll usually process GDPR requests for anyone at these hacked together tech companies. It’s not worth the dev time to build two separate flows
im kinda scared to check. i dont want to see my shit undeleted
This is why I make sure that everything I post is offensive or inflammatory. That way, keeping my comments published is counterproductive for the platform, you dumb piece of shit.
Damn, I wish I thought of this before. Instead I tried so hard to be nice and helpful 😔
Helpful, abrasive, profane; you can be all three at once!
you dumb piece of shit.
😢 I know, I’m sorry, I’m trying
No, no, no… not you. You’re great! Your posts are great, your attitude is great, your hair looks good. I love everything about you. I was just making a comment about how sites like Reddit deserve to be littered with offensive and insulting comments you fucking moron.
ThatsMySecretCap.jpg I’m always snarky.
That’s a great idea, eat shit butthead. ;-)
Thank you for the kind words you sack of cat shit.
See the reason Lemmy is better than Reddit is because you don’t have 37 people jumping down your throat right now because they didn’t understand the sarcasm
Idk man, sarcasm comprehension might even be worse here somehow…
really depends which group of netizens happen upon your comment and when.
And you didn’t get a 3 day ban for threatening violence. Even if all you said was “I miss when we could unapologetically punch Nazis.”
Reminds me of my Reddit “violence” ban. I said that RFK voters should have their brains looked inside for more brain worms. Admins took this to mean literally open their heads up, killing them in the process.
Reddit will ban you for literally anything if it gets dogpiled hard enough with reports.
As long as this kind of thread doesn’t get repeated over and over.
Bro WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY ABOUT MY IQ? I’ll have you know my momma cared about my schooling very much. LIFE WAS LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATES
I can’t believe you think my IQ is 37!!
(I can’t read.)
Huh. I lost 50k in points post-APIgate. So they undeleted some, and deleted others?
50 thousand points… were they gonna let you trade them in for something?
lol, a decade + on Reddit before the API debacle. It all adds up. I don’t care about them, it was just a “huh, wonder where they went…” kind of thing.
I find it very funny to think of how aggressively Reddit was banning people, particularly back in 2016. And how algorithmic they got in censoring and shadowbanning certain comments and accounts.
But now that real human interactions are more valuable than gold, they’re trying to reverse it all again.
Are you sure it was previously deleted stuff? I thought the same thing had happened to me but it was due to subreddits being private at the time of deletion then later coming out of private (some weeks or months later) preventing those then privated posts/comments from being deleted. I think running another automated tool again should do the trick at this point.
There might be something to this. I went and checked just now, prompted by a your comment, and I found a handful (like, six) comments from ages ago on reddit that did not get torched when I did my mass edit-and-delete, somehow. I found these mostly because some punters found them and necroposted on those threads, so I have notifications regarding them.
I found a few more and deleted those by hand, too. Most of them were from the same sub, so that sub was probably locked when I did my mass delete.
Also, there’s non-rolling limit to how much shows in a user profile. All the delete/modify scripts I’ve seen work through the user profile, cycling each sorting method to access as much as possible. For old accounts, or just ones with enough activity, there’s going to be shit not visible there. Have to search with other means if you want to get everything in that case.
This is my problem. Account is 16 years old and I have nearly 500k karma.
It seems to be undeleted. I confirmed that everything was gone at that time, and I am seeing no obvious pattern so far. I could be mistaken, but that’s how it appears.
Every time this gets brought up, I go back to a thread where my most popular comment was (since I no longer have an account to check back on and it’s the only one I know for sure I can find). To this day, it luckily still remains deleted. If it does get restored, I wonder if it becomes the original comment or the generic [deleted in protest of the Reddit API change] or whatever I set them to be edited to before deletion.
I know there are some databases of all Reddit comments prior to… maybe 2015? I forget. Would be cool to port them into an open source clone that isn’t profiting off them, just for the times comments were really useful, like solving a tech issue only a couple people had ever documented.
At one time, Reddit (or at least the core server) was open source. Statistically, it’s relatively likely that someone, somewhere forked and is maintaining that code for their own purposes to this day, but I’m not actively aware of any examples.
If someone has been maintaining a fork, I’d love to see the old comment database imported into it and made available, though I don’t know offhand what license either the code or the comments were released under.
A FOSS Reddit, without the chaos that took over America during the presidential administration installed in 2016, and branching from there, would be an interesting point of diversion to say the least.
Edit: quickie DDG search found me one fork archived in 2023 and a further form updated a year or so ago. That’s recent enough the damn thing just might build with a little work.
2023 fork of open source reddit
I’m sure there are others…
If you’re concerned about particular comments or posts linking your Reddit account to your real-world identity, and you know have a pretty good idea what those are, can you just delete or modify those?
I think that there are some other issues here, though.
That will help if you’re worried about someone doxxing an account via just casually doing Web searches, maybe.
But people have already archived copies of Reddit’s comment and post history. So if you’re worried about someone likely to be digging through such a database, this won’t help.
And I have no idea whether Reddit actually purges deleted comments internally, or whether they or any partners or future purchasers might have access to deleted text. I haven’t looked at their privacy policy, so I don’t know what they do.
It’s an aggregate concern - Advertisers, bad actors, etc could easily use tools that are available now or will be soon to extract information that otherwise would be impossible for a human to wade through. I know that in one sense, everything is backed up by the NSA, etc, but that is not something I can do anything about.
The concern is actually greater in the fediverse, since a federated admin has access to even more information, and there is no absolute way to delete everything even with GDPR. I think that the risk is worth building a better internet. It’s also a part of why blocking Threads is important.
So, I’m gonna be honest. I don’t think that mass deanonymization via text analysis is in the immediate future.
Is it a theoretical risk? Yes. It’s not because I don’t think that it’s technically doable. It’s for a rather-more-depressing reason: because there’s lower-hanging fruit if someone is trying to build a deanonymized database. I just don’t think that it’s presently worth the kind of effort required to mass-deanonymize text, in general.
Any time you have an account with some company that persists for a long time, if they retain a persistent IP address log, then whenever you log in, you’re linking your identity and the IP address at that time. Especially if one cross-correlates logs at a few companies, and a data-miner could do a reasonably reliable job of deanonymizing someone. Maybe it’s not perfect, maybe there are several people in a household or something, maybe some material is suspect. But if you’re watching cookies in a browser on a phone crossing from one network to another and such, my guess is that you can typically probably map an IP address to a fairly limited number of people.
I mean, there are ways to help obfuscate that, like Tor. But virtually nobody is doing that sort of thing. And even through something like Tor, browsers tend to leak an awful lot of bits of unique information.
And if someone’s downloading an app to their phone that’s intentionally transmitting a unique identifier, then it’s pretty much game over anyway, absent something like XPrivacyLua that can forge information. Companies want to get people using their phone apps.
An individual person might be subject to doxxing from someone who wants to try to identify their real-life persona from an online persona. But I don’t think that companies will generally likely be going that route in the near future to try to deanonymize users en masse, because they’ve already got easier, more-reliable ways to track people that people are vulnerable to.
All that being said, once text is out there, it’s potentially not going away, so keeping in mind that it might be deanonymized one day via future analysis might be a good idea. The Federalist Papers were deanonymized via Bayesian statistical analysis centuries after they were written using technologies that their authors could not have dreamed of.
Robert Hanssen – a Soviet mole in the FBI who had counterintelligence expertise and could reasonably expect to be dealing with state-level intelligence agencies going after him – was caught because he used the unique phrase “the purple-pissing Japanese” on two occasions; once where his real-life identity wasn’t known but that he was a spy was, and once where his real-life identity was known but not that he was a spy. That deanonymization was done manually, via human effort, but if you figure that the same sorts of approaches could be used to link accounts at different services and across accounts on one service…shrugs I mean, I just don’t have the tools to try to resist something like that, to keep what I’m saying intact but present ideas in a way that I’d be confident would be strong against that kind of analysis.
While I don’t think that text analysis (TA) is going to replace those techniques that you mentioned, I do think that it is a threat to anonimity in the immediate future, because it’ll likely be used alongside those techniques to improve their accuracy and lower their overall costs.
The key here is machine “learning” lowering the TA fruit by quite a bit. People misattribute ML with almost supernatural abilities, but here it’s right at home, as it’s literally made to find correlations between sets of data. And, well, TA is basically that.
Another reason why I think that it’s a threat is because even a partial result is useful. TA doesn’t just identifies you; it profiles you. And even if not knowing exactly your name and address, info like age, sex, gender, location, social class, academic formation etc. is still useful for advertisers and similar.
(Besides the Federalist Papers and Robert Hanssen, another interesting example would be how the Unabomber was captured. It illustrates better how the analysis almost never relies on a single piece of info, but rather multiple pieces that are then glued together into a coherent profile.)
(Also sorry for nerding out about this, it’s just a topic that I happen to enjoy.)
On a plus side, maybe, if you choose to delete your comments and posts again, albeit slowly, would be to copy/paste the really useful shit to Lemmy. I say this because one unintended (or not) consequence of these actions is that posts from years ago, explaining the solution to a problem that still pops up now and then, doesn’t have the solution most of the time.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment or actions at all, it just sucks when you find someone having the same issue you are, only to learn it’s on reddit and the solution to said problem was deleted.
Yes, I’m considering this. Since I will have to go a few at a time it seems, I should be able to leave individual comments.
Does the internet archive scrape Reddit? Or have they?
This just happened to me as well. Deleted all my stuff about a year ago and even happened to check last week and it was still gone. Saw this and went back to check again just now, and it had all been undeleted.
Update: just realized it’s not everything, just everything more than 5 years old
If they’re mass restoring stuff, they’re probably chugging through in batches, betcha if you check in a couple weeks there will be more
