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
They’d come back after a few days. I’d remember the first few comments at the top of the list, and they’d get deleted for a day or two then re-appear
Yeah I think people are looking for a conspiracy here when this seems like much more of a technical thing. I think the person that put together one of the scripts even acknowledged that comments being "restored" were because the script was bad and needed a delay of some kind? Because Reddit has safeguards against mass deletion or editing in this manner in the event of trolls or compromised accounts and so on.
Like, comments were never meant to be mass deleted in this fashion, and we don't actually know exactly how reddit handles the requests on their end, so it makes sense some of them got kicked back automatically.
Reddit is doing more than enough terrible shit we can point to at the moment, don't need to wind this particular thing up into something it isn't.
I definitely do not believe any of these stories of comments intentionally restored. Not one piece of concrete proof of it happening has been submitted by anyone. It's definitely one of those "do your own research" things.
But also, Reddit is responsible for this situation by not having a first party tool for self-service full account deletions. They deserve all these conspiracies hitting them for omitting such an essential feature.
Spot on. Even when they've been caught doing things most people thought was shady (e.g., last year's /r/place manipulation), they tend to not outright deny it, but rather admit it and offer a half-assed explanation and end the conversation at that.
They wouldn't do something that flagrantly disregards EU/CA privacy laws. If they did it, they'd have have a justification they thought would hold up in court. If they had a justification that held up in court, they'd happily plop it in a comment that's pinned with a few dozen rewards and ignore any responses after that.
Regarding PowerDeleteSuite it's because it hasn't been updated in multiple years and since then (like a year after the last PDS update) Reddit added a cooldown for editing comments. I assume the same exists for deleting.
So when you run the script, occasionally you hit the 5-sec cooldown but the script just keeps moving, thinking everything is okay.
I just used the tool last week and it deleted 3500 comments successfully. A couple of times it encountered errors, but it stopped and asked what I wanted to do before proceeding.