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

  • 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

    Link it or put the email address in your post if you want people to actually do it

  • This is nothing more than reddit pushing their luck with european data laws, and finally relenting and going “OMG if your stuff wasnt deleted it was your fault, not ours, We promise it’ll totally work this time if you do it again, since we’ve turned off our desperation measures after being threatened by fines by the EU”

  • If it isn’t on purpose, then they have a bug that is restoring comments. My main account is 18 years old. Cake Day is December 2005. I deleted it all, and then I checked from multiple devices to ensure when I logged in it was all gone, and it was. Until it wasn’t. I had about 100 random comments from 2013 to 2022 come back. So I manually deleted them all… again. And then a few days later, suddenly different comments are back. I must have repeated this deletion process 4-5 times. Each time, Reddit’s interface (not a third party script or app) showed me everything was gone… until it wasn’t.

    They have some automated recovery going on whether they want to admit it or not.

    • I’d have to dig around for it, but I remember someone posting on here that reddit was restoring their comments. Then they found out that the comments they claimed reddit restored were actually in a privatized subreddit that opened back up. The script they were running to delete comments couldn’t because it didn’t have access to the comments to delete them.

      Reddit is doing a lot of shady shit but I don’t feel like this is one of them.

  • The founder of Tildes, Deimos, is a former Reddit backend engineer who believes this is a technical issue rather than a case of Reddit purposefully subverting user intentions:

    Yes, this is almost certainly a technical issue. The way reddit caches things probably isn’t the standard way you’re thinking of, like a short-term cache that expires and refreshes itself. There are multiple layers of “cached” listings and items for almost everything, and a lot of these caches are actually data that’s stored permanently and kept up to date individually.

    There are also multiple other places and ways that comments are cached—comment trees are cached (order and nesting of comments on a comments page, for all the different sorting methods), rendered HTML versions of comments are cached, API data is probably cached, and so on.

    All of these issues are probably just some combination of all of your posts being difficult to find and access due to the listing limits or certain cached representations of posts not being cleared or updated properly.

  • Mine are staying delete now after initially a few popping back up. What’s more concerning is that I requested my data a few weeks after I deleted my content. I was fully expecting to get empty files but nope ALL of my content. Dating back 10 years is still there! It’s not on my Reddit profile but they clearly kept it somewhere and can recall it whenever they want to. They do not delete the data.

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      IMMINENT DANGER OF CROSSING EVENT HORIZON
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  • When the ICO recieve a complaint they usually send an initial notification email to the data controller to advise that a case officer will be assigned in due course.

    Well, unless it relates to a serious or ongoing data breach, which tends to be triaged immediately into an active investigation.

    Initial notification letters do usually recommend trying to resolve the issue with the data subject in the interim though.

    That probably spooked Reddit into moving your case up the priority list as I imagine they’ve got a pretty substantial backlog of SAR, erasure and objection requests, considering the circumstances.

    The response window for most of those rights is 30 calendar days + extensions if applicable, so they could also have just been responding as late as allowed, accounting for aforementioned probable backlog.

    Do let us know when the ICO gets back to you though, will be fascinating to hear what they have to say.

  • You feel that? You feel it slipping?

    When you have to be this hands on with your site, manipulating it, it just means your circling the drain… slowly working your way down.

    It’s going to get exhausting putting out these little fires constantly. If only they had a group of people that would happily do the moderation for them… for free.

    But why even acknowledge it if you’re just going to lie about it. Cringe.

    • Yes, it matters hugely.

      Let’s say I do a google search for “how to frobitz a widget” and the top result (because as you say it’s in Google’s cache) points me to a post on /r/WidgetFrobitzing.

      I then click through and find that the post is deleted or has been changed to say “lol Spez sucks use Lemmy” or whatever. I’ll almost certainly close that tab and go back to google to find another link. That deprives Reddit of clicks through its ads, of time spent on site, and it also means that user is less likely to follow links to Reddit in future as they will know they’re not as useful as Google thought they were.