Today, not in a moment of necessity, but a moment of protest, I logged in to Reddit because I found tons of comments and posts listed on old Reddit when you sort by top or controversial.
I logged in to Reddit to destroy even more of my comments that were missed by Power Delete Suite.
It seems a lot of people are doing this. I’ve seen some interesting stuff here and Reddit with screenshots of deleted comments with “this solved my problem” below the deletion.
The way I look at it, ALL of my content was posted via Apollo, just like all of my comments and posts are through WefWef here. If Reddit admins felt the API shouldn’t be free, then my submissions are also not free for them to monetize and get traffic from.
I know for a fact I’ve had 100+ #1 ranked longtail SEO posts in Reddit before I deleted everything. Many of them were getting tons of traffic based on the amount of follow-up private messages received years later.
I do expect Reddit’s traffic to go down as a whole because of everyone leaving but also because of how many removed their content.
That IPO of theirs is going so well.
The reason people keep claiming posts are being “restored” by Reddit or “missed” by these tools is that those posts were deleted while many subs were private. Which means the posts/comments were hidden. When the subs came back under restricted/public, then hidden posts/comments became visible again.
On top of that, it’s been alleged that Reddit’s weird caching limits the display of your posts/comments to a surprisingly low number (I’ve seen 1000 and 5000). Meaning stuff older than that is simply not locatable other than through third-party search tools. I haven’t seen concrete proof of this, though, and I definitely saw 12yo comments being found and deleted when I ran tools on my account. It IS, however, clear that Reddit does not respect data privacy laws that require they delete all posts on a user’s request. They demand the user do it themselves while simultaneously not providing tools to do so.
EU’s GDPR officers will be very interested in Reddit’s documented inability to delete EU Reddit users’ personal data.
But is a Reddit users post and comment history personal data? If it was submitted freely and not asked for by Reddit as some kind of sign up or usage rights does it fall under GDPR.
Of course data that can be used to identify an individual comes under GDPR so in that case it’s only the users email address and name. Even the user name doesn’t identify an individual.
I am no fan of Reddit but we need to be careful thinking GDPR gives an individual the right to remove non personal content.
I’ve seen the explanation that deletion while the sub was private somehow nullified the action. However I’ve also seen anecdotal mentions of people finding things they deleted long before all this happened reappearing. Just like on a typical hard drive*, Reddit doesn’t actually delete, they just mark it as not viewable to appease the user, and they have backups of data that doesn’t get removed regardless.
I read the admin post about that and I tend to believe them on that issue. I’ve never seen a post I deleted get restored. Just rando posts come back from years ago as subreddits return.
Now I wonder how long until search engines penalize Reddit for this stuff. They still have me ranked #1 to several posts that shows it’s been removed.
There has to be a manual quality penalty coming.
I have subs where I had some posts/comments deleted and others not. (I know because I was the originator of the post, which was deleted, but some of my comments in it were not removed).
I have comments spanning and wide swath of time still floating out there.
Fun times.
My posts/comments shouldn’t have been viewable in my profile if the sub was hidden or private. I didn’t post much, thankfully, but the edit-then-delete script I used was hit or miss. When everything came back, many didn’t contain the new edited text, but had the old actual post contents.
After my stuff came back the first time I manually edited them all to say [removed] then deleted them.
I had to do it a total of 4 times. It would say it was deleted on my end and my profile page would be empty, then in 1 or 2 days they would be back (most still saying [removed], at least). All the subs had been made public again, so there’s no excuse for it.
The last time I did it, I spread it out over a week, occasionally deleting one then leaving it alone for a couple hours. The few that returned in their entirety I would edit with the [removed] text then wait again. They haven’t shown back up yet but I’m going to keep checking. We’ll see.
I also noticed the up/down ration changed every time I refreshed the page, even if it was just minutes apart. They may be having issues with so many post removals going on.
Anyway… 4 attempts to delete my posts is 3 too many.