The creator of tildes.net is a former Reddit backend developer, and believes this behavior is likely due to how Reddit caching works (or doesn't work), rather than an intentional subversion of user intent:

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.

For example, when you view your comments page, Reddit uses a cached (permanent) list of which comments are in that page. There is a separate list stored for each sorting method. For example, maybe you'd have something like this with some made-up comment IDs:

Deimos's comments by new: 948, 238, 153
Deimos's comments by hot: 238, 153, 948
Deimos's comments by controversial: 153, 238, 948
If I post a new comment, it will go through each list and add the new ID in the right spot (for example, in the "new" list it always just goes at the start). If I delete a comment, it goes through every list, and removes the ID if it can find it in there.

One of the problems with this system (which is probably what's causing @phedre's issues, and affecting many other people trying to delete their whole history) is that all of these listings are capped at 1000 items. If you already have more than 1000 comments and you post a new one, the 1000th comment currently in the new list gets "pushed off the end". The comment still exists, but you won't be able to see it by looking through your comments page, because it's no longer in that listing.

Deleting comments also doesn't cause previously "pushed off" ones to get re-added. If you have 5000 comments, your listing will only include 1000 of them. If you delete 50 of the ones in the listing, your listing now has 950 comments in it. If you delete all 1000 from the listing, your comments page will appear empty, but you actually still have 4000 comments that will be visible in the comments pages they were posted in.

And this is only one aspect of it. 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.

This is one of the many legal issues Reddit now has.
Reddit is very clearly eying an ipo, but who really wants to invest in this dumpster fire.

I’m not an investor but I l personally wouldn’t invest in a website as shortsighted as Reddit.

In an industry as cutthroat as social media having a site as active as Reddit, for 18 years. Should be celebrated.

In this world, where platforms live and die in the span of single years, why would Reddit throw away a formula that has worked for nearly 20 years.

• reddit in violation of privacy laws
• spez a pedophile
• subs closing
  reddit is doomed

I wonder at what point people start taking them to court. It seems like the usual idiot tech bro excuse of thinking terms of service/use somehow override the law which is hilariously naive.

You cannot override the law in a TOS.

Like if they wrote down that they were allowed to murder you written into their TOS and proceeded to murder you they'd still go to jail for murder.

Wow, their legal department shot themselves in the foot putting that in writing. Idiots.

I submitted a CCPA request weeks ago and have yet to hear from them. They also restored tons of content I deleted.

Time for a class action yet?

What I noticed is that when restoring your comments they prioritize the ones with the most upvotes. Some I even deleted manually before the blackout reappeared too.

I find this shit to be likely illegal. I understand that we gave Reddit permission to use our content by agreeing to their terms of service, but if my comment was "A" and I edit it so that it displays "B", it is wrong for Reddit to still display "A" below my username without my authorization. They can exploit the content "A" however they want, but to show it under my username as if it were what I consented to display under my name feels like a breach to me.

I love it, it makes their intentions so obvious. Milking our content for AI training. Nobody will read our old conversations, except for AI´s

Lovely thing is that there isn't even a option to delete data via a LGPD (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados) request. Well, for what I know at least

I don't think they are actually restoring posts/comments. This whole thing is based on confusion about the blackout and many subreddits going private. Most people would think you can see all of your own posts and comments if you are logged in and go to your profile page, but if a subreddit goes private you cannot even see your own submissions in that sub.

So after the blackout ended and most subreddits went public again, people who nuked their account history are now discovering that there's still posts remaining. They think these posts were restored, but they weren't even deleted in the first place.

This is obviously a huge oversight on how Reddit handles your data and your profile page, but don't attribute to malice which is adequately explained by stupidity.

I'm honestly not surprised at all. The content you created for them is valuable and they're expecting individual users not to fight back or even notice. They have the power and thicker wallets on their side.

Louis Rossmann just made a video about this.