Reddit is broken. It's not unusual for some of your comments to get disconnected from your account profile and not show up there anymore.
They still belong to your account so you can delete them from the actual thread... Just not from your profile.
It's been this way for years... Just most people don't notice because they don't try to clear out their entire history.
@anon Reddit is known for bringing deleted comments back, without your consent. That's especially bad for people who also delete the account, because they have no control anymore (I mean even less). Pretty scummy. More people should be aware of this issue.
It looks like that's the case. I found a comment that was mine from 10 months ago. It looks as if Reddit recovered my deleted comments after I deleted my account.
At this point, I don't care. I left all that behind.
Is it possible the sub was private when you deleted the comments? This and known, since-fixed issues with PowerDeleteSuite explain nearly all of the "undeleted" comments I've looked into in-depth.
I used redact.dev and confirmed on reddit.com that all my comments were deleted well before the blackouts.
I'm not familiar with redact.dev and can't comment on its accuracy, but your comments from earlier in this thread make it seem like you only found out about how the limitations of reddit's profile page work about 11 hours ago. They probably weren't deleted to begin with.
That’s right, they were most likely never deleted in the first place, despite Reddit’s indication to the contrary.
Can you show this indication? Otherwise, this looks like a pretty clearcut case of user error.
I believe that “0 comments” you can see is limited to about 1000. There’s a list of your comments that are viewable by your profile page, and that only caches the first 1000 in any category (top, new, controversial, etc).
Interesting - do you have more details about that? I would expect the “top 1K” query to show the leftovers, which would have become the next most top/controversial/etc after the original top 1K got nuked.
Okay, I’m not sure where it originated, but here’s a link to a relevant comment. I read it in a post about deleting Reddit comments when I first started exploring the fediverse, and I’m not sure I can find it but iirc, a Reddit admin confirmed that when you check your posts, it only shows the top 1000 and comments are only pushed off this list for “new” additions, and the list is not repopulated when you delete things. Therefore, if you delete all your comments, then check the list, it will show none (or if you delete 100 comments, it will show only 900, etc). Something about how these lists are populated in Reddit’s system. It is also relevant that some of the Reddit delete programs out there use this list and so will never delete all your comments.
I will keep looking for the original post tho.
Close.
Each of Reddit's listings (top submissions, recent comments, etc.) is generated from a database index. Those indexes are limited to 1000 entries, by dropping older ones as new ones arrive, and they don't re-index for deletions.
That means that once a listing goes over 1000 items, the oldest items can no longer be found through it. The messages are still in the database somewhere, but can only be reached from some other index (different sorting order) or a search or a direct link.
So, the messages are not being deleted and then restored; they were never deleted in the first place, because the deletion tools have no way to find them.
This is why a formal data deletion request is often more effective than a tool.
Thank you for the clarification!
And I think if you get your GDPR data request from Reddit, you can get the direct links and that allows some of the comment deletion/editing tools to do their full job, but I’m not sure on the full details on that.
it's look like the google cached your comments, just waits a few days and search your username again
It’s not just the search results, it’s the actual comments, on the Reddit website itself, still visible under my username. Despite redact.dev reporting a complete wipe weeks ago, and the Reddit profile > comments page returning zero result.
I only used Google to do a sanity check weeks after the deletion, and found all those leftovers that even Reddit doesn’t report to me as being still there.
One thing I’ll mention is to try actually clicking into a post if you see it on a Google search. Web indexing systems like Google may take time before they drop old links. If it’s still there when you’ve clicked into it, there’s still more to clean up.
Yes, it’s not just just the search engine’s web crawler lagging behind in updating its Reddit index. Following the links takes me to the actual comment, on Reddit, under my username. There are dozens of them, some very old, some recent. Yet the Reddit Profile > Comments page shows I have none left. So even Reddit is not internally consistent.
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