I don’t think they did. Unless you have evidence otherwise, I think this is a rumour which comes from a misunderstanding of how deletion tools worked.
Until recently, the api only provided access to 1000 posts per feed, i.e. 1000 most recent comments in your /comments/new feed; 1000 “top” submissions, etc. So if you try to mass delete “everything”, you really only delete the 1k posts from each feed, which can leave a lot of your posts/comments unfindable if they’ve falled off the bottom of all feeds. So if you run a mass deletion, your profile feeds will look empty, via the UI and the API, but you haven’t necessarily deleted everything.
This has been a commonly-complained-about limitation of the API for 15 years. “How am I supposed to find all of my comments if they’re not in the 1000 top/new/hot/controversial feeds?” Their answer has always been, “sorry, you can’t.”. So people would run a “mass deletion” tool, think they’d deleted everything, then later find a comment that wasn’t deleted and they’d get all conspiratorial and claim reddit is “secretly” undeleting stuff and “pretending stuff is deleted” by not showing it on your profile. I seriously doubt reddit cares about your comment that much, much as we love to hate them. They aren’t undeleting anything as far as I’ve ever seen.
I personally wrote a script to scrape search engine results for a “myusername site:reddit.com” search, looking for my comments to delete. After running various mass deletion tools, which claimed/seemed to have completely deleted everything (and made my profile look empty, since all feeds had been exhausted), I was then able to delete tens of thousands more comments via my search engine method which weren’t findable via the API. I… used reddit a lot.
The API has recently been updated to allow more (?) posts to be visible. Since that change, a lot of old posts appeared in some feeds on my profile, so a couple thousand more comments surfaced which even my search engine script missed, and I’ve now deleted those too. If you have that volume of posts it’s really just a case of trying to find them all however you can.
Annoying technical limitation? Yes. Conspiracy to undelete data? No.
I don’t think they did. Unless you have evidence otherwise, I think this is a rumour which comes from a misunderstanding of how deletion tools worked.
They did it to my comments. I had a like 15 year old account, hundreds of thousands of karma, and I deleted all of my comments that I could view in my profiles history and then deleted my account. Days later I found not only was my account undeleted, all of my comments that I deleted were back as if nothing ever happened - and my account was banned.
I don’t think they did. Unless you have evidence otherwise, I think this is a rumour which comes from a misunderstanding of how deletion tools worked.
Until recently, the api only provided access to 1000 posts per feed, i.e. 1000 most recent comments in your /comments/new feed; 1000 “top” submissions, etc. So if you try to mass delete “everything”, you really only delete the 1k posts from each feed, which can leave a lot of your posts/comments unfindable if they’ve falled off the bottom of all feeds. So if you run a mass deletion, your profile feeds will look empty, via the UI and the API, but you haven’t necessarily deleted everything.
This has been a commonly-complained-about limitation of the API for 15 years. “How am I supposed to find all of my comments if they’re not in the 1000 top/new/hot/controversial feeds?” Their answer has always been, “sorry, you can’t.”. So people would run a “mass deletion” tool, think they’d deleted everything, then later find a comment that wasn’t deleted and they’d get all conspiratorial and claim reddit is “secretly” undeleting stuff and “pretending stuff is deleted” by not showing it on your profile. I seriously doubt reddit cares about your comment that much, much as we love to hate them. They aren’t undeleting anything as far as I’ve ever seen.
I personally wrote a script to scrape search engine results for a “myusername site:reddit.com” search, looking for my comments to delete. After running various mass deletion tools, which claimed/seemed to have completely deleted everything (and made my profile look empty, since all feeds had been exhausted), I was then able to delete tens of thousands more comments via my search engine method which weren’t findable via the API. I… used reddit a lot.
The API has recently been updated to allow more (?) posts to be visible. Since that change, a lot of old posts appeared in some feeds on my profile, so a couple thousand more comments surfaced which even my search engine script missed, and I’ve now deleted those too. If you have that volume of posts it’s really just a case of trying to find them all however you can.
Annoying technical limitation? Yes. Conspiracy to undelete data? No.
They did it to my comments. I had a like 15 year old account, hundreds of thousands of karma, and I deleted all of my comments that I could view in my profiles history and then deleted my account. Days later I found not only was my account undeleted, all of my comments that I deleted were back as if nothing ever happened - and my account was banned.
deleted by creator