Does anybody knows how do I get them permanently deleted or I’m powerless against it?
that’s why I overwrote all ofmy comments with gibberish 10 times before I deleted them, so even if they un-deleted them and/or restored previous version, they’d have real trouble finding a version that wasn’t total gibberish. I just knew they’d pull this crap.
Oh that’s great 👍. What a great idea 💡. Everyone should be doing that!
Maybe they delete our comments only to us but everyone still sees them? But yeah, if you re-did your comment like 10 times and another commentor redid theirs 5 times, how would they know what is the correct set? I can only think that maybe they go with the comments that survived the longest time. Or the first comment?
Not too hard to defeat this solution though: put your comments through something like ChatGPT and if it can understand what you wrote, it’s probably good enough for em to restore it.
Maybe the answer is to write some nonsensical answer that’s understood by human readers as utter nonsense, but still recognized by LLMs as a “good comment”.
it was randomly-generated letters and numbers. it would be impossible to divine what te original comment was. I then did this, over and over 10 times, so the edit history was overwritten with blocks of randomized text.
what you suggest would just spit out more garbage, or, at best, completely fake comments.
You misunderstood my comment. Reddit probably has every version of your edits, so all they need to do is to put all your past comments through ChatGPT or something, by time in descending order. The first sensible one gets accepted. In some sense, that’s just like how a person would do it. This way, they don’t have to deal with individual approaches to obfuscating or messing with their data.
I was gonna just wait till this whole fiasco dies down, let it sit for a couple of months to a year, before going ahead and slowly remove my comments over time. It’s easy to build triggers for individual users to detect attempts at mass edit or mass deletion of comments after all, which may trigger some process in their systems. Doing it the low profile way is likely the best way to go.
the amounts of cost and resources for all of that would be profound. when they’re already complaining about profitability, I doubt they’d dumb huge amounts of additional funds into a project like that. they clearly have at least one level of backups, and I wouldn’t be shocked if they had 2 or 3 revision backups, but anything past that - let alone what you’re suggesting - would be too much to be a manageable cost.
It’s hard to say that without knowing what their infrastructure’s like, even if we think it’s expensive. And if they built their stack with OLAP being an important part of it, I don’t see why they wouldn’t have our comment edit histories stored somewhere that’s not a backup, and maybe they just toss dated database partitions into some cheap cold storage that allows for occasional, slow reads. They’re not gonna make a backup of their entire fleet of databases for every change that happens. That would be literally insane.
Also, tracking individual edit and delete rates over time isn’t expensive at all, especially if they just keep an incremental day-by-day, maybe more or less frequent, change over time. Or, just slap a counter for edits and deletes in a cache, reset that every day, and if either one goes higher than some threshold, look into it. There are probably many ways to achieve something similar in a cheap way.
And ChatGPT is just an example. I’m sure there already are other out-of-fashion-but-totally-usable language models or heuristics that are cheap to run and easy to use. Anything that can give a decent amount of confidence is probably good enough.
At the end of the day, the actual impact of their business from the API fiasco is just on a subset of power users and tech enthusiasts, which is vanishingly small. I know many that still use Reddit, some begrudgingly, despite knowing the news pretty well. Why? Cause the contents are already there. Restoring valuable content is important for Reddit, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t want to sink some money into ensuring that they keep what makes em future money. It’s basically an investment. There are some risks, but the chances to earn em back with returns on top of the cost is high.
Reddit needs attention, that’s why they became like TikTok. Reddit needs content, that’s why they restored content.
The spice must flow
I know I’m kinda late here, but you should know that you can still take your images off Imgur. Imgur is still totally independent of Reddit, and Reddit can’t restore what you remove from a third party image hosting site.
That won’t solve everything, but it will completely rob this particular post of its value to Reddit. (Excellent CGI work, btw.)
These are the two I saw linked in the post and its comments, but if you log into Imgur you can unlink everything you ever posted from there to Reddit:
Thank you, I will delete them from imgur. I was more focused on my frustration with reddit than on a solution.
I definitely know the feeling, lol. For me there was a surprising amount of emotion involved with the whole thing, knowing I was definitely leaving (because in every intangible way I was already gone) and then doing the practical stuff to make it happen. Definitely not a straight-line progression out for me: I deleted some things, then others, hemmed and hawwed a lot along the way. You put a lot of effort into your art; it shows. I put a lot of myself into my posts. It’s harder than it looks to take that decisive action and wipe them all, and then it was an unintentionally long goodbye, none of it well planned on my part. But worth the effort. Feels really good to be out.
