Ok now you’re just being a troll. Instead of contributing meaningfully to the discussion, you picked up on three words each from the parent and myself, ignored the entirety of our respective arguments, and derailed what could have been an intelligent discussion about Aaron’s actual contributions to early Reddit and turned it into a superficial joust about some words you unilaterally proclaimed to be verboten.

Be better. Be more charitable and thoughtful. Otherwise we’re just pushing people back to Reddit.

I for one don’t see the issue with that “to be fair” statement here. The parent used it merely to announce that they were going to take the counter-point to the most likely community view, i.e., they were going to defend Reddit’s action of not naming Swartz as co-founder. They then proceeded to do so by explaining that Swartz never really played a co-founder role. The comment implied “to be fair [to whoever at Reddit made that decision] and then went on to provide supporting argumentation.

It’s quite different from the lazy use of the phrase, e.g., “to be fair, both sides suck” that you may find in political discussions without supporting arguments, for example.

Because you’re both claiming to understand the failing of reddit’s UI and claiming the same UI as a reliable indicator of all comments getting deleted. Rather, it seems some comments were likely missed because of the shitty UI. Relying on reddit’s UI for this is the specific user error to which I was referring. I hope that’s clearer.

Thanks for clarifying. I understand the failing of Reddit’s UI from reading about it in the replies here. I didn’t know about it when I first posted, so there is no contradiction there. I also had no reason then to believe that either the redact tool (which reported deleting all comments) nor the Reddit UX (which reported no comment left) were inaccurate in their reporting.

Had either displayed wording similar to that service page you linked to, I would agree with you that it would have been user error to ignore it.

Barring that, I think it’s a stretch to claim user error when an obscure technical limitation of Reddit makes its UX misleading in a non-obvious way.

I haven’t nuked my account yet and will only do so once I am certain that all my comments are permanently deleted (some were missed due to a design limitation in the way Reddit finds them). But practically speaking, I am no longer using that account, so it is functionally equivalent to having deleted it.

I have no regret so far. Deleting my trail of crumbs has assuaged my fear of doxxing (which, in all honesty, is orthogonal to the API shutdown fiasco and was worth doing selectively anyway). It has also given me back time that I would spend mindlessly doomscrolling on Reddit. I am now more deliberate in my use of social media and the Fediverse, which is an improvement in my online habits. For that I am grateful.

This is very good to know, thank you.

I had indeed read and understood the earlier comment that you linked.

I just got confused by your “user error” suggestion, because I don’t see how this qualifies as one.

First, the Reddit API is broken, because the select query sent by the deletion tool receives less than a full set (as if there was an implied LIMIT clause on the server side). This leads the deletion tool to erroneously announce it has processed all comments.

Two, the Reddit UX is broken, because the profile’s Comments page incorrectly returns an empty set due to a silent design limitation (as described in the linked comment).

There is literally no mechanism to find leftover comments through either the Reddit API or UX, because both are broken. The only workaround is to use a search engine that had indexed those leftover comments.

That’s the whole point of my original post, and I don’t see where the “user error” may come in.

I dont think getting banned will remove posts and comments from your history that haven’t been flagged as rule-breaking. All that will happen is that your banworthy comment will get deleted and you’ll lose access to your account, which is the worst outcome because then you can no longer manually delete your history.

I mean, it’s pretty straightforward. Go to reddit.com, click on your profile page, then on Comments. This will show you a list of your comments. If that list is empty, and it wasn’t prior to you deleting all your comments with an API tool like redact.dev, you can reasonably conclude that all your comments are gone. Yet it’s not the case.

I can show you a screenshot of the blank Comments page, but I’m not sure what it would add.

I miss it too - the curated experience after years of filtering out the crap and muting the nonsense, the sleek UX in Apollo, and the many friendly and familiar voices left behind who didn’t make the switch.

My advice would be - don’t give up on the Fediverse just yet. It will take a bit of time for the dust to settle and these multiple federated communities to find their voice. Like on Reddit, don’t ever browse /all - it’s just a litany of low-effort memes. Be deliberate about which communities you sub to, and browse by /sub. There’s enough quality content here to fill a feed, though perhaps not in any single community where the critical mass has not yet been reached to offer fresh content throughout the day.

That’s right, they were most likely never deleted in the first place, despite Reddit’s indication to the contrary.

I used redact.dev and confirmed on reddit.com that all my comments were deleted well before the blackouts.

I just posted a similar story and a kind soul led me to your post. My story correlates well enough with yours.

Thank you. I’m boosting your reply as I hadn’t heard of this behavior before (as I’m sure many others) and it’s the most plausible explanation for what’s going here, i.e., not malicious intent from Reddit but rather sloppy design of the profile’s comments feed and how it pulls data.

Are you still able to log in and delete each comment manually? That’s the only reliable method, unless of course Reddit goes full Satan and actively reverses deletions on purpose.

Weeks. But it’s not just Google returning obsolete results - when I follow the links, the comments are still there, on the Reddit website, under my username. I’ve clarified my post accordingly.

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.

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.

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.

That’s really all on Steve Huffman. He had years to prepare Reddit for profitability and an IPO. He was caught swimming naked when the proverbial music stopped, and he went for the low-hanging fruit (killing the costly API) with nothing but scorn for the dissenting voices.

The board should have fired him after the stealth edits debacle. This guy has no business being a CEO.

I thought perhaps you meant electric.