I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence, but I raised a case with the ICO in the UK, and today they got back to me asking for all my communication with Reddit. Also today - after a month of silence - Reddit also emailed me with this
If you’re in the UK and had been affected by posts being restored, I’d recommend contacting the ICO. It takes less than 5 minutes
Fwiw this is not necessarily a new problem. As a mod I’ve seen it before, if you go through hitting “remove” on a whole bunch of comments in a row often some of them will be visible again when you refresh the page. Something similar could be what’s happened here. Reddit’s backend has never been very good.
I can understand seeing them after a refresh, but visiting my user profile not logged in from Tor and showing everything deleted then having it all come back 2-3 weeks later is a little shady. I just checked my account again after my 3rd powerdeletesuite run since the shutdowns and I had one single comment restored (despite shredding before delete but maybe that failed)
Yeah that’s quite a bit more sus. If it’s showing up as disappeared after a couple of minutes, it should stay removed.
Shit database replication would also do it.
They probably never even tested for mass deletion events and probably still don’t.
While I am unsure if it’s malicious I would not be terrible surprised to find out it’s just a case of bad assumption in system design or bad code.
I wouldn’t be surprised. This is the kind of problem that would usually only affect a small number of users. They should probably have done something about it before it had a chance to come back and bite them…