A GDPR removal request would be quite useful for this.
Fun fact: Being banned from a community, or reddit as a whole, does not remove content that wasnt specifically removed by mods… it also doesn’t restrict you from editing and removing existing comments.
That’s silly, any Reddit moderators that actually care about deleted/edited comments can easily configure automoderator to remove the comment. There’s no need to go on a frenzy to ban every single person editing/removing old comments.
And trust me there are a lot of people editing/deleting comments right now.
I was abruptly permanently banned from a sub I have posted in for years for “ban evasion.” I wasn’t banned in any account I use in that sub. I had been inadvertently banned over 6 months ago when a mod accidentally clicked my name but was unbanned hours later when I noticed and told them.
Supposedly Reddit tagged my to the mods of the sub for ban evasion. When told the mods, they sent a ticket to admins who abruptly permanently banned me from Reddit. I appealed, showing them the messages from the mods where they apologized for banning me, and it went no where.
I really think the admins are clamping down wherever they see dissent. I imagine it has more to do with participating in spez’s AMA than anything. Anything to get rid of users that are against their changes.
Technically it’s the “edit” they ban for, not the “delete”.
The Reddit history deletion tools like to edit every comment before deleting them.
This was (is?) a privacy “best practice” based on the understanding that Reddit, Inc. can recover the text of deleted comments, but not the edit history. Just what the comment said at the time of deletion.
Quoting reddit Admin u/alienth:
We will still have access to a deleted comment. So, yes, if you’d like to ensure that something is completely removed, editing would accomplish that.
Edit: to clarify, the delete button does delete the content from public view on the site. The differentiator with the edit button is that we simply don’t store old edits. People can choose to take advantage of this by editing away the text.
In the case of deleting your comments to protest Reddit’s decision, I’m not sure editing is really helpful. It’s technically possible but very unlikely IMO that they would do something like a mass undelete just to keep your content on their site.
Yea, nothing prevents them from fetching the pre-edited content from their daily or weekly database backups. Media such as images and video might be harder to restore, but “soft” deletes on that type of storage are common, and editing a comment to remove an embed won’t delete the embed source.
Yes, it’s obviously technically possible to recover from a backup whether or not you edit. If anything, alienth was probably sharing that they can see deleted comments with no extra work required at all.
My point was that “editing before deleting” is done by these shredding tools because of the comment I quoted. It does nothing to prevent third parties from keeping their own copy, and is at worst an inconvenience to Reddit, Inc.
Therefore I’m not sure there’s any real value to it for this kind of use.
I’m pretty sure that’s not an option once they receive a GDPR Data removal request.
