I came across today one of my own comments on Reddit with a search on duckduckgo. It was still intact. The problem is I used shreddit to randomise and delete the entire contents of my account. My account comments and posts all show empty on my account pages on reddit so there should be nothing.
I did a site:reddit.com search using my username and found ~50 comments that Reddit has undeleted but also hide from my own account. I could still edit and delete them. Its curious that they donât appear on my accounts content on Reddit and yet a search engine can find them and they are still served by Reddit. Ex Reddit users who deleted their account contents should be aware this is happening and report it as a GDPR breach to their respective agencies if they are in the EU if they too find this has occurred.
I manually deleted everything reddit chose to show in my profile over the course of a week. I only stopped once absolutely NO comments or posts were shown in ânewâ reddit, old.reddit, and all types of sorting (old,new,top,hot,controversial). Waited an additional day and then checked again, just to make sure I really got everything. There simply was nothing left in my profile anymore.
Afterwards(!) I used âshredditâ and it found nearly a thousand effing more things to delete (981 comments to be precise). Ran it twice, and the second go didnât find any more comments or posts.
My account is deleted now, and I can STILL find comments that are definitely mine but no longer attributed to my account (it says [deleted] where the username originally was) but since the account no longer exists, I can not edit/delete them again.
There is definitely something fishy with that site.
I understood that you cannot view, edit, or delete posts and comments from communities that are set to private. So if you run shreddit and a community later becomes public again, your posts can resurface.
Itâs not fishy (at least not intentionally so). Itâs a limitation of their database. It can only show 1000 comments. So it wonât find your very old posts when you sort by them.
So theyâre not restoring comments. Itâs just very difficult to find your old comments to actually delete them.
I am talking about comments that I manually deleted tho. I saved certain comments first before deleting so I know that theyâre the same ones that I manually nuked.
The answer to that post is mine, and I saved that comment because I wanted to use it for a guide later. It was definitely DELETED the day I closed my account, and it is the 1:1 same text as the saved comment, so I defo didnât just confuse it with a different / similar comment.
Please ELI5 to me how it is âjust a limitation of their databaseâ that this comment exists, even tho it did originally pop up in the comment list AND was deleted.
PS: this is just one example of many many others - a whole lot of my longer in-depth comments are simply back again. And that sub was no longer set to âprivateâ during that time.
