Something about it clicks for me

You must be a Cherry MX Blue fan

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.

What an odd title. WorldCoin never masked its biometric collection effort as “public art”. There was never any mention of art anywhere in the white paper or anything. Art has literally nothing to do with any of what WorldCoin is doing.

The concerns about WorldCoin are absolutely genuine and worthy of public discussion, but this particular title is just clickbait from an art publication trying to draw traffic about a trendy but unrelated AI and crypto topic.

Al Gore was definitely prescient in naming his documentary inconvenient.

Climate change is as much a human problem as it is a geophysical one because that psychological defense mechanism that you anecdotally describe in the face of existential gloom is universal to our species, and the cause of so much ill-placed skepticism and hostility toward climate science and its communicators. Don’t Look Up also did a good job at portraying this unfortunate human bias.

We as a species are too smart for our own good; smart enough to geoengineer our world to the point of threatening its existence, but not smart enough to address our own resistance to change and take collective action where and when it’s urgently needed.

For those who study climate change and those who try to mitigate it, there is this double burden of not only losing sleep over the magnitude of the existential threat, but also facing the moral and psychological failings of those who refuse to see reality for what it is and argue against it. It’s tiring.

In the timeless wisdom words of George Carlin,

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

If Netflix’s reporting on the matter is to be believed, then it’s an ironic outcome considering the wave of strongly-opinionated comments predicting the death of Netflix following the crackdown on password sharing. I guess convenience and habits really trump principles and posturing.

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.

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.