Worth pointing out that Reddit voluntarily doxxed at least one of its commenters to this plaintiff — when no court order required it to do so. This Ars writeup neglects to mention this, and leaves the implication that Reddit consistently defended its users' anonymous speech in this dispute: it did not.
- "However, Reddit decided to share information about “ben125125”, while protecting the other users. As shown above, “ben125125” responded to a thread about piracy warnings and specifically mentioned RCN. That wasn’t as obvious in the other comments and Reddit feels that disclosing their identities goes too far."
edit: The linked court order also mentions this (page 3, lines 6–7)
The way I read it, the only reason Reddit didn't hand over the information on the other users was that the comments didn't specifically mention RCN. If all the users had mentioned RCN, it seems like Reddit would have handed them everything they wanted.
Reddit is one part of the web. It's a privately controlled company. It should never have accumulated as much importance as it has. We need to design the next Reddits so they're credibly neutral parts of the internet with their own, distributed controls.
I'm looking at the sign-up process for Reddit now, and it seems to have a "Continue with Apple", "Continue with Google" and "Continue with e-mail" options. Even with Apple's e-mail obfuscation, there's still an e-mail associated with newer accounts, I think.
I requested my GDPR data and they didn't have much data on me - not even stuff such as links that I've viewed in the past. The most private information is a history of IP addresses that I've logged in with recently and the IP address I registered the account with.
It makes me wonder what hn/dang is going to do if a law enforcement agency (a country’s Govt representative) asks info on an hn user? What all HN collects and keep (email is optional, yes)?
The problem with these cases is that we only hear about the requests that get fought, but not the ones where providers silently give up all their data anyway.
There was a satellite piracy site operator where Google got a legal request to Doxx them for a lawsuit. But since Google notified the operator, they successfully got a lawyer to convince the judge to quash it for $7k under 1st amendment. The operator now thought they were in the clear.
“Tragically as I was soon to find out, none of this even mattered.”
“Nobody else even bothered to tell me. And by nobody else I mean: Paypal, eBay, 3 domain registrars, merch makers, VPN providers, and every other online service I had used with that email in the last five years.”
There's a python script[1] (long abandoned) called shreddit that allows you to delete old comments. It first wipes out the comment (edits them and saves a blank string, or whatever string you choose), then deletes it. Reddit devs have said before that their backups don't keep previous versions of comments.
Someone rewrote shreddit in Rust[2]
I'm currently rewriting it in JS for Deno. Still in early stages so not worth posting the mess that it's in now.
As soon as I'm finished with mine I'm going to setup a cron job and have it delete any reply older than a year (with some exceptions you can set either by subreddit or by comment ids). I don't have any comments about pirating so I'm not worried about that, but I also don't think comments on social media need to last forever, especially with all of the data-mining being done on them (remember Cambridge Analytica). I think something similar exists for Twitter and Facebook but I don't remember their names at the moment, maybe someone here does.
I used the rust one a few weeks ago to shred my almost 17 year comment history. I was quite sad to do so but someone started harassing me for stopping them from scamming on the sub I moderate and I realized that it was just a liability.
On another note the Reddit admins wouldn't ban them despite them literally and repeatedly scamming money from users by pretending to need food. Despite them also posting at the same time about the weed they just bought. And also harrasing me and others across the site. One of the admins kept pushing it for me but apparently the team in charge thought it was a difficult case and only sent them a warning. The whole thing was just disgusting.
I hate when people do this kind of purge on Reddit instead of just deleting the account and letting the comments stay. So much useful information has been destroyed thanks to these tools. I'm glad that dang does not allow this to happen on HN.
Feels like a wash compared to the 2000s, 2010s, or whatever. First off, I'd only be worried about my school or employer finding "bad" things, not the govt. Maybe more things are politically incorrect now, but some things are more acceptable than before, and web security is much tighter than it used to be.
For what reason? Once you can establish a firm opinion no additional value can be gained by continuing to talk about it, so any opinions you give are obviously hypothetical. Hell, they are bound to be contradictory from one comment to the next as you can't learn from only hypothetically opinionating one perspective. What can be taken from that?
Even if someone wanted to use your opinions against you, there is no way for them to figure out what your opinions are because, again, there is no value in talking about your actual opinions. They are already established. There is nothing more you are willing to learn from them, so there is no remaining communication value.
Instead of deleting the comments, could you just replace it with some gibberish that includes “RCN” and other ISP names and some piracy adjacent terms?
One thing we all know about Reddit is that their search is garbage.
reveddit and unddit (and many more) archive copies of comments very frequently. To not have your comment archived/copied, you'd need to delete it within just a couple of minutes of submitting it. Reddit itself has no real way to prevent this from happening.
I don't know if there is a way to have a forum-like reddit clone that would allow comments to be truly deleted and forgotten. Heck, I'd like it if there was infrastructure available for sites to verify GnuPG-signed comments.
Reveddit used to work pretty well, but for about the last couple of months every time I've tried to use it, it doesn't seem to show any deleted comments.
> edits them and saves a blank string, or whatever string you choose), then deletes it
My account is 15 years old and I've been manually doing this for some time now.
A few years ago, I had a comment get upvoted to the top of a popular thread in a major sub, but it had some mildly identifiable information about myself, so I deleted it.
A few months later, Reddit had this personal "year in review" page you could click through, shamelessly similar to Spotify's year in review (I have't seen it in recent years so I think they stopped doing it).
For "most popular comment" surprise, surprise, it was the comment I deleted, there in full text.
After this I started using the method described above: editing every comment I make, saving a blank string, and then deleting. I usually do this once a week. It's tedious, but at least I can reasonably assume my comments are actually deleted.
>Reddit devs have said before that their backups don't keep previous versions of comments.
Reddit (devs) are saying they don't do this, but are other companies doing this? Reddit kinda confirmed that this is at least possible by announcing they want money from parties that are using their API at scale.
I do this frequently. One thing to watch out for is that some communities will be very annoyed that your profile is periodically deleted. For example, cryptocurrency redditors love to opine based on what other subs you are active in.
Was wondering about this. You keep the karma at least, but yeah, Reddit can be exclusive. I only care about my account the rare times I need to ask a question without being auto-banned or algo-downranked.
These remind me of those status updates copywriting your facebook messages. If you put it on there, its out there whether you delete it or not, archived on a dozen plus crawlers.
Australia recently took a massive step backwards in this field, passing laws to allow courts to compel platforms to identify users who made allegedly defamatory posts. This was done under the dubious auspices of "preventing cyber bullying".
Australian defamation law is already extremely plaintiff friendly and has a significant chilling effect on free speech here, especially as against the rich and powerful who can afford to threaten lawsuits against anybody who wrongs them
I remember around the time of the first new "cyberbullying" legislation (around 2016 if I remember right), it was almost immediately used to hinder the Carlton Breweries strike by accusing organizers of bullying and cyberbullying for reporting on scab tactics. It's all very two faced.
I don't get the impression from this case that US law would behave much differently. This case involved reddit users who had nothing to do with the litigation and were not, themselves being sued. The court saw fit to protect their right to speak anonymously.
In the case of a person making a defamatory post, that person can be sued and reddit would likely be compelled to identify them to the best of its ability.
This is a small win for privacy. I actually read it on Torrentfreak yesterday, and it always puts a smile on me when there's a single positive article there because it's always depressing news about people losing their rights to privacy.
It's funny to me that the article mentions their usernames and when you look them up, they're still happily posting. I wonder if they're aware of all this
As I understood it, these individuals had at most mentioned receiving piracy warning letters from an ISP; they hadn't posted anything illegal per se on Reddit.
Readit News
https://torrentfreak.com/filmmakers-request-identities-of-re...
- "However, Reddit decided to share information about “ben125125”, while protecting the other users. As shown above, “ben125125” responded to a thread about piracy warnings and specifically mentioned RCN. That wasn’t as obvious in the other comments and Reddit feels that disclosing their identities goes too far."
edit: The linked court order also mentions this (page 3, lines 6–7)
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Has it ever happened?
There was a satellite piracy site operator where Google got a legal request to Doxx them for a lawsuit. But since Google notified the operator, they successfully got a lawyer to convince the judge to quash it for $7k under 1st amendment. The operator now thought they were in the clear.
“Tragically as I was soon to find out, none of this even mattered.”
“Nobody else even bothered to tell me. And by nobody else I mean: Paypal, eBay, 3 domain registrars, merch makers, VPN providers, and every other online service I had used with that email in the last five years.”
They were still fucked.
https://anons.ca/p/i-used-to-operate-a-dss-hacking-network/
That same fellow did a ground up compromise of a previously (officially) uncompromised system that’s still in use:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ConTalks/comments/5kw4m5/how_do_i_c...
Deleted Comment
Someone rewrote shreddit in Rust[2]
I'm currently rewriting it in JS for Deno. Still in early stages so not worth posting the mess that it's in now.
As soon as I'm finished with mine I'm going to setup a cron job and have it delete any reply older than a year (with some exceptions you can set either by subreddit or by comment ids). I don't have any comments about pirating so I'm not worried about that, but I also don't think comments on social media need to last forever, especially with all of the data-mining being done on them (remember Cambridge Analytica). I think something similar exists for Twitter and Facebook but I don't remember their names at the moment, maybe someone here does.
1. https://github.com/x89/Shreddit
2. https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit
On another note the Reddit admins wouldn't ban them despite them literally and repeatedly scamming money from users by pretending to need food. Despite them also posting at the same time about the weed they just bought. And also harrasing me and others across the site. One of the admins kept pushing it for me but apparently the team in charge thought it was a difficult case and only sent them a warning. The whole thing was just disgusting.
Removal of the comment itself matters, nobody owes you information forever.
Even if someone wanted to use your opinions against you, there is no way for them to figure out what your opinions are because, again, there is no value in talking about your actual opinions. They are already established. There is nothing more you are willing to learn from them, so there is no remaining communication value.
One thing we all know about Reddit is that their search is garbage.
I don't know if there is a way to have a forum-like reddit clone that would allow comments to be truly deleted and forgotten. Heck, I'd like it if there was infrastructure available for sites to verify GnuPG-signed comments.
I think reddit has nerfed pushshift.
My account is 15 years old and I've been manually doing this for some time now.
A few years ago, I had a comment get upvoted to the top of a popular thread in a major sub, but it had some mildly identifiable information about myself, so I deleted it.
A few months later, Reddit had this personal "year in review" page you could click through, shamelessly similar to Spotify's year in review (I have't seen it in recent years so I think they stopped doing it).
For "most popular comment" surprise, surprise, it was the comment I deleted, there in full text.
After this I started using the method described above: editing every comment I make, saving a blank string, and then deleting. I usually do this once a week. It's tedious, but at least I can reasonably assume my comments are actually deleted.
Reddit (devs) are saying they don't do this, but are other companies doing this? Reddit kinda confirmed that this is at least possible by announcing they want money from parties that are using their API at scale.
As far as I know, this was said a very long time ago and is assuredly not true anymore.
Australian defamation law is already extremely plaintiff friendly and has a significant chilling effect on free speech here, especially as against the rich and powerful who can afford to threaten lawsuits against anybody who wrongs them
In the case of a person making a defamatory post, that person can be sued and reddit would likely be compelled to identify them to the best of its ability.
https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2021A00076
Or something else?
Dead Comment
Court Protects Redditors’ Right to Anonymous Speech in Piracy Case
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35772583 (4 comments)