The true issue here is that reddit by design NEVER deletes anything. Ever. It's only levels of visibility. In practice the 4 obvious levels are:
* Unregistered users: Public, non-age restricted content(whether that be as a subreddit requirement or post-specific thing).
* Registered users: same as above, minus content that was published by individual users and deleted afterwards, content removed by moderators or in more extreme cases reddit themselves(last one is a bit of a special case, I'll come to that part later).
* Moderators: they see everything that was posted by other users and subsequently removed by the moderators for whatever reason. If a user deletes their contribution personally, then moderators won't see it either.
* Content removed by reddit: visible by reddit employees, appears as "Removed by Reddit" to anyone else. In this particular instance, reddit may remove contents that was removed by moderators already.
I'm a moderator of 2 large subs and a few smaller ones. Luckily I developed a backup system, which effectively backs up everything that was ever published on the sub(plus a ton of other stuff, including image recognition, lightweight nlp and tracking what reddit removes. Without saying which subreddit I'm talking about, I can tell you that a lot more is happening in large communities(20+k people online at any given time) than you might think.
So in the case mentioned here, it's simply a case of some "status" field in some database that was flicked. Which is kind of concerning, given the amount of contents me and the other mods have removed. Truth be told, the moderation tools that reddit provide are rat shit. I ended up developing a ton of custom ones(completely nuking a specific user's history, chained comments or entire comment sections. Things, which reddit has been promosing for years but never delivered. Funny enough, all of those are a question of 30 lines of code in total, if we are talking about a single-script type of thing. But it is worrying that stuff like this happened. Just earlier today I used one of those scripts to nuke 300+ comments in a post. I also keep a backup of the mod log so in theory I could undo the damage. Question is, how long would that take. We are talking about 500k action we've collectively taken over the past year. Some through a script, plenty manually however.
Despite all the drama lately, I don't think that's a deliberate retaliation from reddit due to the blackout, more likely a "woops" moment that happened at a very inconvenient time for reddit.
* Unregistered users: Public, non-age restricted content(whether that be as a subreddit requirement or post-specific thing).
* Registered users: same as above, minus content that was published by individual users and deleted afterwards, content removed by moderators or in more extreme cases reddit themselves(last one is a bit of a special case, I'll come to that part later).
* Moderators: they see everything that was posted by other users and subsequently removed by the moderators for whatever reason. If a user deletes their contribution personally, then moderators won't see it either.
* Content removed by reddit: visible by reddit employees, appears as "Removed by Reddit" to anyone else. In this particular instance, reddit may remove contents that was removed by moderators already.
I'm a moderator of 2 large subs and a few smaller ones. Luckily I developed a backup system, which effectively backs up everything that was ever published on the sub(plus a ton of other stuff, including image recognition, lightweight nlp and tracking what reddit removes. Without saying which subreddit I'm talking about, I can tell you that a lot more is happening in large communities(20+k people online at any given time) than you might think.
So in the case mentioned here, it's simply a case of some "status" field in some database that was flicked. Which is kind of concerning, given the amount of contents me and the other mods have removed. Truth be told, the moderation tools that reddit provide are rat shit. I ended up developing a ton of custom ones(completely nuking a specific user's history, chained comments or entire comment sections. Things, which reddit has been promosing for years but never delivered. Funny enough, all of those are a question of 30 lines of code in total, if we are talking about a single-script type of thing. But it is worrying that stuff like this happened. Just earlier today I used one of those scripts to nuke 300+ comments in a post. I also keep a backup of the mod log so in theory I could undo the damage. Question is, how long would that take. We are talking about 500k action we've collectively taken over the past year. Some through a script, plenty manually however.
Despite all the drama lately, I don't think that's a deliberate retaliation from reddit due to the blackout, more likely a "woops" moment that happened at a very inconvenient time for reddit.