> Reddit suspends accounts en mass, and when they do they nuke their entire history of comments on the site.
That's not quite true, if an account is permanently suspended, the user page is unavailable for viewing, but the comments still remain in their respective threads.
It's only if an account is shadowbanned site-wide that all the comments are automatically removed too. This is intended only for spammer accounts, but can hit genuine users who are both newly created and end up being downvoted below a certain threshold.
Pushshift only blocked such data from being queried via their API. All these users' posts and comments are still in their data dumps, which now have tens of thousands of copies after being released as torrents.
>> It's equivalent to a librarian restoring some of their books that have been vandalised by a disgruntled author.
No, your analogy is idiotic.
Librarian had a sign up: Authors are allowed to vandalise their books. Then they restored it.
Every single reddit post has a "delete" link. If Reddit doesn't want people to delete their posts ... then I will go out on a limb and will suggest to ... remove the "delete" link?
The library bought those books and as such possess the physical copy. If somebody vandalizes it, that's destruction of property and bad.
Reddit never paid anybody. Reddit is made up of comments made by people, and those people can decide to delete these comments. Reddit is a for profit company looking to squeeze maximum shareholder value from the value provided by others people comments, and doesn't enjoy the same leniency that a public library would, IMHO.
That's not quite true, if an account is permanently suspended, the user page is unavailable for viewing, but the comments still remain in their respective threads.
It's only if an account is shadowbanned site-wide that all the comments are automatically removed too. This is intended only for spammer accounts, but can hit genuine users who are both newly created and end up being downvoted below a certain threshold.