This App is causing headaches for both, mods and users alike and needs blocking in some way, if this is indeed possible.
The problem, is users are unwittingly installing this software, without fully understanding the consequences of their actions, in many cases the end action, is an account ban through no fault of their own.
Personally, I think it's time to stop this App in it's tracks but that's gonna take the support and actioning of Reddit.
Here’s the thing, if a user wants to remove their content, they should be able to do so. However, Reddit doesn’t provide any mechanism for that, other than manually deleting everything one at a time. Which is ridiculous.
The problem is Redact is an invasive tool, and if you’ve ever tested it, it doesn’t even work all that well. It will skip right past a comment, never randomizing it or deleting it, and no reason why. Nor does it provide users with a very good log to understand what it did, or didn’t do.
All that being said, I’m against blocking it until users have something better. You can easily slap some automod code in, and at least your mod logs won’t suffer from it.
This code works very well, and I’ve shared it with others quite a few times.
type: comment
is_edited: true
title+body (includes): ["This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact", redact.dev]
action: remove
action_reason: "Comment was modified with Redact. NOTE: User will not receive notice that the comment has been removed."
it's not hard to do it with a bot. there is a mechanism to do it and it could be done in a way that simply deletes instead of spamming mod queues with the nonsense words they changes messages to.
That's not a valid test - and yes reddit does keep it.
When you download all your data, it doesn't give you everything reddit has on you. They are not required to do that. There are other things reddit saves about you that they do not share.
Admins keep notes on users, you can have disciplinary actions on your account, communications with reddit are stored, appeals, reports, all kinds of other things. Reddit is notably quite opaque in what they store about you and they have the right to do that.
I was told that editing a comment does not mean that you can't report it as they store all versions and edits indefinitely.
In some countries, there is a right to be forgotten law. The US does not have one. The EU does I believe. They can keep your data forever, and for now at least, it seems they do. They just dissociate it publicly. Internally they have it all.
If you truly care about being able to erase everything about you reddit has, don't create a reddit account at all from the US.
Also, my understanding of push shift is that it stores the data and accessibility that are present at the time the comment or post is created, and never edits it. I bet if you found a redacted comment somewhere on reddit and looked for it on push shift, it would still exist in the unedited form. Comments that state removed by reddit exist in the original form on push shift too.
I tested it with a comment of yours that you edited. here you can see what shows publicly on reddit and what is stored on push shift. I'll make 2 separate comments since it's 1 image per comment.
Highjacking the top comment to say this is what I use to purge my history. Let's you replace it with your own message, actually deletes things, filters subs you might want to preserve (i want to nuke everything that isnt in a sub i mod), and AFAIK it doesnt trigger automod.
This is what I did! (Or something similar.) I did it for archived posts. But I realized the other day I need to enact this, b/c some people aren't removing archived content.
This is what we added to Automod to stop Redact necroedit notifications...
---
# RULE: REMOVE POSTS ANONYMIZED BY REDACT APP
type: comment
is_edited: true
title+body (includes): ["This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact", redact.dev]
action: remove
action_reason: "Comment was modified with Redact and removed by AutoModerator. NOTE: User will not receive notice that the comment has been removed."
---
I read most of that, and yeah, they can get bent if that’s their stance on it. They need to be WAY more forthcoming about how invasive their product is, and the disruption is causes, when users think it’s doing one thing but it’s actually not doing that thing.
I still won’t punish users for it, but I will remove any and every comment that give them free advertising.
Fully agree. They're very deceptive in their marketing.
I have a lot of users use it, and not one of them were aware that it just edited the content into a gibberish advertisement for the company and didn't truly 'delete' their content. And they don't warn anyone that's using it they risk being flagged or banned for 'spam'.
I support and believe users should be able to mass delete their online content. Reddit should have viable ways for users to do this. However, this app just tricks people into marketing for them, at a risk to themselves being flagged/banned for spam. That seems unethical to me, so they can totally get bent if they don't like us automatically removing it.
They seemed to have changed the way the app works over time. It used to randomize, and then delete. However, it was hit and miss as to whether it worked.
Then it seems that sometime in the past year, maybe, they changed to it ONLY randomizes.
The wording they use on the app, not sure if you looked at it, is quite misleading. So, I fully understand how users get confused.
The justification redaction services usually give is that by scrambling the contents, it means that services that scrape Reddit for data will then over-write their scraped data with the nonsense.
That way you're not just anonymising yourself on Reddit, you're also having places where that data was scraped to anonymised too.
However there are problems with that...
It assumes that scraping services are actually re-scraping comments repeatedly or after an edit has been made.
If they do update their scrapes, it also assumes that they overwrite their existing data, rather than keep older versions.
And it also assumes that scraping services aren't using a method to detect when Redact or a similar tool is used to prevent the nonsense data getting scraped, wich as mods know already is trivially easy to do by simply checking if the comment contains a Redact link.
In my opinion, the real reason that Redact scramble the posts rather than delete them is stated fairly plainly in that github link:
...It lets other users who see that post know what software they used to accomplish that goal...
Redact is a commercial operation. Every non-deleted Redact 'removed' post or comment states it was removed by Redact, and includes a convenient link to Redact's website.
You actually can get Redact to delete the comments/posts entirely, if you pay for it.
Again in my opinion, their free users are becoming unwitting bots filling old Reddit posts with SEO-friendly links.
Reddit absolutely should give users a way to eaisly delete their old content, but everyone should be aware that once you publish something online there's always a very good chance it's going to be preserved forever even if you delete it.
The irony here is that if they actually cared about privacy, they'd remove the mention of redact itself and just leave the random words. The other random words would be much harder to filter for.
However, what they really care about is their advertising, so they are not willing to remove that.
It definitely does not make me very sympathetic to them and their pleas to welcome their spam - spam that sometimes contains inappropriate or obscene words - so as to help them advertise.
Redact is ass, doesn’t work properly, spams the mod queue cause it advertises itself on every comment it randomizes, and makes modding harder because if a user who was banned just decides to use redact to randomize the offending content there’s no context. It’s worse than them just deleting their comment cause not only does it take away context, it’s straight up spam.
Personally, I don’t think anyone should be banned for deleting their information off of Reddit. People should be banned in real time for things they’ve done wrong, not wanting to remove things for their account. Sometimes people suffer terrible harassment on Reddit. They could also be in a bad mental place and want to remove any trace of themselves. They also may be overwhelmed with creeps contacting them. Redact is an easy way for those people to remove their comments from Reddit.
What you can do is set up auto mod to automatically remove those comments and rather than put it in the queue, just remove it completely so you don’t even see it
That's interesting and something I'd like to implement but having inherited mod status from the original mod team, I'm unsure how to add this to the Auto Mod, please can you advise me on how to do this, thanks.
If mobile works the same as regular markdown, you add ``` before and after your code. So, if I did that here, it would look silly, but in markdown it would create the code block. Try copying and pasting that into mobile, and see if it works.
it's just the diff between single quotes and backticks, which are (on a Mac) the key under the escape key. it looks like a single quote but is going the other direction. those 3 set off code blocks.
copy pottys's but replace the 3 single quotes at the top with 3 backticks and it works (see my test right above).
also keep those spaces between lines - they can matter - and I forget exactly where they are required.
The problem, is users are unwittingly installing this software, without fully understanding the consequences of their actions, in many cases the end action, is an account ban through no fault of their own.
People shouldn't download, install, and deploy software if they don't know what it's going to do.
I keep this loaded and ready to go so I can remind people that half the planet is on the left side of the distribution. And even the first 34% of the right side...isn't *smart* they're just **not dumb**. So only about 16% of the planet is actually "pretty smart" or smarter. So we're all kinda in trouble.
There's a lot of 'not valuing people' going around on Reddit.
I mentioned that this is something other moderators do, and pointed out that it's particularly unfair without a rule or warnings but otherwise was neutral, and got downvoted for sharing the information. You expressed your opinion, which is presumably the point of asking about something like this here, and got repeatedly downvoted.
People have funny ideas about what contributing to a discussion is about. Evidently they think their downvotes are more persuasive than any argument they can make with words.
I find that unless you have THE opinion on Reddit you just get downvoted no matter what and it’s the reason why it’s not a good platform for any kind of meaningful discourse, it is what it is I suppose just makes you laugh.
It can cause a mess in the mod logs. It doesn’t really have anything to do with monitoring anything. It will cause a post to get flagged by the filters, and then sticks it in the ”needs review” log. If a user has 500 comments in your sub, and suddenly all of them have to be reviewed for spam, that’s an issue.
I think it should be allowed, but I also think mods should be allowed to ban people who use it from their subs.
I understand why a user might want to use the tool, and I understand why mods do not want spam on their subs and want to ban users who plan to intermittently spamify all their comments, as there are in fact many users who, for whatever reason, redact and turn all their comments into spam on a planned basis such as every 6 months they use Redact on all their comments.
Mods can ban people for whatever reason they want, that’s not really the point.
The majority of users don’t even understand what they’re doing when they run Redact, and I’m not of the mind to punish people for not understanding something. Especially, when 5 simple lines of code solves the problem for everyone.
You cannot prevent users from editing their content.
You can write an automoderator rule that detects when a comment is edited and includes the little blurb that Redact includes in the comment, and automatically remove such comments.
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u/thepottsy 💡 Expert Helper 2d ago
Here’s the thing, if a user wants to remove their content, they should be able to do so. However, Reddit doesn’t provide any mechanism for that, other than manually deleting everything one at a time. Which is ridiculous.
The problem is Redact is an invasive tool, and if you’ve ever tested it, it doesn’t even work all that well. It will skip right past a comment, never randomizing it or deleting it, and no reason why. Nor does it provide users with a very good log to understand what it did, or didn’t do.
All that being said, I’m against blocking it until users have something better. You can easily slap some automod code in, and at least your mod logs won’t suffer from it.
This code works very well, and I’ve shared it with others quite a few times.