What is with all the [deleted] comments?

[gajus]

First of all: love pushshift.io 💕. Saved me so much time.

There are quite a few [deleted] author/ body comments.

What's up with those?

If there is only couple of seconds delay between when content is posted and pushshift.io stream reporting it, then how do all of these [deleted] comments exist?

Are these authors deleting comments themselves/ automatic moderation/ ... ?

[pauldraper]

I believe those are comments from "shadowbanned" users.

For example right now, https://www.reddit.com/r/wattpadbooks/comments/bhn5kc/vampire_genre_based_book/ has a total of "1 comment", but there are no actual comments visible.

Reddit admins can shadowban for spam or maybe other reasons.

[pushshift]

There is a "queue" that the automoderator works on before they are made publicly available via the Reddit API. Sometimes if the automoderator gets backed up, things might get exposed via the API, but generally the flow is user action -> queue -> automoderator works on queue -> object is available via the Reddit API.

An example of this is /r/askscience -- all submissions appear to be removed via the API until an action is taken on that post. So generally if you use Pushshift to pull real-time data from a subreddit like /r/askscience, it will appear it was removed because it is awaiting a mod action for approval.

Hope that makes sense.