[rodw]

> Isn't the fact that they're able to restore deleted comments from that far back itself an indication of malice, or at least irresponsibility?

Meh. You're not exactly wrong but I think it's pretty common for user-generated content sites to follow a logical delete strategy. It holds open the door to being able to restore data deleted by end-user error, and within the bounds of their data retention policy keeps data around that may be useful for internal analysis.

Actually come to think of it seems plausible that they only have ~3 years of logically deleted data, having purged deleted records older than that.

It's also plausible they had all the is-logically-deleted information in some redis datastore that wasn't being reliably persisted to disk and the process had to be restarted for the first time 3 years.

I'm actually leaving my restored comments untouched for now out of curiosity about what they'll do about it now that the issue is known. I think that will probably answer the question about whether this was accidental or intentional.