Google is definitely rigged in certain ways, but this looks like a bug, which you'd realize if you knew how modern web apps work. The way modern web applications work is that frontend updates are made optimistically in real time (for speed) and simultaneously hit an API in the background and rely on that as the source of the current application state which takes maybe 0.25 to a few seconds on average.
What it looks like is the user submitted a comment and the frontend added it to the comment list. In the background, it hits the API to submit the comment and the frontend returned a new list of comments for that view. That's where the error occurred: they probably mixed up the comment IDs somewhere in the code. When the new application state was returned, the view layer rendered that out. That's what you're seeing, they're not rewriting your comments in a quarter of a second.
People made posts here a few months back about "twitter unchecked all of my favorites right in front of my eyes" and it was the same issue.
Trust me, if Google wanted to alter comments, they could do so in a way that wouldn't be detectable to you.
Of course: though it would be smartest to use a different unassociated device on a different IP address to be sure.
Another thing to do is to look in Web Inspector and see what raw data the API returned: it's possible to perhaps use that to figure out where in the chain there's a bug (though I bet if there was a bug that Google would have fixed it fairly quickly)
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cdglow ago
Google is definitely rigged in certain ways, but this looks like a bug, which you'd realize if you knew how modern web apps work. The way modern web applications work is that frontend updates are made optimistically in real time (for speed) and simultaneously hit an API in the background and rely on that as the source of the current application state which takes maybe 0.25 to a few seconds on average.
What it looks like is the user submitted a comment and the frontend added it to the comment list. In the background, it hits the API to submit the comment and the frontend returned a new list of comments for that view. That's where the error occurred: they probably mixed up the comment IDs somewhere in the code. When the new application state was returned, the view layer rendered that out. That's what you're seeing, they're not rewriting your comments in a quarter of a second.
People made posts here a few months back about "twitter unchecked all of my favorites right in front of my eyes" and it was the same issue.
Trust me, if Google wanted to alter comments, they could do so in a way that wouldn't be detectable to you.
WORF_MOTORBOATS_TROI ago
Wouldn't we be able to easily check that by going back to look at the comments using a different device?
cdglow ago
Of course: though it would be smartest to use a different unassociated device on a different IP address to be sure.
Another thing to do is to look in Web Inspector and see what raw data the API returned: it's possible to perhaps use that to figure out where in the chain there's a bug (though I bet if there was a bug that Google would have fixed it fairly quickly)
TwitterBannedIt ago
^this.
That actually is the solution to everything (lul).
Network tab tells all, both directions.