this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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You think that Reddit didn't already have the previous content saved?
i went looking for old comments and posts i had made after i overwrote then wiped them. They're still gone. i looked again several months later, and they were still gone.
so, unless reddit did a massive restore of everyone's comments/posts except for my 4 accounts, then i don't believe they did it at all except for a select number of top contributors who deleted their content.
You are assuming edits overwrite existing content. Instead of overwriting, they could just store the edited post as a new entry in the database with a higher version number. Then, you only show the latest version of each post to the end users while keeping the older versions available die Reddit’s own use.
In fact, it is extremely likely they do this. It is basically a necessity if you want to be able to properly moderate a site like Reddit. Otherwise you could simply post spam or unsavory content, and then overwrite it with something benign an hour or so later, before there were enough reports and a moderator would have gotten a chance to review it.
i have seen no evidence to suggest otherwise, but thanks for sharing your theories
based on what evidence? your baseless speculation?
The fact that they managed to restore overwritten posts after people started to delete their history.
this could also be explained by sketchy scripts failing to completely delete posts/comments, which i even noticed myself when checking that they had done their jobs properly. as i mentioned in another comment, i had to run the shredder scripts several times for complete overwrite/deletion. or it could be database errors failing to register edits/deletions due to extremely heavy loads at the time. it could be a lot of things.
the point is that we don't have any direct evidence of what it actually was, just a lot of circumstantial evidence and a lot of speculation. nothing definitive.
Reddit used to be open source. There is still a copy of that source available on github. It’s 7 years old so it’s probably significantly different from what they are running now. Still, it gives some insight into the design.
For example, deleted comments aren’t deleted, it just sets a deleted flag. Example code that shows this.
I haven’t dug around the code enough to figure out how editing works, it’s Python code so an unreadable mess. The database design also seems very strange. It’s like they built a database system on top of a database.
FWIW even when you properly delete something from a database table, the deleted row can be reconstructed from the audit tables. And even if that weren't the case, databases are regularly backed up to tape drives or whatever - when people delete or munge all their comments, Reddit doesn't go back into all the backups and make the same changes there. In fact, I would imagine that when they sell their shit to companies for AI training, they sell old pre-AI backups rather than a latest copy.
This is not evidence that overwritten and deleted comments could be restored to the original state. Moreover, that points to the original source code of Reddit, not the current code of Reddit.
This is also not evidence that deleted or overwritten and deleted comments have been restored. This is merely evidence that, at one time, this is how deleted comments used to be handled.
All this is evidence of is, as you put it, things are very strange in the code.
I never claimed it was evidence of how it currently works, only that it gives some insight into how Reddit was designed. I would be very surprised if they changed this aspect of the design. It makes sense to not delete comments or edits for reasons I mentioned before. Unfortunately we won’t know for sure unless Reddit confirms it.