Before I left Reddit, I used a plugin through the api to replace all of my comments with random gibberish and then delete them. Part of this was because (mandatory) fuck spez. But more importantly, it was to protect the anonymity of my account. After years of posting, there is likely enough personal information shared to potentially connect my Reddit habits to my online identity. I wasn’t planning on using Reddit again in the future on that account, but I left it open in order to maintain some security control over the account. I’m not really sure what to do at this point because I still consider it a security vector that’s a bit concerning. There’s no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail’s-pace reddit UI, and I have no ability to assure that my content will remain unavailable or at least not publicly displayed.
I’ve been saying this from the start:
Any basic level competency backend team has change history on comments. Crack whatever jokes you like about Reddit but they at least have “basic level competency”
It’s trivial for them to build some filters to detect mass changes and just fuckin roll them back.
If you post ANYTHING on ANY server you don’t own: it’s out there. For ever.
https://media1.tenor.com/m/OUzcn0WrxFEAAAAC/sandlot-forever.gif
I always assumed keeping a change history for comments would be cost prohibitive. I mean there are millions of comments and God knows how many changes.
But apparently it’s not a problem to keep versions of them. It doesn’t blow up the database?
If you’re storing change deltas rather than whole copies of comments, the changes for all of Reddit should be far smaller than the comments for all of Reddit.
Even storing full comments isn’t much more storage. Just consider it as another random comment from someone else. Doubt most people edit their comments so 95% of comments only have 1 copy. Hell they used (maybe still do) ignore edits in the first 5 min or something likely so people could fix typos/formatting before they start storing history separately.
So they keep the change logs. Just don’t provide them for the users’ benefit.
Sounds like what everyone else in all the spaces, does.
Each change is less costly to store than each comment, and the system processes millions of comments per day.
Storage is cheap. Losing valuable data is expensive
Yep. I just deleted my top comments and deleted the account. I wasn’t a high fluting karma whore, but it was 15 years worth. I still open reddit accidentally often, and that site is for sure going for the generic social media route. Such a shame.
I learned this like 10 years ago at least
That’s pretty fuckin cool