574
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
574 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
59144 readers
2651 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
When you edit your comment all you’re doing is adding a “new” comment, the old comment is flagged to not show and the new comment shows in its place.
This achieves nothing.
Reddit was open source until relatively recently. According to the source code, editing comments does overwrite your data. Or at least it used to.
Keeping old data is expensive, and usually a waste of money.
It’s not a waste of money if you can sell it.
And text comments is rarely more than 1kb. They can provably fit more than 1 billion comments in a 1TB drive if they want, which is peanuts in terms of storage.
Relatively recently being 6 years ago.
At the same time, text, which Reddit was exclusively, for a good long time, compresses really well. The entirety of Wikipedia goes from 10 TB to 100 GB when compressed, and if it's just the article text alone, 22 GB.
That's a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of data that they would have had to deal with when they started deciding to take on video and image hosting.
Text data is like practically 0 compared to all the rest of the data (i.e. images for instance).
I assure you that’s not the case anymore
Keeping old comments data is small and relatively cheap to store. I'm sure they've kept backups. Probably even yearly ones for the past 5 years. Storage for text really doesn't take up much room. There's over 4,500,000,000 words in the entirety of Wikipedia. You can download it all right now if you'd like. An offline copy of wiki is currently about 95GB. Probably half the size of your last CoD game update.