this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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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.
Yeah, do nothing because you wouldn't take the risk it works.
I'm still pretty happy that I can change all my comments to quips from story of the eye or jaberwalky and I would encourage everyone to do the same. Seems like a good fuck around and find out situation at least. There will likely be other llms that won't have an official relationship but will crawl reddit. The more we can jumble it up the better.