Comment by just_another_person@lemmy.world on Reddit says it's made $203M so far licensing its data

well, not mine. i used a script to replace all of my comments with gibberish before i deleted them and then my account. if they went back and restored my comments, then all they’ll get is comments full of gibberish, especially since i overwrote them 3 times before deleting them, just in case they tried to roll back to the previous version.

have fun with that!

I like your style, but honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if they keep every single version.

Here’s the thing: Nothing in Reddit’s history indicates that they are that competent.

I put my account’s comment through a mass-delete app around the time of the big protest, and a couple weeks later I found every single one was restored.

People can be incompetent for years and then suddenly start figuring things out.

i bet they do now, but i’ve checked back now and then, and all of my comments and posts are most assuredly gone.

edit: i’ve gone back to check some old haunts, place i know i’ve commented, and i did some seaching with google using my old usernames, as google uses its cache to match to the posts\comments, even though they’re not there any more.

i see old posts that are graveyards of deleted comments, some with simply deleted accounts, and many others where both the account and comment are deleted. i don’t see any gibberish comments. the ones i know are mine (because replies quote the comment above, which i recognize as mine), are all just deleted in their entirety, so it seems they didn’t do comment versioning, at least not past the first edit. i see no posts under any former username of mine.

the efforts to scrub my content from reddit last May appears to have worked. sadly, since the API lockdown, those tools no longer work.

Just because it shows [deleted] doesn’t mean the data were deleted. That is most likely just a flag for the comment.

They most likely keep every save since they decided to do the sell the data thing. Why would google pay them for what google could easily scrape other than having the full history?

As I mentioned, I overwrote the comments several times before deleting them. I seriously doubt that they saved multiple versions of the comments. I know that, towards the end of May, they made some backend changes to try to circumvent users attempt to delete their accounts, but I did all of this to my account a couple of weeks before that.

That literally means nothing at all on their server backup from the year before. You could delete and rewrite your comments a thousand times and it would do you the same amount as good as one time, and barely any better than doing it no times at all. Your entire 15 year comment history would take up probably 10MB of space at best. They’ll have several back ups taken over the last decade. They aren’t just going to be selling off the live servers info.

No, I think the other commenter is right. They definitely store every version of every comment on their backend. Just because it’s not displayed publicly doesn’t mean they don’t have the data.

I imagine that they would. Text is trivially easy to store, and storing multiple versions would let them catch users who might edit away rule breaking they posted to avoid bans, but it’s probably one of those internal tools.

From a data handling perspective, it’d be more efficient to handle edits by having a common id field, and an additional version/edit counter that increments --adding the edit like its a normal post-- , than it would be to edit data the usual way, since you don’t have to go back over the whole database to find the comment, or worry about it falling out of sync if one copy of the database has the edit, and the other has the original.

You’d just need to fetch the comment by id, and the database entry with the highest version count to display it, which would be fairly easy to do.

if you request your data from them under CCPA, and it shows the edited comments as gibberish, you’re good. I did the same thing but I left the comments to simmer for a long time like months.

Reddit used to be open source and the source is still on github as a read only archive.

AFAIK back then edit history was only kept briefly. Enough to roll back an accidental edit (if you have admin privileges anyway) but not far enough back to view old versions of posts.

Of course, they would have backups, and maybe the code has changed, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it hasn’t changed and those backups are impractical (slow/expensive) to access.

Keeping old revisions is a common practice but it’s also expensive and in reddit’s case totally unnecessary.

you can request your reddit data, and they provide every comment along with edits as far as I remember, it was uncomfortable but i’d never posted anything regrettable at least

imagine getting your hands on u/spez’s reddit data

Yeah…all that comment data isn’t really that large. They’ll have backups captured for likely several years back. All you can view is the info on the current live servers. You might have kept them from getting like 3 months worth of your comments at best.

I did the same, but we’re both fools if we think reddit didn’t keep every character we typed (yet alone submitted) in a private, proprietary database.

We weren’t paid for our data. We were given access to a website free of charge. The consent we gave was supposed to be for the operation of the website, not for training AI.

They should fucking pay us.

LOL. I did the same. And I confirmed many months later that the comments were not restored.

Now I hear that Google wants to train their AI on reddit content. Haha. Good luck with that, Lorem Ipsum! 😁

If you actually replaced with “Lorem ipsum” texts, it would probably be easy to filter the garbage from the dataset.

Also, they probably have copies of the comments before the edits that are just not presented in the frontend.

I didn’t. At first, it was basically a long ass message about deleting my comment out of protest. Then a few subreddit mods banned me, so I changed them to “almost makes sense” word salad 😂

I ran the script, changing the text each time, several times for good measure.

They still haven’t reverted it, and it’s been more than just a few months now.

Me too. Feelin’ mighty fine about that decision now. Long Live Lemmy

Correct, our data.

Spez

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Reddit says it's made $203M so far licensing its data(techcrunch.com)

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