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.

You are assuming edits overwrite existing content

i have seen no evidence to suggest otherwise, but thanks for sharing your theories

In fact, it is extremely likely they do this

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.