• malloc@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Given that reddit is making it difficult for users to delete posts and comments [1]. I wonder if it will make it more difficult for them if instead of deleting the comments and posts, but we flood the posts and comments with garbage edits.

    Something like this could be easily scripted out. Could use browser automation if you don’t want to use the reddit api.

    If they truly have the ability to roll back deleted AND edits on a post and comment level, then flooding the change history log with garbage edits will cause them to hemorrhage money in terms of cold storage (ie, Amazon S3) and database size.

    They can’t be infinitely storing all of the edit history. So at some point they have to purge the oldest commits at which point makes it equivalent to deletion of original post, except now they are keeping garbage and paying to keep that garbage stored. Have fun running your LLM on that junk.

    Something like this:

    • original comment: “Some thoughtful comment here”
    • 1st edit: <edited to hit max comment length with garbage content, maybe “lorem ipsom” placeholder stuff>
    • 2nd edit: <edit one character in string>
    • 3rd edit: <edit another character in string>
    • nth edit: …

    Again, this assumes they are even keeping the edit history. Would be nice if we can get insider information from a reddit backend engineer to confirm.

    [1] https://lemmy.world/post/647059