It’s hard to say that without knowing what their infrastructure’s like, even if we think it’s expensive. And if they built their stack with OLAP being an important part of it, I don’t see why they wouldn’t have our comment edit histories stored somewhere that’s not a backup, and maybe they just toss dated database partitions into some cheap cold storage that allows for occasional, slow reads. They’re not gonna make a backup of their entire fleet of databases for every change that happens. That would be literally insane.
Also, tracking individual edit and delete rates over time isn’t expensive at all, especially if they just keep an incremental day-by-day, maybe more or less frequent, change over time. Or, just slap a counter for edits and deletes in a cache, reset that every day, and if either one goes higher than some threshold, look into it. There are probably many ways to achieve something similar in a cheap way.
And ChatGPT is just an example. I’m sure there already are other out-of-fashion-but-totally-usable language models or heuristics that are cheap to run and easy to use. Anything that can give a decent amount of confidence is probably good enough.
At the end of the day, the actual impact of their business from the API fiasco is just on a subset of power users and tech enthusiasts, which is vanishingly small. I know many that still use Reddit, some begrudgingly, despite knowing the news pretty well. Why? Cause the contents are already there. Restoring valuable content is important for Reddit, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t want to sink some money into ensuring that they keep what makes em future money. It’s basically an investment. There are some risks, but the chances to earn em back with returns on top of the cost is high.
It’s hard to say that without knowing what their infrastructure’s like, even if we think it’s expensive. And if they built their stack with OLAP being an important part of it, I don’t see why they wouldn’t have our comment edit histories stored somewhere that’s not a backup, and maybe they just toss dated database partitions into some cheap cold storage that allows for occasional, slow reads. They’re not gonna make a backup of their entire fleet of databases for every change that happens. That would be literally insane.
Also, tracking individual edit and delete rates over time isn’t expensive at all, especially if they just keep an incremental day-by-day, maybe more or less frequent, change over time. Or, just slap a counter for edits and deletes in a cache, reset that every day, and if either one goes higher than some threshold, look into it. There are probably many ways to achieve something similar in a cheap way.
And ChatGPT is just an example. I’m sure there already are other out-of-fashion-but-totally-usable language models or heuristics that are cheap to run and easy to use. Anything that can give a decent amount of confidence is probably good enough.
At the end of the day, the actual impact of their business from the API fiasco is just on a subset of power users and tech enthusiasts, which is vanishingly small. I know many that still use Reddit, some begrudgingly, despite knowing the news pretty well. Why? Cause the contents are already there. Restoring valuable content is important for Reddit, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t want to sink some money into ensuring that they keep what makes em future money. It’s basically an investment. There are some risks, but the chances to earn em back with returns on top of the cost is high.