The problem with your analogy is that swaths of Reddit’s knowledge is intentionally being overwritten by its posters. There’s no guarantee that indexed search results won’t link to a comment that just says “Fuck /u/spez”.
this is what I fear, this is probably a hot take but I hope reddit might as well make it possible to see the first iteration of a comment, genuinely useful for knowledge subreddit
Reddit has, throughout the years, said that they don’t keep a revision history of comments, only the text from the most recent comment and flags like “deleted”, “edited”, “removed by mods” etc.
Of course, they could be lying, but a lot of these things were said before the recent drama and there’s no real reason to doubt.
I suppose one could go dig up the old open-sourced code from like 2017 and see how comments and posts were stored then, and hope in the intervening years they hadn’t altered it?
I suspect it’s the truth. For a site the size of Reddit keeping a version history of comments would represent a huge expenditure of resources for essentially no purpose.
The problem with your analogy is that swaths of Reddit’s knowledge is intentionally being overwritten by its posters. There’s no guarantee that indexed search results won’t link to a comment that just says “Fuck /u/spez”.
this is what I fear, this is probably a hot take but I hope reddit might as well make it possible to see the first iteration of a comment, genuinely useful for knowledge subreddit
Reddit has, throughout the years, said that they don’t keep a revision history of comments, only the text from the most recent comment and flags like “deleted”, “edited”, “removed by mods” etc.
Of course, they could be lying, but a lot of these things were said before the recent drama and there’s no real reason to doubt.
I suppose one could go dig up the old open-sourced code from like 2017 and see how comments and posts were stored then, and hope in the intervening years they hadn’t altered it?
I suspect it’s the truth. For a site the size of Reddit keeping a version history of comments would represent a huge expenditure of resources for essentially no purpose.