Comment on Reddit started doing what they always wanted to do, sell user content to AI.
pixxelkick@lemmy.world 4 months agoThey definitely do, it’s common for such systems to never actually delete anything because storage is cheap.
It likely just is flagged deleted=true
and the searches just return WHERE [post].Deleted = False
on queries on the backend.
So it looks deleted to the consumer, but it’s all saved and squirreled away on the backend.
It’s good to keep all this shit for both legal reasons (if someone posts illegal stuff then deletes it, you still can give it to the feds), as well as auditing (mods can’t just delete stuff to cover it up, the original still exists and admins can see it)
archomrade@midwest.social 4 months ago
This is how system storage works generally: the disk “de-lists” the data in the block registry, so it appears there is no data in that block.
Obviously a server back end it keeping it for redundancy and not efficiency, but procedurally it’s the same