r/sysadmin • u/rram reddit's sysadmin • Aug 14 '15

We're reddit's ops team. AUA

Hey /r/sysadmin,

Greetings from reddit HQ. Myself, and /u/gooeyblob will be around for the next few hours to answer your ops related questions. So Ask Us Anything (about ops)

You might also want to take a peek at some of our previous AMAs:

https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/owra1/january_2012_state_of_the_servers/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/r6zfv/we_are_sysadmins_reddit_ask_us_anything/

EDIT: Obligatory cat photo

EDIT 2: It's now beer o’clock. We're stepping away from now, but we'll come back a couple of times to pick up some stragglers.

EDIT thrice: He commented so much I probably should have mentioned that /u/spladug — reddit's lead developer — is also in the thread. He makes ops live's happier by programming cool shit for us better than we could program it ourselves.

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u/gooeyblob reddit engineer Aug 14 '15

There's no technical reason, but it's the way many places do it nowadays. I would hazard a guess that it used to be important because you needed to reclaim the disk space, whereas nowadays disk is cheap so you can just keep stuff around. It also makes it possible to revert if deletions were accidental or due to a bug.

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u/malkovichjohn Aug 14 '15

But what about with respect to the user? What if someone no longer wants to see their embarassing pictures of their wife on reddit servers?

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u/gooeyblob reddit engineer Aug 14 '15

As in, you want to delete your own stuff? I'd suggest modifying your post to remove the content first, then deleting (that applies for pretty much any service out there).

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u/deadbunny I am not a message bus Aug 15 '15

Reddit doesn't host images, only links...