Isn't the fact that they're able to restore deleted comments from that far back itself an indication of malice, or at least irresponsibility? I could understand if it was comments from the past month, but after 3 years I'd expect the only remnant to be on very old backups if at all. The fact that they're visible again adds a lot of weight to the common suspicion that they're just setting a delete bit and keeping them in the live database
I do seem to recall that their database schema is mostly a big unstructured key-value table, so it's possible that this is part of the explanation - and they've never cleaned up any garbage/orphans in at least 3 years?
I do seem to recall that their database schema is mostly a big unstructured key-value table, so it's possible that this is part of the explanation - and they've never cleaned up any garbage/orphans in at least 3 years?