Deleting a post is simply marking a piece of text so nobody sees it, but I think the text is still stored in their servers.
Furthermore, a large company like reddit, must backup regularly, meaning there must be several copies of my posts in several SSDs. If the backup once a day… some of my posts are 5 years old.
Companies exist to make money. I suspect they just marked my posts not to be readable by anyone, except staff and they can still monetize them.
Am I wearing a tinfoil hat way too often?
I think it’s enough to stop engaging with Reddit, there’s not much point in worrying about what you’ve already posted there imo.
Yeah, looking up how to do something on an 8 year old post and finding deleted comments is getting really old. It’s even worse now that Google’s search engine has gone down in a bullshit flaming AI crapshoot and adding reddit to your search is the only way to find a human answer anymore.
They monetize your posts by serving ads next to them. If no one can see the content, it’s not monetized. The other thing is using them to train language models and such. That’s a little more abstract, and hard to account for.
Also, not sure if this is still a good way to do things, but there are tools to overwrite all your comments with useless text before deleting it. The thinking is that reddit and any third party websites aren’t going to bother storing multiple versions of a deleted comment.
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PowerDeleteSuite was a good tool for overwriting your comments and deleting them. Now you need a rate-limited fork of it. It still works, but I don’t have the link handy.
Edit all of your comments and posts to some useless text, then delete them.
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