this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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Don't worry, they got to keep them anyways. There is zero reason to believe that comments and posts that were "deleted" by their creator actually vanished from reddits database and didn't just have a little "show public" set to "false" instead.
At least for EU residents, they are legally obliged to show what data they have on you and let you delete it. Should show well enough if they keep data for other non-EU people. At least if it turns out deleted content is still retained.
This only goes for personal data. The content you put on reddit is public.
Are you sure? Not saying you are wrong, I've just never heard about that or thought about it in those ways. Either way, in this scenarios it's not really public any more, is it?
I am pretty sure but I wouldn't insist on being right.^^
If you choose to delete a comment, you're choosing to make it no longer public.
That's why the move is to edit all of your comments into jumbled nonsense and then delete them.
They can restore them if they want. A guy here was a kind of big user in some tech support sub. He didn't just delete...he used one of those account scrubbers to edit over all his comments a few times before nuking his account. Went back to look a few weeks later and all his answers were back.
They don't do this with everyone because most people aren't important to making a sub look useful and attractive but...yeah. They have everything we all ever said stored.
There is zero reason to believe the edit function replaces the previous post text in the database instead of just updating the posts pointer to the new text. Or maybe it would be more optimized to save the old text somewhere new. Editing posts might piss off mods, but I wouldn't be surprised if the admins don't care.
I was in the process of deleting everything, 600k karma over seven years, and my account got permabanned. I don’t think Reddit is taking too kindly to their AI info being messed with.
I've built data entity versioning/audit systems for web apps. Your comments can be undeleted, unedited, basically restored to any point in their lifetime by anyone with the appropriate access.
This has been harped on before, but the last time we were allowed to view reddit's source code, I believe it was determined that deleted comments still exist and are hidden as you suggest but edited comments are overwritten with their new contents.
This is why I used Redact to overwrite all of my comments and posts with nonsense rather than delete them.