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?
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.
Yes, the important point here is editing all posts, let them sit a day so they are snapshot and then delete. They will typically only restore from the last snapshot.
Of my 2000+ deleted comments only a handful were restored by them. I just re-edited them with more spez scorn.
Even if they do, they wouldn’t know which ones to restore.
OP maybe your data is still there, but it’s not visible to anyone but reddit, which is the important part imo