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.
SearXNG is free. Don’t waste your time with Kagi.
Except most of Reddit of bots now too lol
Would have been better to run the script that edits posts, just to fuck with the data.
China and Facebook would probably buy it for their own profile databases on every person on the planet.
Chances of that though are unlikely. Both are more worried about short term things. For China spotting dissent and trends on the fly. For Facebook selling ads more accurately.
Did you delete them outright or modify the text and then delete it? That is the tinfoil hat way! If you lived in Europe you could request your data to be deleted. You can also request your data and they are supposed to comply at some point. If you did that you could see what they have.
The rabbit hole will drive you a little bonkers so maybe don’t overthink it for now and take a look at https://www.reveddit.com/ and archive.org to see if your username pops up.
Just an FYI but if you posted anything prior to March 2023, the Pushshift project archived it. Even if you requested Reddit itself to remove all of your data, everything will exist in that archive forever.
This post is pure gold. If your other posts are as heavy as this one Reddit is sitting on a small fortune.
I’m not sure about what the backup schedule and stuff has to do with it, but I don’t think it helps much:
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deleted posts don’t come up in Google searches after a while
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deleted comments might be counted in the comment count on a post someone navigates to (not sure), so at most the post will initially appear to have more content which might get someone to click
Marginal change at best, it’s probably not worth your time thinking about it
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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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“In several SSDs”
Backups are usually done to slower HDDs (online backups) and then to tape archives (offline).
They’ve got it forever.
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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Companies exist to make money.
Therfor, it isn’t a great problem, tbh.
The gouverment my spyy on us just to have as much information as possible to get profiles but companies need you as possible customer. If you never use the side againt, they would not find any use of the data and to store it makes costs. So, they probable delete them after a certain time.
