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’ve been meaning to ask this elsewhere but I guess I can piggyback off this post-
What tool(s) are available for deleting/removing your post history? I’ve seen mention that some didn’t delete their posts but had a bot or something replace the text in them with some text about leaving for Lemmy, and I’d like to do something like that myself.
I used Power Delete Suite but I had to modify it a bit to put in a delay of about 30-45 seconds for each comment as I was editing the text for each one prior to deleting.
Took quite a while, but in the end my account was gone. I’m sure reddit could pull stuff from it if they really wanted, but no user facing options exist - even “deleted reddit comment viewers”.
Edit: I will say that I’m unsure if this still works (or any editing tools) because of the API changes.
I haven’t kept up with anything reddit wise but I thought those tools utilized the now inaccessible APIs unless they’ve figured out how to do it without them.
I think the tool I used was doing it via a browser extension, you opened your account up and gave the extension access and it did its thing.
