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?
Your ad blockers and “not logged in” protections aren’t actually protections. You’re still tracked on VPN and icognito. Sure now it’s not necessarily your account (although they can make good guesses), but to them it’s someone. Every month youre making it on charts of “real active user data”, helping reddit continue to look profitable as a business. They’ll likely be able to hold on a bit longer and get funding until adblockers go away.
Just visiting reddit isn’t in my list though, it doesn’t help reddit that much. Either way I don’t see why I should leave my helpful content up for others to view. I don’t get to pick to show my post only to adblock people, so OP definitely has an impact deleting them.
That’s totally fair, I deleted my comments and account as well. Definitely not interacting with the site anymore besides the occasional search for niche info