this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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i bet they do now, but i've checked back now and then, and all of my comments and posts are most assuredly gone.
edit: i've gone back to check some old haunts, place i know i've commented, and i did some seaching with google using my old usernames, as google uses its cache to match to the posts\comments, even though they're not there any more.
i see old posts that are graveyards of deleted comments, some with simply deleted accounts, and many others where both the account and comment are deleted. i don't see any gibberish comments. the ones i know are mine (because replies quote the comment above, which i recognize as mine), are all just deleted in their entirety, so it seems they didn't do comment versioning, at least not past the first edit. i see no posts under any former username of mine.
the efforts to scrub my content from reddit last May appears to have worked. sadly, since the API lockdown, those tools no longer work.
Just because it shows [deleted] doesn't mean the data were deleted. That is most likely just a flag for the comment.
They most likely keep every save since they decided to do the sell the data thing. Why would google pay them for what google could easily scrape other than having the full history?
As I mentioned, I overwrote the comments several times before deleting them. I seriously doubt that they saved multiple versions of the comments. I know that, towards the end of May, they made some backend changes to try to circumvent users attempt to delete their accounts, but I did all of this to my account a couple of weeks before that.
That literally means nothing at all on their server backup from the year before. You could delete and rewrite your comments a thousand times and it would do you the same amount as good as one time, and barely any better than doing it no times at all. Your entire 15 year comment history would take up probably 10MB of space at best. They'll have several back ups taken over the last decade. They aren't just going to be selling off the live servers info.