I also wouldn’t be surprised if even the automated processes that edit your comment to be gibberish even accomplishes that. Text is, in the software world, remarkably cheap to store, even at volume. It also compresses easily, is remarkably easy to tie to version control mechanisms, and with reddit’s comment system can easily be structured as a part of an existing dialogue tree. They know people are pissed at them and are looking to nuke their comment history, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they already have multiple cold storage backups of reddit’s entire site comment history over the course of months or years. Right now, that data is the most valuable thing they have, their reputation as the “front page of the internet” be damned.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if even the automated processes that edit your comment to be gibberish even accomplishes that. Text is, in the software world, remarkably cheap to store, even at volume. It also compresses easily, is remarkably easy to tie to version control mechanisms, and with reddit’s comment system can easily be structured as a part of an existing dialogue tree. They know people are pissed at them and are looking to nuke their comment history, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they already have multiple cold storage backups of reddit’s entire site comment history over the course of months or years. Right now, that data is the most valuable thing they have, their reputation as the “front page of the internet” be damned.