I’m sure Reddit keeps all versions as well. But I think it would be impractical to restore to the correct version at scale unless they want to manually review to find the “right” version to restore.
I think if they got a specific subpoena for me, they could find my comments with a manual investigation, but I expect that will never happen as there’s no reason for anyone to do that.
I just want to remove my content from Reddit.com and make it harder if they decide to undelete or otherwise not respect my decision.
I’m surprised Reddit still allows edit and undelete and expect them to remove the functionality soon.
If they retain versioning history I'm sure it would be easy to identify a mass edit and revert all of those edits from the user. If it wasn't easy, for some reason, it would probably be easy to revert all edits after, say, 2 days of posting.
Given that everything posted to Reddit becomes the property of Reddit (okay, perpetually licensed to Reddit), I don't know that much legally could be done about this. Unless they restored stuff posted while under-age, or PII, maybe.
They could restore all comments a month after controversy/blackout events from about a month before such events.
That would probably restore the majority as most people are deleting/overwriting their comments as a reaction to or as a part of these events.
It’s much more likely they just disallow editing and deleting.
Your comments, including here in HN, are probably already covered by a scheme like that where you give the site operator an unrestricted license to use them. You can remove the association to your identity via GDPR, but to take down the content itself you’d need to go through the justice system.
There are obviously ways to defeat this in analysis, but it does make Reddit's job slightly harder if they want to leverage that data. It would also probably be interesting to also just edit them and not delete them in some cases in some randomized way, which would make it even harder to reliably tease out good comments from noise.
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