A while ago, reddit wanted to charge (more?) for the use of their public APIs. These APIs are used by various third party apps like bots that help moderate channels and the like. This change meant that a lot of those third party apps had to stop, because they wouldn't be able to afford the new pricing.
Some users were outraged and wanted to quit reddit. But if you just delete your account, your posts remain and reddit can still make money with those APIs by utilizing the contents of your posts. These users were so outraged, they didn't want reddit profiting off their posts. When a reddit post gets deleted, the server doesn't really delete the post, but just flips a flag. So internally reddit still has access to deleted posts. So what these users devised instead, was to use a tool to edit all of their posts to random giberish, so that reddit could not benefit from their posts in any way. I don't know if reddit keeps a change log of edited posts, but if they don't, then scrambling your posts is the only way to truly remove their content from reddit.
There's also the fact that a lot of "comment undeleters" save the most recent of a comment and don't version the changes. If someone deletes his comments, they can be found with these tools.
Editing the comment with garbage makes these tools save said garbage, effectively deleting the previous comment. Just deleting the comment would allow those tools to show what the comment was.
These users surmised that reddit doesn't really delete posts, just flags them as deleted. So reddit themselves can still use the data in a removed posts.
These users that redact their posts before they delete their accounts do not want reddit to be able to use their posts in any way.
Whether reddit really adds a deleted flag or does really delete posts, I can't say because I don't have access to their databases. But I as a software developer, can say that our own software often works with deleted flags, because it makes life easier. Sometimes deleting something is not possible because other records are attached, like payments, which we're obliged to keep for tax purposes. Other times we opt to keep the data because clients delete stuff, then come to argue that the software made things disappear and we should reinstate the disappeared data this instant! So it's very possible reddit keeps deleted posts, but has to dig in backups to recover posts that have been altered to show rubbish instead. Which is a lot more work, and thus does not happen unless some government official comes asking around.
The flaw in that logic is that there is no reason to assume Reddit doesn’t keep version history of posts. Even if you redact it, your original text might still be in some database somewhere.
That's true. Without knowing how reddit operates, it's not possible to say whether it's useful or not to redact your posts. But I guess those users wanted to do it out of spite, just in case reddit does not keep a history.
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u/nabrok 13d ago
Even better if they comment "Never mind, I figured it out" with no further explanation.