My gut tells me they are not deleted but rather simply no longer publicly available. Can’t have these pesky AI bots training for free.

More likely just moved to cold storage to save money. It’s expensive to keep data in an easily accessible database. If you don’t need to access it you can move it to object storage for pennies on the dollar and still keep it accessible for whatever nefarious data brokers you want to sell it to in the future

This. My static websites are on GCP with Cloudflare https. Storage costs are almost literally zero. I pay when people access/read. My storage cost is never over 8 bucks/month. Unused, 10 cents a year.

How much data are you storing and how much do you think reddit is?

Right but the difference is Reddit is now charging an extortionate amount for data access via the API when compared to other platforms.
What do you think this (if achieved what was hoped) massive new flow of income was supposed to help sustain?
Oh yeah, infrastructure costs.

GROWTH. The upcoming IPO is for a publicly traded growth corporation. Read about how they work. The side 2ffects are appalling.

It is nothing like you’d imagine a corner store working, where profit is the goal.

Read about how they work.

No need to be quite so condescending is there?
I fully understand how they work.
Seems like this growth they should be trying to achieve is fucking futile when they:

• cut off the apps that a portion of their most active users use
• prevent helpful bots (automod etc.) working correctly or being financially viable due to API changes
• shuttered an award system that helped maintain engagement via vain dopamine acquisition and actively made them money with no replacement in sight other than some data mined financial incentive program which will lead to a lack of genuine discussion
• spat in the face of their largely volunteer moderation community who volunteer their time for free to help keep things smooth
• delete the content histories of their users when it isn’t publicly facing. Users give content to platform, that’s how Reddit exists, to remove DMs from users it makes it very apparent they’re content pigs and nothing more. Can’t have a transactional platform (content to profit) if the content doesn’t feel any incentive to use the platform.

Great growth strategy that.