Nothing sinister, we just don’t delete what we say we delete. Instead we keep it in your profile to feed the algorithms and set the “deleted” flag to make you think it’s gone.

That’s how a lot of people handle deleted data in database, it’s literally just a flag. That’s why there’s a recommendation to edit Reddit posts before deleting them, to ensure they’re actually overwritten so they can’t just be restored.

Funny how you think an edit doesn’t write the old record to a comments_old table