It was naïve to believe they’d honour a delete in the first place. Maybe early reddit did, but it would have quickly become apparent that the deleted comments tend to be more interesting ones, so they could hold on to that more interesting data by just setting a “deleted” flag in the db, or maybe moving deleted comments to a different table for optimization reasons.

Same thing with edits. Instead of replacing the old comment with the edited one, just have the edited one be a new comment while the old one is just hidden now.

Can’t say I’m surprised that try undid all of that when the intent was to lower reddit’s value by removing helpful comments. It wouldn’t surprise me if they stop even pretending to go along with edits and deletions. It’s out of your hands now and always was from the moment the comment was made.

Same thing with lemmy btw, though through a different mechanism: federation. Anyone can clone all of your activity by just creating a federated instance running custom code that handles deletions and edits differently. I’d be very surprised if no one is already doing this. Federation makes censorship and community control harder but the cost is privacy and control of your own content. The fediverse won’t sell out to AI trainers because those entities can just grab the data for free. If there’s something you don’t want known, the only way to do it is to not post it in the first place. Trying to delete or edit it will probably just mark it as more likely to be interesting.