Deleting messages and accounts doesn’t remove them, it merely marks them as Deleted. The content is still there. According to the docs for tools like shreddit (which I’ve used myself) which replace comments with gibberish before deleting them, reddit only keeps the most recent copy of content. Based on what you’re saying this seems to be wrong - possibly reddit keeps periodic backups. They might even have anti-shredding software that scans for masses of gibberish and restores previous content from one of those backups. Just a theory.
Deleting messages and accounts doesn’t remove them, it merely marks them as Deleted. The content is still there. According to the docs for tools like shreddit (which I’ve used myself) which replace comments with gibberish before deleting them, reddit only keeps the most recent copy of content. Based on what you’re saying this seems to be wrong - possibly reddit keeps periodic backups. They might even have anti-shredding software that scans for masses of gibberish and restores previous content from one of those backups. Just a theory.
They likely started tracking comment deltas at some point for moderation and purposes like this.
Pretty much something like a git diff for every edit.
That being said, they might just straight up store every single edit to every single comment. This wouldn’t be an absurd amount of data by any means.
Which, if you actually take the time to read the post, they did.
I read it, apparently I didn’t digest it. Rewriting my comment.