Technically it’s the “edit” they ban for, not the “delete”.
The Reddit history deletion tools like to edit every comment before deleting them.
This was (is?) a privacy “best practice” based on the understanding that Reddit, Inc. can recover the text of deleted comments, but not the edit history. Just what the comment said at the time of deletion.
We will still have access to a deleted comment. So, yes, if you’d like to ensure that something is completely removed, editing would accomplish that.
Edit: to clarify, the delete button does delete the content from public view on the site. The differentiator with the edit button is that we simply don’t store old edits. People can choose to take advantage of this by editing away the text.
In the case of deleting your comments to protest Reddit’s decision, I’m not sure editing is really helpful. It’s technically possible but very unlikely IMO that they would do something like a mass undelete just to keep your content on their site.
Yea, nothing prevents them from fetching the pre-edited content from their daily or weekly database backups. Media such as images and video might be harder to restore, but “soft” deletes on that type of storage are common, and editing a comment to remove an embed won’t delete the embed source.
Technically it’s the “edit” they ban for, not the “delete”.
The Reddit history deletion tools like to edit every comment before deleting them.
This was (is?) a privacy “best practice” based on the understanding that Reddit, Inc. can recover the text of deleted comments, but not the edit history. Just what the comment said at the time of deletion.
Quoting reddit Admin u/alienth:
In the case of deleting your comments to protest Reddit’s decision, I’m not sure editing is really helpful. It’s technically possible but very unlikely IMO that they would do something like a mass undelete just to keep your content on their site.
Yea, nothing prevents them from fetching the pre-edited content from their daily or weekly database backups. Media such as images and video might be harder to restore, but “soft” deletes on that type of storage are common, and editing a comment to remove an embed won’t delete the embed source.