Deleting a post is simply marking a piece of text so nobody sees it, but I think the text is still stored in their servers.
Furthermore, a large company like reddit, must backup regularly, meaning there must be several copies of my posts in several SSDs. If the backup once a day… some of my posts are 5 years old.
Companies exist to make money. I suspect they just marked my posts not to be readable by anyone, except staff and they can still monetize them.
Am I wearing a tinfoil hat way too often?
Just an FYI but if you posted anything prior to March 2023, the Pushshift project archived it. Even if you requested Reddit itself to remove all of your data, everything will exist in that archive forever.
Seems like a GDPR nightmare waiting to happen for them
Not really. It was publicly available information. It’s, by definition, not private.