I deleted all my post from my reddit account, can they still monetize them?
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.
Use a tool like powerdeletesuite. Edit all posts with something random or condemning. Let them sit a full day so they get saved in the nightly snapshot. Then delete.
Yes they still have the original somewhere buried in the previous backups, but nobody will go to those lengths to restore them. Your text is effectively removed from their site and no longer able to be used to create revenue.
Depending on what they do it's not that simple. If you include the entire history of an account you could probably de-anonimize most active users. That being said, de-correlating the comments and posts before feeding them to an AI model is probably enough.