My old Reddit account gets regularly scrubbed because Reddit keeps restoring shit. First, all posts get deleted (again), then all comments get replaced with crap, and after a few months, they too get deleted.
A mod looked at my profile and couldn't wrap his little brain around it. Hundreds of thousands of comments and post karma, but no posts. How? LOL
Lol every time I see this come up I laugh a little because last year during the whole API fiasco I said that it was pointless to scrub accounts because Reddit likely had backups of, at a minimum, text comments since they had put significant value on it.
I was downvoted to hell and told there was no way they were doing that because "it would be too expensive and technically challenging" to have backups, regular or not, of even just text at that scale
Now here we are with like the millionth example of Reddit restoring supposedly scrubbed content
There were public archives of all reddit comments, to-date.
Folks, if the Internet Archive can see it, they probably have. If it's interesting - so has someone else.
Before the API fiasco ... weren't there several services that regularly archived entire communities and sections of the the site ... it was easy for third parties to just collect and archive everything continuously.
It was so easy that sites had real-time archives within a few minutes of each post. Anything not removed or deleted immediately was liable to show up there.
Fuckin' RIP web 2.0.
They're not restoring scrubbed content, it's just subs that were closed at the time of scrubbing are now open.