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?
I’m not sure about what the backup schedule and stuff has to do with it, but I don’t think it helps much:
deleted posts don’t come up in Google searches after a while
deleted comments might be counted in the comment count on a post someone navigates to (not sure), so at most the post will initially appear to have more content which might get someone to click
Marginal change at best, it’s probably not worth your time thinking about it