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 don’t think so.
The postings of a specific individual are not important for great companies. Its the mass. They search for patterns and want to use this patterns for advertisment or to lead your use of the internet. The postings or information of one single individuum may be not even necessary after the analyis. And even if they could use them for some purpose, after 5 years or so, they arn’t current anymore. In this time, there will be 1000s of users who spend their data.