This is awesome news to privacy focused people. I don’t want this shit stored anywhere ever. I couldn’t be happier. And with that done, I will finally delete my 10 year old account.
They’ve made them unavailable to you, but if you think they’ve actually deleted them, you’re dreaming. Now you can’t delete them, but presumably they’ll sell them for as much as they can get. Spez was pretty clear that aggressive mometization of existing content was his business plan, and this is undoubtedly part of that.
This is a good point. It’s more likely that they changed their underlying storage infrastructure/access and don’t want to deal with data migrations. Data migrations are very expensive and non-value add.
So, yeah, probably some messed up data processing still going on behind the scenes and now you CAN’T delete them because you cannot access them. I could even see that last bit being the entire point. They’ve removed easy access to delete any messages along with any reminder of what exists that Reddit has. Oh god damn it it’s probably both of these things. Much easier to run data processing on something people don’t try to access often.