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?
Did you delete them outright or modify the text and then delete it? That is the tinfoil hat way! If you lived in Europe you could request your data to be deleted. You can also request your data and they are supposed to comply at some point. If you did that you could see what they have.
The rabbit hole will drive you a little bonkers so maybe don’t overthink it for now and take a look at https://www.reveddit.com/ and archive.org to see if your username pops up.
Just an FYI but if you posted anything prior to March 2023, the Pushshift project archived it. Even if you requested Reddit itself to remove all of your data, everything will exist in that archive forever.
Seems like a GDPR nightmare waiting to happen for them
Not really. It was publicly available information. It’s, by definition, not private.