Sometimes I find old Reddit posts on search engines, and when I look at them the top commenter’s account is deleted. This has happened many times, and I was curious about the general statistics of this.

I made a small analysis of Reddit.

I searched some random words with top posts: “minecraft, people, help, science, google, amazon, funny, colorful.”

I didn’t just choose the top one; I chose 10 old posts and summed up the total users in comments (top posts hierarchically).

data

Results;

total 1,947 users, 451 deleted, 23.1%

btw this is for users who deleted their accounts; maybe there are many more abandoned

this is just a small research I did; the real stats may be higher or lower - I don’t know

So at least in my research, 23% of top commentator Reddit users chose to delete their accounts; some of them also deleted their comments, and some obfuscated their comments (to poison LLMs)

But 23% of top commentors is a really big number. These guys made Reddit the Reddit, but they chose to leave

  • lemmylump
    1·
    17 hours ago

    When you delete your reddit account I thought the posts and comments stayed. Are they removed?

      • lemmylump
        3·
        16 hours ago

        That what I thought. Something I recently found out that hidden account posts and comments are not actually hidden. All you have to do is in the account pull up search type and empty space and click search and every post or comment is revealed.

        Reddit is shady AF now. Glad I stopped using it.