In 2019 the total size of the text stored by Reddit was only 50TB. A Petabyte of data in cold storage is only 12k a year so even if they 500x in size since 2019 (very unlikely) it’s a drop in their ARR. given they sell the data for advertising and for AI, they are not deleting it. Reddit also self hosts a lot of their infra (they used to present their architecture at kubecon) so the storage costs would be even lower
In 2019 the total size of the text stored by Reddit was only 50TB. A Petabyte of data in cold storage is only 12k a year so even if they 500x in size since 2019 (very unlikely) it’s a drop in their ARR. given they sell the data for advertising and for AI, they are not deleting it. Reddit also self hosts a lot of their infra (they used to present their architecture at kubecon) so the storage costs would be even lower