imagine going to your account section and seeing the 'worth' of your comments

if you want to delete your account, you would be offered that amount for the site to be able to keep your output

It's more of a "you might not be able to". Even with all the archival things that target Reddit currently, plenty of accounts who purge their comments squeeze through just fine.

If you post on the internet, yes, you do need to understand it's not sitting in one database table somewhere. It doesn't mean it's futile to try and clean up though.

That said, our stories are nowhere near representative of why it's important to be able to delete comments. ;P

Of course these days with AI able to do analysis of everything we've ever wrote, duplicate our speech, and mimic our look, we may find out that leaving all this information in public was a foolish mistake.

- Cardinal Richelieu

This was going through my head when I recently deleted 15 years of Facebook data. I am not the same person I was when I was 18.

People's ability to preserve their own safety and identity is important. Obscure knowledge can be reproduced; people cannot be.

You would still have to take additional measures if you post in some communities with any regularity.

You do not need permission to withdraw your side of a conversation you engaged in.

We are getting to a point where the 'approved' really narrow consensus moves so fast you never know what will be used to harass you in the future.