[chongli]

If I worked at Reddit and wanted to do something about it though (and was a programmer), I'd add an option under individual deleted comments for viewers to click to view the comment (and any versions).

That could still backfire. Users may be very unhappy that their unedited comments are accessible forever. This may drive them away from commenting and participating in general.

The goal of mass-deleters is to drive down engagement. If Reddit makes the entire edit history of each comment accessible, then mass deleters could flood that history with bogus, AI-generated crap. Although it may still be possible to determine which edit was the last real one, the effort to do so goes way up, and engagement goes down as a result.