It's silly to act like every online context has a real world analogue. But no, I don't vandalize it. Whatever you consider the real world equivalent of deleting my comments after the place has enshittified itself, that's what I do.
Deleting is easy to restore. There have been cases where reddit restored deleted posts. Edits are a bit harder to filter for so they probably won't bother.
You're right, the latter is funnier. Like I said, the more it's weakened the faster people will move on from it and let it fully die. For now it's only spiritually dead.
Since many of your replies are referencing my post I would just like to add that I am not 12. I'm closer to 9 (in dog years). I grew up a long time ago, maybe before you were even a sparkle in your parent's eyes and a new name on the family Christmas card.
Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that from day one a user had the right to edit by adding to or subtracting any part of their content or to delete the entire comment? How is this vandalization? This is user control, the same level of control granted on a site that was built for users to post on and discuss any subject - free speech was a keystone principle until some bad actors couldn't stop posting trash and ended up rightly banned.
Millions, maybe billions of comments are digital dust at this point. Like thoughts lost just before they made it past the tip of your tongue. This is normal and expected behavior. Conversations get lost in the fog.
Reddit isn't a Banksy. Today, it's more like the monkey area of the zoo in spots with each monkey's hand ready to sling the shit. When you consider the huge number of bots on the site it is likely worse than that.
Originally /u/spez and /u/n0thing set a standard where a poster who dropped a reply containing information that didn't fit the established narrative and tried framing it as an accurate answer was asked to post the references that supported their conclusion. It was "tits or get the fuck out" days. That by itself promoted healthy discussions and worked to disseminate accurate information on important topics. It helped establish a cadre of users who are outstanding in their fields and who enjoy sharing their expertise with others.
In time, especially after Digg imploded themselves, the expansion of subreddits made it untenable for proper moderation so a lot of boogers were allowed out of the nostrils and while the quality of discussions in general on the site was still good, many subreddits were established where people could say anything with no one calling them out. It sideloaded all the horseshit that used to hit the front (and only) page of reddit to the subs - stuff like goatse, nsfw content, etc. In the earliest incarnation reddit's front page was a minefield of stuff you really needed to avoid if you wanted to surf online and still keep your job. Early users learned fast to read the comments before opening the post.
I'm having a hard time understanding how a feature - user control of content they post - is mislabeled in your reply as vandalism when the user elects to employ that feature in managing their content.
That was me. I know there are a lot of comments and replies to comments here so it's easy to lose track of who did what to who.
I think if you read my replies in this thread you can begin to understand why it is not trolling or juvenile behavior, it's just me exercising control over the content that I posted, on my own time, following all the rules that reddit established when they launched.
This is a feature. Like I mentioned, all the content that I have ever posted is likely to be indexed in someone's archive somewhere whether reddit controls that archive or not. There are too many players in that space and they have been active for years with publicly available tools to manage all the grunt work for anyone who wanted to download it all and slog through it looking for gems.
If they find one of my edited posts that has a suspicious amount of worthless updoot karma and that post is totally out of context then I am sure they are bright enough to figure out that they will need to get that content somewhere else.
I left untouched all of my old "Best of Reddit" and the gilded posts since those had above average value to the readers who chose to engage and updoot.
At the end of the day, the content has always been mine to edit or delete. That is the way that the site was designed to function so labeling anything I do as vandalism, trolling, or juvenile behavior only works to make you look like someone trying hard to understand how to value your investment in reddit in the event that others choose to act similarly.
As I mentioned somewhere else, reddit could change all of this if they instituted controls that would allow live users to instantly recognize bots and adverts so that users can instantly choose to read a post or comment or to ignore it. The fact that they embraced and actively ignore the bot armies, the shills for various products or philosophies, the blatant adverts, etc tells me and others that they have lost touch with their users.
As it is, forcing me to check karma levels and username age to hope to recognize reposters and bots is just wrong. Clear and ban the bots, ID the adverts, add a shill warning to those who evangelize or push agendas or misinformation, and the traffic finds a floor.
On that floor reddit will find those loyal, long-term users like myself a lot more likely to engage. Clean the house and make it more livable and others will move in to see what's up. Sunshine is the best disinfectant here. Otherwise people like myself will choose whether to continue to engage with reddit and set their own terms of engagement.
Reddit is very much a real-time experience. People visit to read or view current posts or to comment on current posts. I suspect that dead posts, especially those more than a few months, are functionally never touched again. Broken search has always been a feature so the idea that anything on an old thread is useful is dubious at best. Even searching Google for specific information from reddit posts will not pull up what you want if that information is deep in a comment thread.
There's really nothing to see here. This is standard expected behavior baked into reddit from day one. Not even /u/spez or /u/kn0thing wanted everything they ever posted to be perpetually available. They had multiple discussions early on about how some of it might appear years down the line.
I'm not making reddit worse for anyone. I'm the guy who saw the "no shoes, no shirt, no service" sign and made sure I wore my best t-shirt and a pair of boots so I could enjoy the facilities.
The only ones who might get their feelings hurt are those who are actively using reddit content to train their LLMs or those who decided to invest in reddit's IPO and who see any modification of posts as potentially damaging the value of the content.
In the end, it has always been my content and their aggregator. The shear volume of traffic they have seen makes anything that I do functionally irrelevant.
I'm late to the discussion here, but I use shreddit. It edits and deletes all my past comments.
However I found recently there are websites that have every single one of my old comments accessible and I'm sure reddit itself does to. Once you comment it's there forever.
This is also my experience. Editing or deleting comments on reddit doesn't permanently remove them since there are so many operators updating their own reddit streams in real time. It never goes away, it just takes a little more effort to find the original.