[doodlebugging]

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.