It wasn’t the fact that there was a limit to see 1000 comments but what they were. The vast majority of my 12 years on Reddit I spent talking about dungeon and dragons 5th edition (DnD 5e) which I started playing early in is lifestyle. It was my first role playing game and I got sucked into the Internet to learn more. Before my first game I found dndnext where I could learn about the current edition. I spent hours and at least 1000 comments talking about playtests, new books, character concepts, rules, adventures and eventually the new onednd playtest.
If you aren’t familiar with DnD you might be unfamiliar with their owner wizards of the coast (WoTC) which is part of Hasbro. WoTC has been awful this year, trying to rescind their open licence agreement which allows 3rd parties to operate. They broke their workers union with the Pinkertons and their are rumors their new edition will be digital only. I stopped even caring about the new playtests and completely disengaged with learning anything new.
So I was deleting comments on the old forum that provided me so much entertainment about the old game that I used to love. Both ruined in the same year but overwhelming greed. If that isn’t the most millennial late stage capitalism experience I don’t know what is.
They most-likely used a Reddit Data Request. It’s kind of like Google Takeout if you’ve ever used that. If you’ve already deleted your reddit account it won’t work IIRC. I scrubbed my comments and posts with PowerDeleteSuite a day or two after I submitted the data request, but before I actually received the data (took 20 days), but all of my comments and posts did show up in the data request. Don’t know if that points to reddit actually keeping that data in their database and just hiding it on the site or not, but either way, if it’s not visible on the site it becomes worthless to them unless they decide to provide that data to someone behind the scenes.
Edit: spelling
@sneakyninjapants I know some people complained that Reddit would reinstate all comments that was deleted by hand, every single one. So if you delete your account, maybe Reddit will bring the comments back after some time. I didn’t delete my account so far, only logged out and not logged in since. As I’m in the EU, Reddit probably has to provide such an option to download and delete my comments, but I’m not sure. Not going to log in for the moment. I will have this in mind though, thanks for point it out.