More likely just moved to cold storage to save money. It’s expensive to keep data in an easily accessible database. If you don’t need to access it you can move it to object storage for pennies on the dollar and still keep it accessible for whatever nefarious data brokers you want to sell it to in the future
100%. The idea that reddit would just permanently delete all those chat messages rather than just archive them away from the public is crazy. Even if they don't directly sell them to advertisers there's a shitload of value for private ML training