tmpob

Your posts and comments will still be available in the Pushshift dumps. These have been released as torrents, so there are many thousands of copies of these already.

In my experience it's when you post something that someone has a strong opposing opinion about. Same for flagging, seems to be treated as a super-downvote most of the time.

I do the same on Reddit and similar sites (including HN), though I never delete any comments, just the accounts. I've become increasingly uneasy about leaving a digital trail, especially as there are increasingly advanced techniques to correlate accounts via stylometry.

For Reddit specifically, if I needed to, I would look up old comments in Pushshift if I could remember enough information to locate them - keywords, approximate date, subreddit, username. It's somewhat annoying that this service no longer exists. Though there are dumps, and backups of those dumps, so hopefully someone will release a similar search tool for these, eventually. Perhaps also including the data scraped by Archive Team. Maybe I'll have a crack at it myself as a side project.