That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
If I can convince you to go a step further… Deleting your account (at least in the near-term) may not be the best course of action. Simply deleting your account does not delete the content you created on Reddit nor (afaik) all the data they hold on you and allows them to continue to profit from those things. Once you’ve deleted your account you are no longer able to directly delete the content made by that account. Deleting all your content first is a good start however that’s a long-term process as any comments or posts you’ve made to subs that are currently privated are harder to remove and when and if those subs become public again your content comes back with it. So from that perspective it’s probably worth keeping your account and checking it is empty from time to time. There’s also been some accusations of Reddit undeleting comments but it’s not clear if that’s what’s really happening. If it is a concern though, editing your comments first should mean only the edited versions could come back. Most people edit to a blank comment but you could edit to say something about why you are removing your content from Reddit. Leaving those comments in place so you’ve removed your content but are showing why (and where else similar content can be found…) is probably the best option. As for the data they hold on you. I’m not sure exactly how much they would keep if you just deleted your account but there’s a good chance there is some sort of data privacy law you could use to request they tell you and or delete all of it. Certainly within the EU and UK you have some sort of right to be forgotten.