Sometimes I find old Reddit posts on search engines, and when I look at them the top commenter’s account is deleted. This has happened many times, and I was curious about the general statistics of this.

I made a small analysis of Reddit.

I searched some random words with top posts: “minecraft, people, help, science, google, amazon, funny, colorful.”

I didn’t just choose the top one; I chose 10 old posts and summed up the total users in comments (top posts hierarchically).

data

• https://reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/jijwhs/i_made_another_cyberpunk_scene_in_minecraft/ 194 users, 34 deleted, 17.5%

• https://reddit.com/r/movies/comments/62sjuh/the_senate_upvote_this_so_that_people_see_it_when/ 201 users, 50 deleted, 24.8%

• https://reddit.com/r/blog/comments/6mtgtp/we_need_your_voice_as_we_continue_the_fight_for/ 205 user 57 deleted, 27.8%

• https://reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/16iti27/for_science/ 154 users, 35 deleted, 22.7%

• https://reddit.com/r/memes/comments/ig9u4z/she_did_her_best_ok/ 201 users, 41 deleted, 20.3%

• https://reddit.com/r/news/comments/jptqj9/joe_biden_elected_president_of_the_united_states/ 202 users, 48 deleted, 23.7%

• https://reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/15emk8z/he_saw_someone_needed_help_and_stepped_in_to_help/ 184 users, 41 deleted, 22.2%

• https://reddit.com/r/funny/comments/q1a7iu/zuckerberg_right_now/ 202 users, 37 deleted, 18.3%

• https://reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/rmqa2a/this_is_an_amazing_idea/ 202 users, 47 deleted, 23.2%

• https://reddit.com/r/PraiseTheCameraMan/comments/ekud8e/right_after_ricky_gervais_talks_about_how_the/ 201 users, 61 deleted, 30.3%

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Results;

total 1,947 users, 451 deleted, 23.1%

btw this is for users who deleted their accounts; maybe there are many more abandoned

this is just a small research I did; the real stats may be higher or lower - I don’t know

So at least in my research, 23% of top commentator Reddit users chose to delete their accounts; some of them also deleted their comments, and some obfuscated their comments (to poison LLMs)

But 23% of top commentors is a really big number. These guys made Reddit the Reddit, but they chose to leave