I might get “cancelled” for this, but hear me out:
If you remove your account bad actors won’t be able to identify you unless they put in the effort. Reddit staff will revert popular comments and posts to the way they were before the Blackout. Mass-scrambling your posts and comments with a “f*ck Spez”, followed by a long chain of "A"s or whatever, annoys people who are just trying to find an answer to something on Reddit, and it doesn’t help anybody except the user’s feelings.
The preservation of information comes above some moral feeling.
Your opinion?
On the other hand, it makes spammy articles from content farms the primary resource to find answers.
And either way, not everybody is doing this, so Reddit retains part of its usability, which still exists, and some portion of people will still use Reddit after the API changes.
Or it forces search providers to actually fix their shit rather than relying on our labor.
Maybe you haven’t noticed, but Reddit is a spammy content farm, too.
I didn’t choose any of this. Reddit made the first move. Maybe Steve Huffman should consider second-order consequences.
Reddit is archived on sites like the Wayback Machine. If you have the URL of the reddit post you’re looking for, you can see a version from last month, or last year, or whatever. Deleting or scrambling comments on the current version of the site is most useful for bouncing people who just clicked through casually. They’ll be fine, and if all they find outside Reddit is blogspam, they’ll come back, and dig up the archived version, and they’ll still be fine.
And yes, scrambling comments annoys people. That’s the point. People who don’t care that Reddit is a garbage company will care that it has annoying content, and that’s why scrambling/deleting is bad for the company. Polluting the API is a potential bonus, but the effects are harder to predict.