TL;DR: even if your delete script confirms a full wipe and your Reddit profile page shows zero comment, there may still be comments left over (that you can find through a search engine and delete manually on Reddit).
Weeks ago, I used redact.dev well before the API shutdown to delete all my Reddit comments (thousands of them over 10+ years). Redact.dev confirmed a full wipe, and my Profile > Comments page on Reddit confirmed I had no comment left.
Yet, as of today, Google still returns dozens of results for “$myredditusername site:reddit.com”. It’s not just Google’s crawler lagging; when I follow those links, those comments are still visible on the Reddit website, under my username, where I have the ability to manually delete them.
Thankfully, I hadn’t yet nuked my account because I knew of other users whose deleted comments got reinstated (although that was thought to be caused by the deletion script exceeding the API rate limit; supposedly a different case, as they should show in the Profile page).
So even if your Reddit profile says you have no more comments, use a search engine and you may find plenty of leftovers.
spez: edited for clarity.
I dont think getting banned will remove posts and comments from your history that haven’t been flagged as rule-breaking. All that will happen is that your banworthy comment will get deleted and you’ll lose access to your account, which is the worst outcome because then you can no longer manually delete your history.
Well, when I was permabanned, I could still create an API key and run a script like github shreddit to wipe my account out. I never lost access to my account, I just couldn’t add new posts/comments or send messages to anyone.