If everyone did that, we'd no longer have platforms that mandate using first party apps. A platform would have to answer the question you asked, whereas now they're free to ignore it.
When did you delete your comments, and have you checked to see if they are still deleted?
In June last year, Reddit was “undeleting” a bunch of comments that users had deleted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36399883
In another alternate universe, the Reddit app is made so well that third party apps can’t compete. Consumer sentiment is high and everyone in the community strongly recommends their premium subscription with their amazing app through word of mouth, and I happily convert to a paid customer.
But in the status quo I am certainly a low-value or potentially negative-value user. I don’t comment, post content, or click on ads. I don’t pay them for premium features. I mostly leech off their content delivery network, and Reddit can’t monetize people like me in the way that Meta can. The proof is in their financial statements.
I’m mostly there for certain subreddits that just aren’t replicated elsewhere and my screen time on the app is dramatically lower than it was with Apollo. My foot is already 3/4 out the door.
But it was just easier to kill them altogether. I was a regular user for 17 years and I quit the platform on July 2023.
The problem is that the best app on iOS, Apollo, had its developer chased away.
And really it was about communication and trust rather than an unwillingness to sell a paid app. He also expressed dismay over the short timeline to adapt his business since he already sold his customers paid versions of his app, so changing everything abruptly or forking the app to being something like “Apollo 2” would be screwing his own customers over.
But if Reddit had communicated the changes more clearly and had treated him better in general I think he would have kept the app. Instead Reddit basically burned the bridge and the dev didn’t need the bullshit anymore.
The only account I use now is purely for NSFW reddits, which Reddit will not display advertising for, and I don’t post questions or write comments. They serve me media they host, incurring the costs of storage and data transfer, and get nothing from me in return.