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Whether they’re doing it on purpose is not relevant to the legal aspect of the situation. They have a responsibility to honor deletion requests. If a user complains, the appropriate response is “sorry you had a problem, we’ll fix it,” not “sorry, we will only honor our legal responsibilities if you follow our preferred [but not stated until now] procedure for requesting deletion, try again.” Having database problems opens you up to legal liability whether you like it or not, and trying to convince users that you are not responsible for your own database is… inappropriate.
Besides, there have been bugs with manual deletion, too. This is at least partly a problem with their own systems.
Agreed. People keep saying that investors can be bamboozled by numbers of any kind, because they are not familiar with Reddit, because they don’t understand the technology, etc etc, but investors do know how to read, and a lot of them also know how to read the room. They might be rich scumbags who don’t understand the internet, but I am willing to bet that a lot of people who might be interested in buying Reddit understand people, and therefore, understand that you can’t run a business that defines itself as an online community when you have pissed off a whole lot of the people who make up that community.