I suppose the people talking about deleting all their posts/comments may be on to something then. Saw someone delete an 11yo account and another with over 10m karma.
Search engines will still link to reddit, but if most relevant content is scrubbed that'll be interesting.
It doesn't work like that. Pages bounce back very quickly (particularly if they are already indexed). Google swipes removed pages regularly even 1+ years after they have been removed.
Not sure. Currently Google gets a normal website (not an error or a 404) for every page. Just with different content.
When search
site:reddit.com "best bicycle"
I get a page a page "Best bicycle for a beginner?" in r/bicycling. But it has no content about bicycles at the moment.
At some point Google will probably decide to discard that page, because there is nothing to see there. How would Google know it should regularely check to see if the old content comes back? That would mean Google's index is versioned. And keeps old versions of pages and revisits them to see if an old version comes back. Seems unlikely.
Search engines will still link to reddit, but if most relevant content is scrubbed that'll be interesting.