Deleted Reddit posts: how much of Reddit do authors delete themselves?

You might be wondering: just how common are deleted Reddit posts, really? On the surface, this sounds like a simple question with a single answer, but it’s not. Your own deleted post will only count towards the numbers here if the deletion was recorded before the copy of Reddit was taken in its current state.

The dataset contains 471 million posts, but only those from the last twelve months. 131 million comments were sampled, and those comments were drawn from a narrower range, four months within that span. So you could go back further in time and see what percentage of posts and comments were deleted then, and compare that to more recent collections. You could also look at how old the copies of comments are. The guiding question is simple: what proportion of posts and comments were deleted by their authors, as indicated in the copy of Reddit?

How many Reddit posts are deleted by their authors?

In the period from October 2025 to September 2026, 1.77% of posts on Reddit were flagged as having been deleted by the author, according to the publicly available copy of Reddit. This is below one in fifty posts, and represents only a minimum count of posts with the “deleted” flag. It does not show if the authors chose to delete them or not.

Screenshot of reddit.com, captured Nov 15, 2026

Reddit comments during the same time period (October 2025 through September 2026), taken as a 10% sample and spanning four months, have 0.34% of comments with the author-deleted mark. This is a lower share than posts, but it’s not necessarily evidence that posts are deleted more often than comments, as I explain later.

If you divide both figures up by month, they shift:

For posts, over the same period of October 2025 through September 2026, the monthly share ranges from 1.13% to 2.28%. For comments, over the four sampled months, it ranges from 0.25% to 0.44%.

Both of these counts are lower bounds; they capture each post only once, at the moment that it was copied. If the author deleted it afterwards, it could still appear “live” to a visitor, unless and until the page is rechecked at some later date. The schedule on which rechecks occur is not visible, so all you can see are the posts that were gone when they were last copied.

It’s important to distinguish between a post being deleted and one being removed. In the period October 2025 to September 2026, takedown requests, Reddit, AutoModerator or moderators removed 16.2% of posts, according to the removal field, which I tallied separately. Such posts were also considered deleted if they had the text [removed] in their body. These can be read as removed first, but neither the remover nor deleter is identifiable; I’ll discuss this later.

Deleted-flagged posts were recorded differently starting January 2026. In the period August 2023 to December 2025, 55.6% of deleted-flagged posts still had a living author, whereas since January 2026 only 0.3% do. So the above twelve-month figures are a mix of two different ways of recording deleted posts.

Does the share of deleted Reddit posts differ between copies?

The number of deleted posts you see depends not just on when you’re looking, but also on how the copy recorded events. Comments have a timestamp on the copy, so that’s where it starts. Here’s the median amount of time the copy waited to log a comment, for each month.

Between 2015 and May 2023, the median delay before a comment was copied, each month, ranged from 9 to 302 days, with erratic swings from one month to next.

Since June 2023, the copy date seems to indicate that copying happened within hours, but I don’t know what time the deleted state was recorded at, so I can’t measure that. It could be, for example, that the copy checked again some time later, on an unseen schedule.

The same is true for posts: they too show a huge gap between the collection of older posts and the more recent ones. Timing and format might both play a role, and it’s impossible to separate them.

I thought this was my most important finding: the monthly proportion of posts that were flagged as deleted by their authors:

In the older collection, from June 2022 through May 2023, 27.2% of posts were flagged as deleted by their authors. In the more recent collection, from October 2025 through September 2026, it flags only 1.8%, which is much lower. It’s possible that the two collections were recorded in different ways. The claim that people just stopped deleting isn’t supported by the data.

It’s also possible that the collections saw each post at different points in time, but there’s no way to measure exactly when a post was seen. And it’s possible that the deleted-post recording process differed between the collections, and that the year difference matters as well. These are not separate factors; they’re all intertwined.

Note that comments are only collected as a 10% sample. Until 2014, there was a lag of months or even years between when a comment was posted and when it was captured. Since mid-2023, the copy timestamp has been recorded within hours, but the time at which the post’s deletion status was captured is unknown. The copy date of posts is not known.

The shares in this article are drawn from collections gathered at different times and logged differently, so it is impossible to know what timing contributes to the gap from these figures alone. This is not a timeline of behaviors. The highest share is in comments that were copied months or years after the original, and the lowest is in cases where the copy date reads “within hours” of the original. The headline of this article would change dramatically if a different copy was chosen.

How many deleted posts had a [removed] body?

This wasn’t something I set out to analyze, but rather something that came up in the data. There are two distinct possible interpretations of an author-deleted post, as far as the available data lets one read:

There are two kinds of deleted posts: those where the body of the post still shows up (without the [removed] mark) and those where the body of the post already shows up with the mark. Since October 2022, the mark has appeared on both text and non-text posts. Neither the completeness nor the reliability of the mark have been measured.

From January through September 2026, deleted posts with a [removed] body constituted 57.6% of all deleted posts, more than half. I interpreted these as having been removed first, and I split them overall and by whether they were labeled “not safe for work” (NSFW).

From January through September 2026, at most 0.72% of all posts were marked deleted but had no visible removal, so this is an upper bound.

Do NSFW posts get deleted differently?

In the most recent collection (January through September of 2026), I see no visible difference, with NSFW posts at about the same rate as other posts: 0.64% vs 0.79%, and the intervals overlap, suggesting they’re about evenly matched. However, NSFW was higher in the older collection, and also in August 2023 through December 2025.

The difference is in how these posts were deleted. NSFW posts were much more likely to be deleted with a “[removed]” body. In the same span of time, 1.42% of NSFW posts were deleted in this way compared to 0.63% of other posts, over twice the rate.

I know the type of mark, but not why it was done. The format has been in use since January 2026, and when a post is deleted, the author is almost always removed. It’s not clear if the person deleted it themselves, or their account disappeared. I haven’t checked to see if when an account is closed, its posts are marked deleted.

Are Reddit comments copied later more often already deleted?

The older collection is still valuable because things move so slowly.

Some comments were captured within days, while others were captured a month or two later. They were compared within one month. Already-deleted frequency by age, one week through two months, versus baseline copies between three and seven days.

I have data on comments from 2015 through May 2023; there are enough comments at both ages to make meaningful comparisons, about six months of data at each age. The copies of comments that had been up for one to two months were already more likely to be deleted than the copies that had been up for three to seven days. The median difference in the share deleted was 0.7 percentage points.

In those months, the gap between the copies that had been up for one to two months and the copies that had been up for three to seven days was between 0.6 and 3.3 points. This means that even later copies of a comment were already more likely to be deleted than earlier ones.

It’s not clear whether this is because different comments were deleted at the two times, or whether the same comment was deleted at a later time. It’s also not clear what happened on the first day; there aren’t enough months with such young comments to estimate that reliably.

Are posts or comments marked deleted more often?

If you compare posts and comments in terms of their raw share (the number of posts or comments deleted divided by the total number of posts or comments), that number is higher for posts than for comments, at least when you compare across all windows of time since 2020. The only exception to this trend is in October 2021, where the line representing posts dips below the line for comments; I recorded the reason for that in a previous entry. In 2026, there are three months where comments were sampled, and in those months, posts’ raw share is higher than comments’ 0.37%. That raw share for posts includes posts where the entire body of the post was removed, i.e., “[removed]”. If you look only at posts where the removal isn’t visible, the upper bound for posts is 0.70% of posts. That cut alone can’t tell you the direction.

I doubt this reflects users removing their own posts more frequently than comments. It’s possible that posts and comments are flagged deleted in different ways and their copies are checked at different times. A narrower claim would be that posts are flagged deleted at a higher rate than comments, but there’s no multiple involved.

How much does it vary between subreddits?

There are 33,513 subreddits with at least two thousand posts in this dataset. These are the posts that were flagged author-deleted in the copy, from October 2025 to September 2026.

The median subreddit has 1.32% of posts deleted by the author. In fact, nine in ten subreddits have 2.86% or less.

Note that I left the ranking out, because a handful of particularly prolific posters can skew a subreddit’s number. The top spots are full of subreddits used for testing, run by bots, and advertising adult content, so I dropped the list. However, the total number of subreddits is provided, to give a sense of how broad the communities represented in this dataset are.

Try itPosting activity and removals for a subreddit you pick: Subreddits

Are people deleting more than before?

It’s an undetermined question, at least based on this data, since it’s impossible to know whether the copies of comments have been changed to appear faster or slower, or if any posts have been removed entirely, so these periods aren’t strictly comparable. It’s even an issue within the older collection.

[removed] body comments were more than twice as common in July 2022 than July 2016. The sampled share was 4.91% in July 2022, and 2.05% in July 2016. If a comment was removed-then-deleted, it is tallied only once, in just one state. So the rise or fall of the deleted-share could just be a reflection of comments moving from one state to another.

So how much of Reddit gets deleted?

In comments from 2015 through May 2023, what percentage was deleted? Comments were compared to other comments from the same month. Copies that were one to two months old were more likely to have been deleted than copies that were only three to seven days old.

The number of deletions shown here is how many were flagged in the copy of the site used to make this, which means there’s an unknown snapshot moment for each post, and it’s not possible to pin down exactly when they were deleted for comments.

In January through September 2026, more than half of the deleted-marked posts in the data with a [removed] body are interpreted as having been removed first. Who removes posts? What survives in business subreddits? Which ones require karma and account age?

The reader might be interested in exploring another aspect of Reddit deletions; if so, let me know and I’ll see what I can find!

What this data can't tell you

An important thing to keep in mind about these proportions is that they represent floors for the deleted-flag, not for when authors intentionally removed their own content. The proportion showing zero visible removal, on the other hand, represents a ceiling. There could still be items deleted after the copy of the item was captured that would still appear intact in this data.

Another limitation of this data is that modern comment collection only goes back to the middle of 2023, but the copy dates on the copies indicate that some copies were made only hours after the original was posted or commented on. Unfortunately, the date that the post copy was taken isn’t recorded. For both types of items, it’s not known precisely when the deleted-flag was recorded, and the monthly proportions could vary by a factor of two. It’s possible that the timing of this process has changed since the main period of collection, so the monthly figures presented here could be a mix of one or more processes.

The format in which the deleted-post flag is recorded varies over the course of collection, and comments are also different in terms of when items are checked for deletions. Since the timing of posts themselves is unmeasurable, it may have changed too, and is inseparable from the format. Therefore, the gap between these periods is no evidence of a behavioral shift.

From October 2022 on, deleted-flagged posts with “[removed]” in the body of the post (for text and non-text posts) were counted as “removed” first; comments don’t have this marking. Since the completeness of the marking isn’t measured, the number of posts with no visible removal is an upper bound. Deleted-post recording changed again in January 2026. There, it was split by whether the post had “[removed]” in the body of the post (for text and non-text posts), but only; January through September 2026. Earlier months are considered a separate regime.

Comments are a 10% sample of the data (Jan, Apr, Jul, Oct), while posts are recorded in full. The month-resampling intervals are wide, and each rests on only a dozen months at most, maybe even just a handful.

I counted posts and comments, not the people who deleted them. I did drop known bots from this analysis, but most deleted comments and posts after January 2026 had blank authors fields. I couldn’t see any obvious bots there, and I never tried to quantify what effect they’d have on shares. I did allow, though, that accounts could have been removed for other reasons besides someone deliberately hitting delete.

Posts and comments were flagged for deletion differently, and perhaps checked at different times. So the rising number of deleted flags on posts isn’t necessarily evidence that people are deleting more. Similarly, while “[removed]” comment bodies are now over twice as common in July 2022 than July 2016, a comment that was removed then deleted would only be counted once. The apparent shift in the share of deleted content over the years might just be a reshuffling between those two states.

Finally, this analysis doesn’t get at why things were deleted or who deleted them, because, well, nobody read the deleted content. All I checked for in the body fields were instances of “[deleted]” and “[removed]”, and nothing else is stored there. (User profile pages were partially excluded prior to August 2021, and subreddit names are gapped in that dataset). Additionally, data prior to March 2018 may be different, so comparisons across it are weaker.

There were many cuts examined, and no multiple-comparison correction was done. Removal-order and NSFW splits were added as an afterthought, after the rest of the analysis was already planned out. The direction reported here is consistent across all cuts run. However, some findings from a single cut should be flagged, such as the one about NSFW posts where the removal isn’t visible in the post body. That finding is only true from January to September 2026. Older collection, and August 2023 to December 2025, the NSFW posts did score higher, though that older figures is only a crude upper bound. In those cuts, the ratio of NSFW posts with [removed] in the body was less than 2.

Method

Planned before looking, and found while analysing

KissMyPost is a tool for researchers interested in Reddit, built without outside funding. If you have any corrections, please get in touch. When I make a fix, I'll date note it here.

Conflict of interest: KissMyPost makes Reddit research tools. Funding: none.

Corrections: contact me; each fix gets a dated note on this page.

Questions people ask (FAQ)

The data

Here are the CSVs containing the monthly shares, copy delays, comment-age gaps, and collection periods. The share files contain fractional values (i.e., they’re not percentages), capture_lag.csv is in days, and age_curve.csv is in percentage points. There’s no post text, and no usernames. These files are made available under CC BY 4.0; if you use them, please credit “KissMyPost” and include a link back to this page.

• CSVDeleted posts by month, from 2020 to 2026Share of posts marked deleted by their author each month, with the number of posts and Wilson 95% intervals; June and July 2023 are transition months.
• CSVPosts marked deleted with a [removed] body, by monthShare of all posts that were marked deleted by their author and had a [removed] body, by month, with the number of posts; before October 2022 only text posts carry the mark; this is the share of all posts, and the format changed in January 2026.
• CSVHow long before comments were copiedMedian days between a comment being posted and a copy recording it, by month (x = month, y = median days, n = comments in a separate random sample; bots and profile pages not excluded), with no value for February to June 2021.
• CSVDeleted comments by age when copiedGap in percentage points against comments copied at 3 to 7 days old, within the same month, with 95% intervals and the number of months.
• CSVDeleted comments by monthShare of sampled comments marked deleted by their author in January, April, July and October of each year from 2015 to July 2026, with Wilson 95% intervals.
• CSVCollection periodsShare marked deleted by the author for each period, posts and comments (comments are a 10% sample), with the number of items; for posts the date of the copy is not known.
• CSVDeleted posts: with a [removed] body or not, January to September 2026Share of all posts marked deleted by their author, marked deleted with a [removed] body (read as removed first), and marked deleted with no visible removal, for all, non-NSFW and NSFW posts in January to September 2026 and all posts in June 2022 to May 2023; for June to September 2022 only text posts carry the [removed] mark, so that row's no-visible-removal figure is a very loose upper bound.
• CSVModern and older collectionPosts and comments marked deleted by their author, October 2025 to September 2026 and June 2022 to May 2023.
• PNGMain chart as an imageDeleted posts by month, as an image.

Zenodo DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24140336