As another example, the Path of Exile community moved off onto their own community-run wiki domain, but the Fandom variant (which is woefully out of date) continues to be one of the top results when searching for a PoE wiki page.

In some regards that’s inevitable, but it clearly shows what Fandom’s priorities are.

Fandom purchasing Gamepedia and moving everything onto Fandom Wikia was so awful. I’m so upset the Dota2 Gamepedia wiki is now on Fandom, and I’m sure many other communities feel that way for their own community run and community led wiki pages.

Not that I was particularly warm about Gamepedia either, but at the bare minimum I didn’t feel like the page was all ads and no information. Fandom wikis are explicitly set-up to drive as many eyeballs as possible onto advertising and engagement, and are holding actually relevant information for the visitor as a hostage to get those eyeballs. It’s information masquerading as a social media site.

The Runescape community convincing Jagex to cover the hosting costs and moving all their wiki pages to their own set-up has been such a huge boon for their community. It is super unfortunate that for many communities, the community-led wiki pages are a huge trove of information but the companies/games/groups these communities coalesce around have shown little to no interest in merely just financially supporting the endeavor.

The “numbers” are called Discriminators and served a variety of purposes:

• Identity wise it meant multiple people could have the same username text. If you wanted to be John, you could be John#6754 and someone else could be John#1298 and both of you could be John! Now there is only one john.
• It provided parity. EVERYONE had it, therefore no one is better or worse than other excluding particular number combinations. If you were John#5363 and hated the discriminator, well everyone else had one, versus someone behind john, and then someone having to be john_87 because there’s already a john

You argue that being able to use effectively the same username everywhere is a good thing. The unfortunate reality is the rollout Discord used alongside the limited number of permutations (combinations?) of short usernames makes this impractical. For example, a friend largely goes by a 4-char username, and the switch by Discord means they can’t use that 4-char username on Discord anymore. It’s easy to say like “well, just add something to the end”, but that is exactly what discriminators did.

At the end of the day the benefits weren’t as compelling as the losses (it would suck to have one’s identity impersonated or username stolen, or now most folks with short usernames have to stop friend requests cause they are getting spammed with them, or the fact these accounts are valuable and can be sold).

It is understandable that some people don’t really care about the matter and that’s fine, but it doesn’t make the frustrations others feel less important.

Reddit doesn’t (at least as far as I know) store a history of edits, so what is saved on the database is what your comment literally is. The reason people suggest overwriting comments is because the comment itself has value (for a variety of reasons), so overwriting the comment with something valueless (in the sense that it has no value for Reddit) is better, so the database itself is updated with that valueless comment.

After that whatever you do with the account is up to you.