It wasn’t archive. It was a site that was specifically storing reddit threads in a queryable manner. Unfortunately, I didn’t explore the particular site enough. Ideally, I’d like to be able to pull an arbitrary month’s worth of /r/politics, and ideally only select posts with more than 30 replies or some upvote/downvote threshold.

As an aside, was it confirmed that they were restoring content? When I was doing it, I was using a python script that just grabbed all posts and comments for a given user name, overwrote the data with some ipsum text, and then deleted it. Sometimes, even when I’d finally get the post count down to zero, I’d find I still had some posts the following day.

It turned out that the api wasn’t showing posts from subreddits that had gone dark. So if a sub you posted in was dark when you were running your script, it wouldn’t be able to see/delete those posts until the sub opened back up. It made it look like there was something sketchy going on, but at least in my case it was just two types of protests clashing.