Reddit removes years of chat and message archives from users' accounts
Reddit removes years of chat and message archives from users' accounts
Many Redditors were caught off guard by the removal of their chat and message history.
Reddit removes years of chat and message archives from users' accounts::undefined
Mashable confirmed with Reddit that messages and chat history are no longer available if they were made prior to January 1, 2023.
Retain only half a year worth of content? What the fuck? That's absurd.
In our continued pursuit of empowering communities, we are transitioning to a new chat infrastructure, shared in our previous updates here and here. In an effort to have a smooth and quick transition to this new infrastructure, …
If you can migrate 6 months' worth of data, how is older data any different? The data is there, in the same form. The timespan should not matter at all. It's either the same form, or interfaced to transparently integrate into the existing system - which would allow migration all the same.
A Reddit spokesperson forwarded Mashable a changelog announcement(opens in a new tab) made on June 22 where the company shared that these messages would be removed.
Absolutely absurd.
announcing removal of 18 years of content, of central functionality, announced just 20 days ago, in an obscure place, and after random uninteresting flair navigation and chat channel announcements spanning multiple paragraphs and screenshots.
Baffling.
Acting as if they were managing a personal project that only they themselves use.
In an effort to have a smooth and quick transition to this new infrastructure, we will migrate chat messages sent from January 1, 2023 onward. This change will be effective starting June 30th.
It really seems like everything reddit is doing is rushed and always chooses to harm the users as a default. It's as if they're actively sabotaging their own platform.
whelp, the real "landed gentry" have spoken. now back to the fields, serf!
And here they were saying the private subreddits were causing usability issues...
The admins, not to be out done, have now just broken search links and user experience for the whole rest of the site. Not just for the private subreddits.
I can take my browsing somewhere else, but the biggest casualty of reddit's implosion for me will be the years of help posts in hardware and Linux focused subs.
He really saw Elon destroy Twitter and decided to try a speedrun.
This is such weird self-destructive behavior by Reddit.
One oddity: I requested a complete archive on June 21 and received it on July 6, and for some reason it includes my incoming private messages going back only to Oct 2021.
I expected it to be either complete (~2015) or chopped off at 1/1/2023 like chat. Why Oct 2021???
Lmao why would you only announce this in an obscure space that 99% of the userbase doesn't follow?
If you're making a major change to chat the obvious thing to do is send a message via the chat feature announcing it.
I'm only just learning of this now myself, lost some good stuff with YTers we worked with, shame.
Wow, they're doing an impressively shitty job of owning Reddit.
Wow, glad I didn't have any. I really was a fairly minimal reddit user, fortunately. I do feel bad for folks who had a lot invested in those chats / friendships.
Agh what the fuck guys. I had a months-long convo about when I ordered a custom kitchen knife from an awesome aussie I met on the platform. Thank goodness I remember his username on instagram because everything else is gone completely! Glad I moved to Lemmy.
Deleted all my comment and post history from there when I was directed to Lemmy. Zero regrets. Have not looked back. Find the engagement here far better; proper discussions without the trolls. Loving it.. Also tried Mastodon and enjoying that too even though I never used twitter.
Used to spend hours each day on Reddit and was active contributor on the subreddits I subscribed to. Hoping we get some of the less popular and specialised communities here so we all got to make an effort to support the smaller ones by posting and commenting.
Not terribly upset at this, but it does suck that we had to look to 3rd-party applications to be able to properly search our own comment history. I have thousands of comments going back a decade and I reference a lot of stuff to save time. In my pursuit to archive some of my write-ups, it became impossible to do so with the absence of Push Shift / Camas.
Oh well fuck it; Reddit admins royally fucked me over with a bullshit suspension and won't even hear out an appeal. Bonus that they only let you use... 250 characters to explain.
Joke's on them, everything I wanted was copied to local storage when it happened and the rest of my 14 years of reddit posts were overwritten with a single letter a and deleted.
As some other redditor said, reddit's only value is our posts. delete all your content and let spez IPO the ashes.
Might be a sign of server cost issues?
They're also removing the coins and awards that you got for reddit Premium. They're doing a speedrun of destruction of platform
There's no technical reason they couldn't migrate this data into a new system or otherwise store it for legacy users. This was a direct buisness decision from leadership plain and simple. Hard to watch as people lose such a big part of their lives. Really highlight a greater need for more open forms of social media that can't be destroyed in a whim
To long, didn't reddit.
Most likely a request now goes to the "new infrastructure", where only new messages are replicated. Old data is still stored on the old infrastructure, which some old frontends are still using. After the migration is over, the old chat might no longer be accessible.
So there's hope for remedy to their tech incompetence, which is also their tech incompetence…
It appears some users may be able to download all their messages, including ones prior to 2023, by making a data request at https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request(opens in a new tab) while logged into their Reddit account. [...]
In addition, using the old version of Reddit which is still accessible at https://old.reddit.com(opens in a new tab), users may still be able to access inbox messages prior to 2023.
However, some Redditors have reported that even the data request option did not retrieve their old chats or some messages were missing.
I forgot there was chat
I noticed this shortly before exiting Reddit. Thought it was just a glitch that a bunch of my chats were missing. Most of them were “thanks for the gold/award!” type messages, so it kind of goes right along with the stupid decision that to kill coins/awards.
Jokes on them, I deleted my account
Oh no. So much conservative harassment and OF spam, gone!
Oh. Someone totally broke something and they are playing it off as intentional lol
Good on you!
This is why you don't use websites as cloud storage. They are not under any obligation to keep your content.
For god's sake. Time to request data.
Mine were 99,9% spam. So, I don't give a sh*t!