2y ago

Reddit removes years of chat and message archives from users' accounts

mashable.com 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

161 comments

My gut tells me they are not deleted but rather simply no longer publicly available. Can't have these pesky AI bots training for free.
- I think it's the opposite. These are private chats that can't be sold to the AI, that's why Reddit thinks they're worthless.
- More likely just moved to cold storage to save money. It’s expensive to keep data in an easily accessible database. If you don’t need to access it you can move it to object storage for pennies on the dollar and still keep it accessible for whatever nefarious data brokers you want to sell it to in the future
  
  They’re implementing new chat infrastructure and only replicated 2023/01/01 forward. It’s in the article.
- They’re implementing new chat infrastructure and only replicated 2023/01/01 forward. It’s in the article.
- Probably want to prevent people from deleting their own messages. Can't delete messages you don't have access to anymore.
- Can't have those pesky users deleting spez's retirement fund
- 100%. The idea that reddit would just permanently delete all those chat messages rather than just archive them away from the public is crazy. Even if they don't directly sell them to advertisers there's a shitload of value for private ML training
- 100%. The idea that reddit would just permanently delete all those chat messages rather than just archive them away from the public is crazy. Even if they don't directly sell them to advertisers there's a shitload of value for private ML training
- Training on inaccessible private chat logs?

Many of those left on reddit, not all but many, are the ones who were happily shitting on the mods who were protesting. Fuck those trolls, they voted for the Leopard Party. The rest of us did a data request like it said when the shenanigans started because the writing was on the wall.
- Lol, exactly. Sucks to be anyone still licking Redditinc boot. I have my datadump, I used chat maybe once, twice then turned it off.

I'm blown away by how it seems Reddit makes the wrong decision all the time.
- When you're the CEO of a platform you don't care about anymore and just want to cash out, wrong decisions are a dime a dozen.

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.
- They will sell access to that 18 years of content. They don't want it able to be scraped in any way.
  
  To prevent scraping, users who don't pay can only read 20 of their own comments per day.
  
  There it is.
- 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
  Just standard verbose bullshit PR talk
  
  Lane closed to ease conjestion
- Posting notices like the Vogons.
  
  This made me snort
- Text is basically free to host, especially text that you can index on a primary key like an account id. The only reason to do this is to reduce dev maintenance costs, but they're not achieving that by cutting back on the storage time

But they were restoring all my posts and comments for weeks after I deleted them.
- Same, though I guess maybe? The public posts and comments make reddit more valuable. Private messages don't.
  That being said, I'm calling incompetence on this one.
- Ribbit

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.
- They don't want users to be able to wipe their own chats manually or via GDPR requests.
  If anyone asks, they will be told that the data is gone, but we all know that's not the case. They do have backups.
- Every decision they’ve made in the recent past, they have went with the worst possibly option available. Repeatedly.

Remember when people were critical of Lemmy because an instance admin could shut down and you'd lose all your account history...
- There's also a guy who says that Lemmy was created by a communist.
  Well, this time "at least it's not spez" works even if it's a fallacy.
  
  Weren't they a tankie? I've heard about it a couple of times on Reddit before joining the fediverse but I don't have proofs myself.
- Absolutely true even now. But Lemmy has good APIs which can be used to download all data. But the core idea is if you really want to have complete control over your data, just roll-out your own instance. Save the data for as long as you like.
  
  Sure, it could happen. But it's not an argument in Reddit's favor when they're apparently just as willing to clear out your history too.

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.
- I mod a linux sub over there. Any tips on what to do?
  
  Make Lemmy alternative and migrate here! Sorry that’s not really a tip, but still it’s a good idea!
  
  https://redact.dev Edit all your posts and comments with a link to your new home here.
- Of reddit comments and posts those were the ones that hurt most to delete. The tech support/tutorial stuff. It hurts me a bit to think that in the future someone might search for a particular error message spat out by an installation script or how to achieve a partícular effect in a image editor and turn up empty handed. Power delete suite let me export all my content but besides the effort to repost it's just not the same because I have only a single piece of the puzzle. What makes sites like Reddit so powerful is the branching back and forth between multiple roles. So you might have a post about a partícular error message and 4-5 different suggestions on how to deal with it each with feedback on how well the solution worked, what you need to watch out for and how to avoid the problem in the future.

Oh that's fine. Fuck the Reddit chat function. Only scammers and spammers ever messaged me on that shit.
- Dont forget about the trolls lol
  
  The self help bot is worse. It was only used to push vulnerable people over the edge and for pissing off people who couldn't pm someone who disagrees with them.

He really saw Elon destroy Twitter and decided to try a speedrun.

Only chat history I had there was spammers trying to sell me crypto.
- I had conversations with my ex on there so on the one hand, it is good I can't return any more to torture myself with reminders of what a piece of shit I am, but on the other hand my psyche irrationally feels despair because it cannot return to torture myself with reminders of what a piece of shit I am
  
  You lost a remnant of someone you cared about, so it makes sense even though it was bad for you in the long run
  
  Would it help you if I called you a piece of shit from time to time?
- Or trading advice 😂
- Mine probably was, too. I only used old.reddit, so I didn't even see that there was a chat.

undefined

Reddit is sinking.
- Hopefully the captain goes down with the ship.
  
  The only thing he's going down on right now is Elon's ego.
- Good thing I've brought a towel
  
  Now there's a hoopy frood!

Man fuck those fascists. I am glad for every day that I am not on there writing content for them. Now granted my content might be shyte but it still drove revenue. 😆
- I’m doing a full history delete using my data request as a reference to all my comments. 17761 comments. Many stupid crap, but also many helpful tech related stuff that will no longer drive traffic to Reddit.
  
  using my data request as a reference to all my comments
  You.. absolute genius. Thank you, that should have occurred to me. 🤦 This I can just script to catch all the old ones that don't show up in the user overview.
  
  That’s just so sad to me. Is there any place we could tell people to store or upload these things? I hate that we’re losing so much because of one company’s hubris.
  Honestly even an instance that’s just “deletedposts.lemmy” or something like that, to save posts that were useful.
- Fascists, is it?

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???
- I even seen messages there that I hadn't received in Reddit. There was someone selling weed.

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.
- Lmao why would you only announce this in an obscure space that 99% of the userbase doesn’t follow?
  "All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now."
  
  In the mid 2000's, Reddit was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
  
  I miss Adams, he would have so much to say right now.
- Request your data and hope you get it in a month

If your past conversations are important to you, then you should make a point of archiving them. Regardless of the platform.
Personally, I'm hoping FaceBook does the same thing to the account I can no longer remember the password to.
- Yep, this is why I always back up my posts and any other important posts or anything else important.
- Test post
- I've never been able to get used to the fact that redditors treat their accounts like some kind of second persona.
  "... but all my saved posts and witty banter!"

People should stop using Reddit. Migrate to Lemmy or Kbin and show spez that he’s not as powerful as he think he is
- I agree (as I’m already here), but unfortunately I think most “normies” don’t really care
  
  People will not care about something until it exceeds a tolerance. It's not productive to explain away behaviors with a label. What's of more importance is why people are tolerant of things that are not in their best interest? How do we change that?
  
  Who cares what they like/think lol

Wow, they're doing an impressively shitty job of owning Reddit.

Smells like desperately trying to save on storage costs.
- It's incredibly cheap, no way they don't have money for storage. They should fire their CEO instead lol
- Text takes very little space, so I don't think it is mainly about storage costs.
  I think they just want to save the data migration costs.
  
  They want to sell it to AI companies, so they need to make sure they can’t scrape it.
- error loading comment
  
  They probably looked at Facebook's latest dumpster fire involving hauling data outside of the EU and decided to just not find a workaround.
- It's called doing the Elon. Or "musking"
  
  Musking: the act of becoming an ouroboros of shit producing self consumption.
  
  We have to email dictionaries till they add that!

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.

I've deleted my reddit account just a few days ago, good riddance!
- This is the way

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
- There are 3 reasons I can see.
  1:
  It's a huge change, and they did a dual-implementation however long ago - where they store it in the active legacy system, and also store it in the new inactive system ready for when the switch is flipped.
  Do a year of this, changeover flawlessly, and suck up the outrage over lost data.
  2:
  It's a maybe not such a large change, but the data processing for it is expensive. So, however long is an acceptable cost, and its balanced against user outrage
  3:
  There was a TOS change. So data before that date can't be sold/monetised, whereas after that date has value.
  So, drop the data that costs money, keep the data that can be monetised.
  Whatever, it's bullshit.
  Glad I left. And glad Lemmy is cool

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.

To long, didn't reddit.

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.