Reddit recently removed years of chat and message archives from users’ accounts without warning as part of an infrastructure upgrade. Many Redditors were upset to discover that their chat histories from before January 2023 were no longer accessible. Reddit claims they only migrated data from 2023 forward during the transition to the new chat infrastructure. Some users were able to retrieve some of their old messages by requesting their Reddit data, though others reported that not all messages were recovered. Along with this change, Reddit has recently made other unpopular decisions like ending Reddit Gold, showing a lack of communication and consideration for users’ sentimental attachment to their online data.
People used reddit chat?
I always assumed that trolls used it for brigading since people on 3rd party apps couldn’t see it.
Yeah, I got into a disagreement with someone in a thread once and for a year or two, they’d just message me at random times to yell at me and accuse me of making them suicidal. I eventually blocked them and should have done it sooner. Aside from that, most other messages were just people sharing in game names for multiplayer stuff and Animal Crossing dodo codes.
you’d be surprised, I’ve heard from other reddit users that entire discord servers, wikis, & other communities would first start from reddit group chats so apparently there were a lot super involved in it. one of the big community partnered discord servers I was in told me the only reason they were on discord at first was because reddit chat made it hard to search old messages
They just keep fucking it up there.
This sounds like it would hurt Reddit more than the users since a lot of value was in being able to search archived solutions to obscure problems.
It’s just the chat though, not posts comments. I’ve probably used chat 3 times since it exists, I couldn’t care less about the history. I’m sure most don’t mind. Still, Reddit sucks.
If I understand correctly, this is only about private chats and private messages. Public comments you still have to blank/delete personally, and Reddit seems to be keeping restoring them.
I’m finding they are stealth restoring them. As in, I’ve deleted all my posts/comments, but every once and a while, I’m finding someone replying to a post I’ve most definitely deleted. And my profile shows no posts/comments associated with my account.
What is much more likely is that you didn’t delete all your comments and posts. Reddit “listings” only go back 1000 items and if you delete an item from there older items don’t pop into view. So if you deleted all comments visible from your profile and you had posted more than 1000 comments you effectively never deleted all your comments.
This might be relevant: https://tildes.net/~tech/16on/reddit_is_silently_restoring_deleted_edited_comments#comment-8o2b
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
If I still had my Reddit accounts I’d be P I S S E D
man, what a shitty move. i had some chats that i wanted to keep in case i needed them in the future but forgot to back up :(
It seems there’s a form you can submit asking Reddit to retrieve them, if you wish to explore that option.
thanks for letting me know!
