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

  • ShaktiAmarantha@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    2 years ago

    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???

  • lennybird@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • frazw@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • Radium@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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

  • AbidanYre@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    Remember when people were critical of Lemmy because an instance admin could shut down and you’d lose all your account history…

  • rbar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Move to lemm.ee@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • ElectroNeutrino@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.”

  • OGC@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    People should stop using Reddit. Migrate to Lemmy or Kbin and show spez that he’s not as powerful as he think he is

    • kklusz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I agree (as I’m already here), but unfortunately I think most “normies” don’t really care

      • PrimalAnimist@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        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?

        • kklusz@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          Thanks, those are great questions and a better way of framing it. What are your answers to them?

          • PrimalAnimist@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            They are tolerant of things harmful to them because they have been indoctrinated to devalue themselves beneath the capitalistic company. However, this makes people assets to the highest bidder. Start a whistleblower rewards organization that pays people for revealing corporate exploits. The organization is filled with passionate lawyers and talented media personalities who will counter the indoctrination by exposing any and every corp any time they degrade people. Corps install security cameras and all sorts of monitoring metrics with which they can use as puppet strings to manipulate their employees. It’s time for the employees to spy back and get rewarded.

  • DreamButt@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    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