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

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 989 points – Reddit removes years of chat and message archives from users' accounts
mashable.com

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

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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.

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

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