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