If you’re finding lots of your Reddit chats missing, that is a feature, not a bug, says the site. The company did actually announce the plan, but in a very low-key way …
Background
Reddit hasn’t exactly been winning friends and influencing people of late.
The mess began when it decided to charge unrealistic amounts for access to the API that powered third-party (former) apps like Apollo. That resulted in wide-scale protests by moderators and users alike, including a clever way to demonetize subreddits. The company responded by issuing a series of threats to moderators.
It’s now found another way to annoy users …
Reddit chats missing
A number of users reported that their older chats had disappeared.
Yesterday I noticed most of my chats have disappeared, I’m extremely upset about this and very concerned at the missing chats. They’ve disappeared on the website version as well as the app.
The company responded to a similar message, stating that this was intentional.
Hello, we are migrating legacy chats to the new platforms and, unfortunately, only data for 2023 is replicated.
While the company did announced this plan last month, it only did so in a changelog, rather than in a blog post or by messaging users to warn them. Even then, it was buried at the bottom, and didn’t explicitly state that older chats would be lost.
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, we will migrate chat messages sent from January 1, 2023 onward. This change will be effective starting June 30th.
This meant that most people were completely unaware that the plan existed.
You may be able to get some back
Reddit went on to say that you can request a copy of your Reddit data, which the company claimed would include all of your older chats.
Please note: you can request the data export from Reddit at https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request and this data should contain all chats messages from all chats.
The link is to what’s known as a subject data access request – a legal requirement in the EU and in California that companies must, on request, hand over a copy of all personal data it holds on you. Reddit honors these requests, even from users outside these jurisdictions.
However, some users are reporting that this data does not include all of their older chats.
Via Engadget
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