The so-called 'front page of the internet' is where many the internet's most powerful communities reside. But sometimes, things can get anti-user over there.
Back in June, when people were at rage when they found out about Reddit's API change, the communities there created one of the largest online protests ever.
And this time, before things even settled, Reddit announced it's deleting all of users' messages since the beginning of time, until 2023.
It's worth noting that Reddit isn't doing this without prior notification.
Also back in June, during the mayhem, the company posted in the /r/Reddit subreddit that it was planning to transition to a new chat infrastructure.
According to Reddit, this is to ensure "a smooth and quick transition."
But to do that, the company also said that it would only migrate messages from the start of this year, essentially deleting everything before.
The changelog that Reddit published on June 22, said that the change to messages would happen on June 30.
Since Reddit didn't make a big announcement about it, and that Reddit did not explicitly mention that older chat data would be removed in the process, the shift went largely unnoticed.
People didn’t realize they’d lose their messages and are just now starting to notice that they have.
While the change isn't a good new for a lot of people, fortunately, they have ways to recover their messages.
Reddit users have two options to regain access to their chat history.
- Use the Old Reddit website (https://old.reddit.com/) which gives users access to chats, but only regular chats, and not live chats.
- Request a data export (https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request) which allows users to request a full data export, which contains chat data. This can take 30 days to finish.
At this time at least, those two methods work.