- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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.
Posting notices like the Vogons.
This made me snort
Your drug habits are none of my business.
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
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
Lane closed to ease conjestion
They will sell access to that 18 years of content. They don’t want it able to be scraped in any way.
There it is.
To prevent scraping, users who don’t pay can only read 20 of their own comments per day.
Most likely a request now goes to the “new infrastructure”, where only new messages are replicated. Old data is still stored on the old infrastructure, which some old frontends are still using. After the migration is over, the old chat might no longer be accessible.
So there’s hope for remedy to their tech incompetence, which is also their tech incompetence…
It appears some users may be able to download all their messages, including ones prior to 2023, by making a data request at https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request(opens in a new tab) while logged into their Reddit account. […]
In addition, using the old version of Reddit which is still accessible at https://old.reddit.com(opens in a new tab), users may still be able to access inbox messages prior to 2023.
However, some Redditors have reported that even the data request option did not retrieve their old chats or some messages were missing.
Man fuck those fascists. I am glad for every day that I am not on there writing content for them. Now granted my content might be shyte but it still drove revenue. 😆
Fascists, is it?
I’m doing a full history delete using my data request as a reference to all my comments. 17761 comments. Many stupid crap, but also many helpful tech related stuff that will no longer drive traffic to Reddit.
using my data request as a reference to all my comments
You… absolute genius. Thank you, that should have occurred to me. 🤦 This I can just script to catch all the old ones that don’t show up in the user overview.
Their rate limiting is a bit annoying, but after adding a 3 second delay (maybe overkill) the deletions seem to be progressing steadily.
That’s just so sad to me. Is there any place we could tell people to store or upload these things? I hate that we’re losing so much because of one company’s hubris.
Honestly even an instance that’s just “deletedposts.lemmy” or something like that, to save posts that were useful.
Agree that it’s sad, and I’ve got the export of my posts if that ends up being useful… but idk what to do with it rn
Sooner or later someone will make something, either a site or actual software, that will be able to parse the dumps and present it in a user-friendly fashion. There are enough users out there with data dumps now to justify it.
If/when it happens it’ll also be possible to create an archive everyone can see and search that isn’t beholden to reddit at all.
This is why you don’t use websites as cloud storage. They are not under any obligation to keep your content.
Wow, glad I didn’t have any. I really was a fairly minimal reddit user, fortunately. I do feel bad for folks who had a lot invested in those chats / friendships.
Agh what the fuck guys. I had a months-long convo about when I ordered a custom kitchen knife from an awesome aussie I met on the platform. Thank goodness I remember his username on instagram because everything else is gone completely! Glad I moved to Lemmy.
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.
I mod a linux sub over there. Any tips on what to do?
https://redact.dev Edit all your posts and comments with a link to your new home here.
Make Lemmy alternative and migrate here! Sorry that’s not really a tip, but still it’s a good idea!
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.
I’m blown away by how it seems Reddit makes the wrong decision all the time.
When you’re the CEO of a platform you don’t care about anymore and just want to cash out, wrong decisions are a dime a dozen.
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It’ll blow over sooner if we do it while they’re still mad instead of making them mad again.
Bad move. Should have waited until people had cooled down from being mad. Now they’re mad for more than one reason, which makes them more likely to leave.
That conspiracy theory that Twitter and Reddit are being killed deliberately in order to stifle the public’s ability to organize mass movements during the lead up to the 2024 election is looking plausiblier and plausiblier. (It’s a perfectly cromulent word, shut up!)
Ribbit
Deleted all my comment and post history from there when I was directed to Lemmy. Zero regrets. Have not looked back. Find the engagement here far better; proper discussions without the trolls. Loving it… Also tried Mastodon and enjoying that too even though I never used twitter.
Used to spend hours each day on Reddit and was active contributor on the subreddits I subscribed to. Hoping we get some of the less popular and specialised communities here so we all got to make an effort to support the smaller ones by posting and commenting.
Oh. Someone totally broke something and they are playing it off as intentional lol
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deleted by Reddit
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
There are 3 reasons I can see.
1:
It’s a huge change, and they did a dual-implementation however long ago - where they store it in the active legacy system, and also store it in the new inactive system ready for when the switch is flipped.
Do a year of this, changeover flawlessly, and suck up the outrage over lost data.2:
It’s a maybe not such a large change, but the data processing for it is expensive. So, however long is an acceptable cost, and its balanced against user outrage3:
There was a TOS change. So data before that date can’t be sold/monetised, whereas after that date has value.
So, drop the data that costs money, keep the data that can be monetised.Whatever, it’s bullshit.
Glad I left. And glad Lemmy is cool
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.
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.
Training on inaccessible private chat logs?
Can’t have those pesky users deleting spez’s retirement fund
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
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This. My static websites are on GCP with Cloudflare https. Storage costs are almost literally zero. I pay when people access/read. My storage cost is never over 8 bucks/month. Unused, 10 cents a year.
How much data are you storing and how much do you think reddit is?
Oh no comparison! Mines like 10 to 50 gb. I assume reddit’s is in high terabytes.
The point is cloud services charge for data leaving storage over networks.
Just guessing, and I’m not gonna RTFM and do the math, but for “cold line” storage a static petabyte would be maybe hundreds of dollars/mo max. That’s noise to them.
Right but the difference is Reddit is now charging an extortionate amount for data access via the API when compared to other platforms.
What do you think this (if achieved what was hoped) massive new flow of income was supposed to help sustain?
Oh yeah, infrastructure costs.GROWTH. The upcoming IPO is for a publicly traded growth corporation. Read about how they work. The side 2ffects are appalling.
It is nothing like you’d imagine a corner store working, where profit is the goal.
Read about how they work.
No need to be quite so condescending is there?
I fully understand how they work.
Seems like this growth they should be trying to achieve is fucking futile when they:- cut off the apps that a portion of their most active users use
- prevent helpful bots (automod etc.) working correctly or being financially viable due to API changes
- shuttered an award system that helped maintain engagement via vain dopamine acquisition and actively made them money with no replacement in sight other than some data mined financial incentive program which will lead to a lack of genuine discussion
- spat in the face of their largely volunteer moderation community who volunteer their time for free to help keep things smooth
- delete the content histories of their users when it isn’t publicly facing. Users give content to platform, that’s how Reddit exists, to remove DMs from users it makes it very apparent they’re content pigs and nothing more. Can’t have a transactional platform (content to profit) if the content doesn’t feel any incentive to use the platform.
Not to mention, infrastructure costs lead to growth.
If you don’t have the resources to support your current platform, you shouldn’t be actively trying to grow the platform by discarding older content. It makes those accessing and making use of the content (be it individual or institutional) lose trust in the quality of data.Great growth strategy that.
My apologies! I was commenting only on the cost of cold line storage, for the hypothesis reddit is offline storing data, only. I meant, there, to know the cost look for the pricing page it’s reasonably readable.
Tbh I find the order of Lemmy reply presentation a bit confusing sometimes.
He means the business model they’re going for with the IPO.
Growth means the value of the company. The shares. The stockholders getting dividends. It has fuck all to with user experience, or even user growth. It’s about manipulating information and using clever accounting to get investors to give you money.
They’re implementing new chat infrastructure and only replicated 2023/01/01 forward. It’s in the article.
Oh man.
To be able to have a long running project and decide to truncate years worth of data…
Just, drop it like you never need it again.Apart from working at Reddit, sounds like a dream
They’re implementing new chat infrastructure and only replicated 2023/01/01 forward. It’s in the article.
100%. The idea that reddit would just permanently delete all those chat messages rather than just archive them away from the public is crazy. Even if they don’t directly sell them to advertisers there’s a shitload of value for private ML training
100%. The idea that reddit would just permanently delete all those chat messages rather than just archive them away from the public is crazy. Even if they don’t directly sell them to advertisers there’s a shitload of value for private ML training
Probably want to prevent people from deleting their own messages. Can’t delete messages you don’t have access to anymore.
He really saw Elon destroy Twitter and decided to try a speedrun.
Good on you!
