Many Redditors were caught off guard by the removal of their chat and message history.

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

  • frazw@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1197·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
      81·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • Radium@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      333·
      2 years ago

      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

      • irkli@lemmy.worldEnglish
        122·
        2 years ago

        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.

    • ultimate_question@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      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

    • ultimate_question@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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