Reddit removes years of chat and message archives from users’ accounts::undefined
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.
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
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.
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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
Training on inaccessible private chat logs?
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
I’m blown away by how it seems Reddit makes the wrong decision all the time.
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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
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.
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.
Remember when people were critical of Lemmy because an instance admin could shut down and you’d lose all your account history…
There’s also a guy who says that Lemmy was created by a communist.
Well, this time “at least it’s not spez” works even if it’s a fallacy.
Weren’t they a tankie? I’ve heard about it a couple of times on Reddit before joining the fediverse but I don’t have proofs myself.
They are yes. They’re also admins of the oldest lemmy instances, lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml (ml stands for “Marxist-Leninist”).
The important point is Lemmy is not beholden to them. By design.
If they fuck with something down the line, it can be forked.
Like how Emby’s attempts to kill itself for profit birthed a fork that came to be known as Jellyfin, which now overshadows it.
Agreed… I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter so I don’t give a shit, though.
Yep, they may be tankies but they have pretty decent values besides that, and if they ever do anything really bad with it there will be many people ready and willing to fork it.
Finally, somebody says the obvious.
ML stands for Machine Learning and just became a popular domain for open source apps.
Yeah, but that’s not why lemmygrad chose to use ml lol
But we were talking about lemmy.ml too
Yeah same thing, they were created by the same people
As I understand it: Yes, but they allowed Lemmy to outgrow them.
They do better than Soviet union, lol.
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.
whelp, the real “landed gentry” have spoken. now back to the fields, serf!
He really saw Elon destroy Twitter and decided to try a speedrun.
Reddit is sinking.Hopefully the captain goes down with the ship.
The only thing he’s going down on right now is Elon’s ego.
Good thing I’ve brought a towel
Now there’s a hoopy frood!
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This is such weird self-destructive behavior by Reddit.
One oddity: I requested a complete archive on June 21 and received it on July 6, and for some reason it includes my incoming private messages going back only to Oct 2021.
I expected it to be either complete (~2015) or chopped off at 1/1/2023 like chat. Why Oct 2021???
Lmao why would you only announce this in an obscure space that 99% of the userbase doesn’t follow?
If you’re making a major change to chat the obvious thing to do is send a message via the chat feature announcing it.
I’m only just learning of this now myself, lost some good stuff with YTers we worked with, shame.
Lmao why would you only announce this in an obscure space that 99% of the userbase doesn’t follow?
“All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.”
I miss Adams, he would have so much to say right now.
Request your data and hope you get it in a month
People should stop using Reddit. Migrate to Lemmy or Kbin and show spez that he’s not as powerful as he think he is
I agree (as I’m already here), but unfortunately I think most “normies” don’t really care
People will not care about something until it exceeds a tolerance. It’s not productive to explain away behaviors with a label. What’s of more importance is why people are tolerant of things that are not in their best interest? How do we change that?
Thanks, those are great questions and a better way of framing it. What are your answers to them?
They are tolerant of things harmful to them because they have been indoctrinated to devalue themselves beneath the capitalistic company. However, this makes people assets to the highest bidder. Start a whistleblower rewards organization that pays people for revealing corporate exploits. The organization is filled with passionate lawyers and talented media personalities who will counter the indoctrination by exposing any and every corp any time they degrade people. Corps install security cameras and all sorts of monitoring metrics with which they can use as puppet strings to manipulate their employees. It’s time for the employees to spy back and get rewarded.
Who cares what they like/think lol
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.
Not terribly upset at this, but it does suck that we had to look to 3rd-party applications to be able to properly search our own comment history. I have thousands of comments going back a decade and I reference a lot of stuff to save time. In my pursuit to archive some of my write-ups, it became impossible to do so with the absence of Push Shift / Camas.
Oh well fuck it; Reddit admins royally fucked me over with a bullshit suspension and won’t even hear out an appeal. Bonus that they only let you use… 250 characters to explain.
Might be a sign of server cost issues?
Joke’s on them, everything I wanted was copied to local storage when it happened and the rest of my 14 years of reddit posts were overwritten with a single letter a and deleted.
As some other redditor said, reddit’s only value is our posts. delete all your content and let spez IPO the ashes.
