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.

Many of those left on reddit, not all but many, are the ones who were happily shitting on the mods who were protesting. Fuck those trolls, they voted for the Leopard Party. The rest of us did a data request like it said when the shenanigans started because the writing was on the wall.

I'm blown away by how it seems Reddit makes the wrong decision all the time.

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.

But they were restoring all my posts and comments for weeks after I deleted them.

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.

It really seems like everything reddit is doing is rushed and always chooses to harm the users as a default. It's as if they're actively sabotaging their own platform.

Remember when people were critical of Lemmy because an instance admin could shut down and you'd lose all your account history...

whelp, the real "landed gentry" have spoken. now back to the fields, serf!

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.

Oh that's fine. Fuck the Reddit chat function. Only scammers and spammers ever messaged me on that shit.

He really saw Elon destroy Twitter and decided to try a speedrun.

Only chat history I had there was spammers trying to sell me crypto.

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. 😆

Reddit is sinking.

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.

If your past conversations are important to you, then you should make a point of archiving them. Regardless of the platform.

Personally, I'm hoping FaceBook does the same thing to the account I can no longer remember the password to.

People should stop using Reddit. Migrate to Lemmy or Kbin and show spez that he’s not as powerful as he think he is

Wow, they're doing an impressively shitty job of owning Reddit.

Smells like desperately trying to save on storage costs.

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.

I've deleted my reddit account just a few days ago, good riddance!

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.

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.

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.

They're also removing the coins and awards that you got for reddit Premium. They're doing a speedrun of destruction of platform

Might be a sign of server cost issues?