These are tumultuous times on Reddit, and the last one can be defined. Apparently, the social media platform has removed all direct messages sent or received by users before 2023.
The story came first On Mashable, reported several users’ complaints citing posts and comments they apparently missed, and we’re talking about posts from three weeks ago. In fact, one user claimed to have lost 7 years of chats, another posted how He met his wife on Reddit And he can no longer read their first exchanges.
Our colleagues Gizmodo in the US Also checked their chats were deleted by old accounts (luckily nothing personal). Bit Later, a Reddit admin commented on a post on the r/help subreddit, explaining that the site was moving data to new sites and could only replicate its 2023 data.
So the question is clear: Is this the end of live news before 2023? It seems all may not be lost. And users can request their data through the official Reddit form. A user who posted about the initial condition said they received their messages after a few days. Apparently Reddit sends messages and account data in a Microsoft Word document, and while the formatting isn’t perfect, your history is preserved, similar to how Twitter retrieves users’ tweet histories.
We reached out to the social network from Gizmodo, and a spokesperson referred us to an announcement the platform made last month, at which point it confirmed that user chats made before January 1, 2023 would be deleted on June 30. Reddit did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s questions about why those chats were removed.
