https://www.engadget.com/reddit-is-removing-years-of-chats-and-messages-194558937.html
Reddit has removed years of chat and message logs, but there may be a way to recover some of that data..
The chat system is there so nerds can hit up the hot chick who posted a painting in /r/pics asking for feet pics
I wrote a comment outlining my very specific and somewhat surprising immigration situation, and someone asked me if I would mind answering some questions because they were by chance writing an article about people who fit my exact situation.
I gladly would have answered whatever questions they had, but they asked me via that dumb fucking chat function, so I only saw a year after they sent me the message.
I'm guessing they never opened up the API for chats. 3rd party app users never saw chats
I almost could have sworn that boost had it... I remember being frustrated that I couldn't get the chat pop up to go away.
I could easily be misremembering too, though.
No I'm pretty sure that was one of the things the Apollo dev was looking forward to with paid API.
I hated the chat function. DMs make sense, that stupid chat never did. And as I didn't really browse Reddit from my desktop (it was always a mobile app for me) and I used Boost, I never consistently checked my chats.
Yeah I really disliked it, bots were always trying to chat with me (also follow). I finally had to disable it. Direct messages are fine, but if they ever add following or chat here, the first thing I'll do is disable it. I mean if I want to chat (which is rare), I'll just head over to Discord.
Every few months I'll log in on a PC and have a bunch of messages about comments. Oops. I should say, used to. Won't be going back.
Dude, there are so many hot chicks from my area trying to hook up in chat. You won't believe it!
I used it a couple of times to reach out when I felt like a more personal approach would be helpful.
Of course. The 12 year olds had to send you a death threat somehow?
Seriously, every time I got one, I checked the account and it was someone asking OP models how they are doing and posts on /askreddit like “How to meet girls?”.
Good. Get rid of everything Reddit. Do it. Go ahead and try to start over. Reddit won't ever be the place it used to be, and its all Steves fault.
I suspect it's not out of choice but because parts of the new UI is duct taped to the old. That said they'll still likely rip it out soon and break everything in the process, just as Spez's idol did to Twitter.
I've had people working at Reddit tell me that old.reddit is so buried in there its removal would be hard. Which doesn't change the fact that they would pull it out of necessary. I'm guessing they'll find the routes for it and 301 anything to the new reddit. Easy enough change.
they probably already have all the mapping for the old system stored somewhere the first time they have to switch to old reddit. Just need to change the behavior of that to return a 302
From the article: “ As the social site explained in June, it's moving to a new chat architecture and believes pulling older messages will enable a "smooth and quick transition" to the new architecture. The change took effect June 30th, but many users only noticed days later.”
If it took this long for people to notice, is it really worth their time to update the chat architecture?
Oof. Even Google gives its products a longer runway than reddit does.
All these high visibility features shutting down has to come from a single point. I'm guessing they are cutting features with high AWS costs.
Honestly if anything, good if it's the chat system.
I've had one legitimate message. Every other one was people trying to send me to phishing sites or w/e. And even that was low.
So it would be like taking out all the leaflets, ads, sales flyers and alert sheets from your local newspaper and throwing them in the trash without looking at any of them. In a small way, I always feel bad when I do that to my paper ... such a huge waste of paper that only a small fraction of people actually look at.
I only got one legit message as well. The rest was spam and one was disturbing enough that it kept me up for a bit
I used the chat feature semi-regularly to chat with people about more private stuff. It was mostly about exchanging in creative endeavours, sharing what we had before posting it to Reddit.
So I am a bit moved now that they want to delete it.
But I also hated Reddit's implementation of it. Under certain circumstances it wouldn't load older messages and worst of all it was only available on the official app, not even their mobile web app. So continuing my chats forced me to use my desktop, or to try out the app which was horrible.
At this point, let Reddit burn in their mistakes and hopefully the others will make it better.
It's funny, all they had to do was make better mod tools then stay the course and Reddit would have been the biggest social media company.
All of this change for the worse will end up killing them in the long run
So I'm the only one who semi-regularly got people sending them messages in chat? I hated it, but I responded unless it was someone being a prick.
I don't personally care that Reddit is removing these logs, but it just seems like they're doing anything they can to piss people off.
I got messages in chat all the time. I just didn't see them until a year or two later usually. Sync Pro gang rise up.
In my years at reddit, I think I private messaged a single person. It was such a non-existent thing for me and honestly until I saw this, I forgot reddit even had that functionality.
Will the wayback machine archive reddit posts when they inevitably start to delete those too.
All my messages are still there, I just checked. But I had never even once used the chat feature, so I wouldn't even know about that.