Reddit Just Removed Years of Private Chat Messages

Reddit has surprised users by removing years of chat and message archives from their accounts. The company announced the change on June 22 via a changelog announcement(Opens in a new window); however, the platform was in the midst of protests over its API changes and many users missed the announcement.

The June 22 changelog announcement highlighted a new way to make it easier to discover chat channels in the communities you’ve subscribed to, specifically, it added a “NEW!” Badge next to communities that recently enabled public chat channels and a live bar that displayed chat channels you haven’t yet joined in communities you’re a part of.

As part of that announcement, it said it would be transitioning to a new chat infrastructure on June 30th, and to facilitate a smooth and quick transition to that infrastructure it would only be migrating over messages sent after January 1, 2023. That means any old chat messages Redditors were holding on to were lost.

That note; however, was buried at the bottom of a rather lengthy announcement, so even if a Redditor happened to see the changelog it’s possible they might have not stuck around to the end of the message to see the note about the change.

Originally spotted by Mashable(Opens in a new window), since the change many Redditors have reported the missing of their private messages and frustration with Reddit for not sending out alerts or warnings to users about the change.

If you’re one of those affected, there is hope. One Reddit admin posted(Opens in a new window) that one potential way to retrieve your old messages is to make a data request to Reddit(Opens in a new window). You also may be able to access really old messages through the old version of Reddit(Opens in a new window); however, that won’t provide access to old post-2018 live chats since they were launched under the new version of Reddit.