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Reddit removed your chat history from before 2023
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Watching Reddit die from afar has been much better than being on the sinking ship.
If they can migrate data back to jan 1st, they can migrate everything. They choose not too.
But why? I'm guessing there's some underage shit or something that makes them liable in those chat logs. Gotta get rid of them before the IPO.
Would they really need to go to this extreme? They could just, idk, delete the offending content?
I don't think there is a conspiracy on that level here. I think the direction is to not spend the resources on migrating all data. Either because of the cost/time or because they don't want to tax the new system.
Everyone is acting like Spez is an idiot and is trying to hide evidence, he's just an asshole who doesn't care about user experience.
More than likely costs for storage and what not. Everything points to reddit being out of money
Yeah I think you're right on the money here.
Being an asshole who doesn't care about user experience doesn't mean he's not also an idiot and/or trying to hide evidence. I personally agree that the "hiding evidence" in general thing is unlikely, and that deleting all conversations in order to get rid of just a few is extremely unlikely, but I think "idiot" is supported by evidence.
Huffman has actually said publicly that he is inspired by what Elon is doing at Twitter, which, at best, suggests that he doesn't read the news. I don't think there's anyone who thinks Elon is doing a good job except Elon, and there's concrete, objective evidence that this is not true. So unless there's a "getting paid to destroy Reddit deliberately" conspiracy (I have yet to see any convincing argument for that), there's something wrong with the way in which Huffman evaluates information and makes decisions. I won't insist on "idiot" for that kind of lack of brain operation, and you're probably right that there's a pragmatic reason for deleting user conversations,but asshole alone doesn't cover Huffman's recent behavior, IMO.
If you nuke the entire thing, you can blame technical difficulties, dropping support for "legacy" products and whatnot.
Whereas if you only delete the offending content, it could mean:
When found out, it could be used against you for consciousness of guilt and trying to conceal it. Even if it doesn't amount to charges it could be a bad look for the company down the road; whereas you could just tank the hit right now for being a heartless CEO and it only goes to the pile of things Reddit is doing for IPO.
But let's say there's no crazy conspiracy behind and they're just trying to clean house. You can never be sure how wide spread it is, or if you can indeed remove everything. Most importantly, why would you even devote extra resources to finding and reviewing for something that adds little to no face value to the main product(s)? Might as well just nuke the whole thing and be done with.
In order to get caught, someone would have to already know right now what the content is. If no one currently knows about it, then no one will know to look.
It's likely what another commenter said about storage, or a performance thing.
"Oh, no! There's a spider in my house! I guess I need to burn everything down."
All large platforms (except for Twitter) have a trust and safety team to handle those kind of situations. They also establish relationships with the various government agencies and non-profits that deal with that kind of stuff.
If they're replacing chat with a new system that isn't compatible with the old that means either migrating and modifying all messages to be made compatible -or- keeping part of the old system online while adding adapter code to the new system so old messages can be fetched and displayed. Reddit is going the cheap, easy, and anti-user path of deleting old messages.
My guess is ineptitude. I don't they lost everything on purpose, just incompetent
Iirc an actual announcement said they weren't migrating the older data, though I suppose that doesn't rule out just failing to think of a way to make it work.