Reddit users who have used the site's chat functionality prior to 2023 may have noticed that all records of 2022 and earlier are no longer accessible.
Reddit keeps records of chat messages between users, private conversations, and users could access these at any time while logged in to their account.
Reddit users who use the "new" Reddit in a web browser or the Reddit mobile application on iOS or Android, can't access chat messages before January 1, 2023 anymore. The removal has been caused by a migration of the site's chat infrastructure.
The site's chat infrastructure was migrated in June 2023 and and the decision was made to ignore messages before January 1, 2023 to "have a smooth and quick transition". The announcement was made in June 2023 and many Reddit users appear to have missed it.
Reddit did not explicitly mention that older chat data would be removed in the process, which may have been a reason for users were caught off guard. Not everyone is reading official announcements on self.reddit either, the group where changes and announcements are published.
The migration happened on June 30, 2023 already, and users of the site started to take notice of the change since that day. Reddit engineers used January 1, 2023 as the cut off date. Any thread started before that day, even if it had activity in 2023, has not been migrated.
How to access and restore Reddit chat history
Reddit users have two options to regain access to their chat history. Those are not guaranteed to work and it is unclear for how long they may be around:
- Use the Old Reddit website. Using https://old.reddit.com/ gives still access to chats, but only regular chats, not live chats are accessible here.
- Request a data export. Visit https://ift.tt/XuD8WKm to request a full data export, which contains chat data. Note that it may take up to 30 days for Reddit to respond to this.
Closing Words
Reddit has made several anti-user changes lately on the site. In April 2023, Reddit announced that it would introduce a paid API that third-parties needed to use to access site content. The rates were set so high, that most third-party app developers announced that they could not afford them, let alone react to in the short time Reddit gave them to adjust.
Reddit also started to block logins on mobile for some users, asking them to use the official Reddit app instead. While there are still ways to access Reddit on mobile without account, the site's higher-ups seem hell-bent to get users to use the official Reddit app.
The community staged blackout protects, which set many popular Reddit forums to private, but this did not lead to any concessions.
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