Reddit nukes chats and messages from before 2023, but there’s a way to download them

In June, while everyone was raging about the Reddit API changes, the company posted in the /r/Reddit sub that it was planning to transition to a new chat infrastructure. It also said that it would only migrate messages from the start of this year, essentially deleting everything before.

The changelog that Reddit published on June 22 said that the change to messages would kick in on June 30. With it being a quiet announcement, people didn’t realize they’d lose their messages and are just now starting to notice that they have.

While the news won’t be taken well by a lot of people, there is, luckily, a way to recover the messages. According to Mashable, you can go to your Reddit account settings and make a data request while you’re logged in.

Mashable said that it had successfully downloaded its old messages through the data request and also noted that inbox messages, but not live chats, could be accessed through the old version of Reddit. Some people who requested their data reportedly didn’t get all their old chats back and if you do request them, they can take 30 days to be compiled into a downloadable file.

All this mayhem comes on the back of recent changes to the Reddit API, which the company is now charging for access. As a result of the change, which is very expensive for third-party developers, Apollo and Reddit is Fun closed down.

To protest the API changes, many subreddits went into private mode but this didn’t deter the company. In further protests, Minecraft developer Mojang said it won’t post updates to Reddit anymore and the popular IAmA subreddit will no longer reach out to celebrities to do popular Ask Me Anythings (AMAs).

Have you been impacted by the migration to the new chat infrastructure? Were you able to restore your data OK? Let us know in the comments!