Reddit Is Deleting Your Old Chats, But There’s a Way to Get Them Back

Over the past few months, there has been a lot of talk going around Reddit, and its API policy changes, where they have asked for ginormous amounts of money for third-party apps to use its API. As a result, over 10,000 subreddits have gone private.

Reddit is adamant on not reversing these changes, and is risking an irreversible shift to its platform, by essentially forcing years old users out of the system. For a rough estimate, two of the most popular third-party Reddit APIs, Apollo, and Reddit Is Fun had around 40 million users on their platform, which is HUGE.

While Reddit has not reversed its API policy changes, it has done something even worse to annoy the remaining users on the platform. Reddit is essentially deleting users’ chats before 2023. This isn’t something uncalled for, though.

Reddit Is Moving to a New Chat Architecture

Last month, Reddit announced that they would be moving to a new chat infrastructure. They did mention that all chats after 1st Jan, 2023 would be migrated over to this new iteration, but there was no mention of deleting messages.

In an effort to have a smooth and quick transition to this new infrastructure, we will migrate chat messages sent from January 1, 2023 onward. 

This new chat structure will also feature chat channels for subreddits, and an overall revamped tab for mobile users. It kind of reminds me of Instagram’s chat page. Take a look down below:

Reddit is also adding what they call a “live bar” which essentially contains all the communities you are a member of that have their own dedicated chat channels that you haven’t joined yet. These are under the Discover tab on your Chat screen.

Getting Back Old, Deleted Conversations

Now, since all of your conversations pre-2023 have been deleted, there is a chance that they may contain something that’s really important, or close to you. In that case, Reddit gives you the option to retrieve those lost conversations.

Log into your Reddit account and go to the data request page, and from there, you may be able to access all of your old conversations that were deleted. You can choose from a specific date range, or since the time you joined Reddit.

This is all we know for now, but rest assured that we will keep you updated as new information becomes available.