Reddit removes years of chat and message archives from users' accounts

Reddit continues to show how little they care. I hope they get the IPO over with relatively soon so we can watch it turn into Tumblr, and have an exodus of people move to a service that "remembers the human".

All my Reddit accounts are banned now, but back in the day I was contributing how-to posts and the like. I was a mod on a larger subreddit too. The bans were mostly “incorrect” and a result of automation e.g. “X people reported it so it must be against the Reddit rules because people only report things that are against the rules, right?” Anyway it’s become a cesspool and I’m glad it’s dying.

Of course.

They can't be sold for datamining... Why would Reddit waste money keeping them?

I doubt they've deleted it. They've just made it unavailable for scraping (not logged in), so anyone who wants older data for that purpose will have to pay for it.

It seems this action would also have the undesirable side-effect of gradually removing older Reddit pages from search engines.

So it was announced with 1 week notice?

During summer, when people are on vacation?

Consider r/redditseppuku