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Comment by padolsey | Hacker News Reader

Before you fully delete your account, don't forget to first save your chats! Go to https://chatgpt.com/#settings/DataControls and click Export under "Export Data".

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What value does this give you? Part of why I deleted my account was I couldn't think of a single thing of value in my chats from the past couple years? Maybe some nostalgia looking at what bugs I was fixing?

You’re confusing your situation with others. There are unlimited reasons someone else might want their chats.

Yeah, just curious what those reasons are? Like a valuable thought process you want to keep? Or like a data dump that is useful for looking at later?

Answers to non-trivial questions. Records of wide ranging topics I explored.

You seriously can’t imagine a single reason why someone would want to save their chats? That’s hard to believe.

For me this is very valuable. The results of personal "research projects" are in there. I use it for reference. Of course I could ask Claude to get me those answers but why waste the energy?

Thank you, was just kind of curious. I've never really seen how other people use AI chats so was curious what the use cases were.

Same I furiously clear memories. This is a tool, not my friend or assistant.

Upvoted because you were genuinely asking a question and don't deserve to be down voted for that.

Thanks, but I guess I understand the sentiment. I probably should have not said that I couldn't think of "a single thing of value" when that is a bit of a judgement along with my question. Anyways, it is interesting hearing what people ask it, I think I've only ever used it like a search engine / bug fixing while it seems some people have much deeper conversations or discussions that are worth remembering.

I for one might use these chats as an input for switching over to keep the learning process fast. For me it took a while for ChatGPT to get me. I know that other people delete memories because they want a clean slate experience with every chat. I use chatGPT mostly private (use claud code for work for instance) and I prefer that memories travel across chats.

I'm glad I upvoted. Your perspective and questions are valid, no matter the depth of conversation. You'd be surprised what fresh questions can do for a topic.

Some people have apparently been using it as a notepad. See the following: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-04064-7

In my case, I would rather keep it than lose it. It's just text so small amount of data. You can trivially get a GPT Embedding for it and search it in DuckDB later for things you asked.

Thanks. I've been meaning to do this for a couple days and this made it easy enough to do in the moment.

You can also just dump the localdb

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