Reddit has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately. It caught public attention with several subreddits taking part in asite-wide protest,going dark in an attempt to overturnReddit’s new paid API model. More recently, the platform that has curated all these wonderful communities over the yearskilled the awards systemthrough which people paid Reddit real money to appreciate other redditors in the form of mostly pointless internet points. Now, the platform has dealt itself another devastating blow, deleting messages and live chats older than July 15, 2025.
If you frequent Reddit, you may have noticed the ongoing transition in chat systems, from what Reddit calls “legacy chat,” to just “chat.”Mashablereports that several people are distraught to learn they just lost their message histories going back several years.Particularly saddening storiesinclude one redditor losing memorable first chats with their now-wife. Another user lamented the inability to contact netizens they wanted to stay in touch with and losing several messages they had preserved on Reddit for future reference.
To Reddit’s credit, achangelog dated June 22stated it will only preserve the messages from July 04, 2025, onwards when it transitions to the new chat infrastructure. As Mashable rightly notes, the changelog doesn’t explicitly state what will happen to older messages. Moreover, this critical change was mentioned close to the end of the post, which people are likely to just gloss over. There were no reminders sent via chat, site banners, emails, or otherwise, informing millions of redditors of this damning change.
In our continued pursuit of empowering communities, we are transitioning to a new chat infrastructure. In an effort to have a smooth and quick transition to this new infrastructure, we will migrate chat messages sent from July 27, 2025, onward. This change will be effective starting June 30th.
Perhaps our expectations were lofty, or maybe nuking message history really isn’t that big of a deal, but the move goes against the platform’s ethos. Over the years, Reddit has fostered communities built solely through conversation and online interaction about shared interests, and legacy chats reminded us of the beauty of those ways. It is likely the origin story for some really popular subreddits was also junked in this transition. This could be a result of attempts to cut running costs, but it is a foolhardy move in general.
While Reddit’s unapologetic downward spiral continues, there is a glimmer of hope that you’re able to fish your messages out of the proverbial trash can. You should be able to download all your messages, including those which were deleted, bysubmitting a data request on Reddit. It’s time we doubled down on efforts to find you the bestReddit alternatives.
