Removing spez’s conversations with underage girls
Watching Reddit die from afar has been much better than being on the sinking ship.
If they can migrate data back to jan 1st, they can migrate everything. They choose not too.
But why? I’m guessing there’s some underage shit or something that makes them liable in those chat logs. Gotta get rid of them before the IPO.
Would they really need to go to this extreme? They could just, idk, delete the offending content?
I don’t think there is a conspiracy on that level here. I think the direction is to not spend the resources on migrating all data. Either because of the cost/time or because they don’t want to tax the new system.
Everyone is acting like Spez is an idiot and is trying to hide evidence, he’s just an asshole who doesn’t care about user experience.
More than likely costs for storage and what not. Everything points to reddit being out of money
Being an asshole who doesn’t care about user experience doesn’t mean he’s not also an idiot and/or trying to hide evidence. I personally agree that the “hiding evidence” in general thing is unlikely, and that deleting all conversations in order to get rid of just a few is extremely unlikely, but I think “idiot” is supported by evidence.
Huffman has actually said publicly that he is inspired by what Elon is doing at Twitter, which, at best, suggests that he doesn’t read the news. I don’t think there’s anyone who thinks Elon is doing a good job except Elon, and there’s concrete, objective evidence that this is not true. So unless there’s a “getting paid to destroy Reddit deliberately” conspiracy (I have yet to see any convincing argument for that), there’s something wrong with the way in which Huffman evaluates information and makes decisions. I won’t insist on “idiot” for that kind of lack of brain operation, and you’re probably right that there’s a pragmatic reason for deleting user conversations,but asshole alone doesn’t cover Huffman’s recent behavior, IMO.
If you nuke the entire thing, you can blame technical difficulties, dropping support for “legacy” products and whatnot.
Whereas if you only delete the offending content, it could mean:
- You knew they existed;
- You knew they were wrong;
- You tried to clean it up/hide it.
When found out, it could be used against you for consciousness of guilt and trying to conceal it. Even if it doesn’t amount to charges it could be a bad look for the company down the road; whereas you could just tank the hit right now for being a heartless CEO and it only goes to the pile of things Reddit is doing for IPO.
But let’s say there’s no crazy conspiracy behind and they’re just trying to clean house. You can never be sure how wide spread it is, or if you can indeed remove everything. Most importantly, why would you even devote extra resources to finding and reviewing for something that adds little to no face value to the main product(s)? Might as well just nuke the whole thing and be done with.
“Oh, no! There’s a spider in my house! I guess I need to burn everything down.”
All large platforms (except for Twitter) have a trust and safety team to handle those kind of situations. They also establish relationships with the various government agencies and non-profits that deal with that kind of stuff.
If they’re replacing chat with a new system that isn’t compatible with the old that means either migrating and modifying all messages to be made compatible -or- keeping part of the old system online while adding adapter code to the new system so old messages can be fetched and displayed. Reddit is going the cheap, easy, and anti-user path of deleting old messages.
My guess is ineptitude. I don’t they lost everything on purpose, just incompetent
If you want to know when I learned Reddit chat existed…I just did when I read this post.
No one wanted chat. Does anyone use chat?
I lived on old reddit. Chat and these other useless features just did not exist for me.
I didn’t want it but now that it’s here and many people did message me (usually asking for something) I would feel upset that all that history is lost.
Thank god I made a data request last month asking for everything in my account. I have all my 10+ years of Reddit history backed up elsewhere.
If chat is what I’m thinking of (the private DM feature), then I used it once or twice. Namely, when I wanted to send a link/file to users in a community where posting links or files were not allowed, or being on the receiving end of that, wanting to privately message someone asking for something.
Tbh, it’s not a system that needs to be overhauled and enhanced. It should just do the bare minimum of letting people privately message each other in a more streamlined format (a chat, as opposed to the equivalent of sending e-mails back and forth)
I did use it a few times, but only as a 1-to-1 message. The inbox was more efficient anyway.
I think they had subreddit general chat but I’ve never used that.
I’ve seen it used for live events (think press releases or keynotes), which I think is probably the best use case for it. As a general chat platform it’s pretty useless.
Did anyone actually use Reddit Chat? Didn’t notice it even existed for a really long time
Yes, there’s a group chat I share with others with a common interest and we’ve all become supportive friends. I also have a mod chat with my fellow mods because it’s way easier than using the native mod functions on reddit. The mod chat is actually pretty bad and harder to get to, plus when notifications work (they’re not working correctly now for chat), it was also easier.
I also had some friendships chats with people one on one that I’ve gotten to know from my years on reddit. All gone. The only thing left is the new group chat and our mod chat because it was most recent. It’s honestly a bummer.
