TL;DR To make messaging on Reddit faster and more reliable, we’re replacing Private Messages (PMs) with Reddit Chat and inbox notifications. This transition is necessary to maintain and improve Reddit’s messaging infrastructure. We aim to make these changes with minimal disruption while improving the user experience.
Timeline: Starting at the end of March, we'll roll out these changes in phases over the next three months to ensure everything goes smoothly
they probably know the legacy users/og users like us would bounce from reddit the moment they remove it? they havnt figure a way to introduce the shittier new UI in such a way that people will stay?
To make Reddit faster, simpler, and easier to use, we needed to unify our messaging platforms. This consolidation helps us focus on improving one system instead of maintaining multiple. Plus, Reddit Chat's infrastructure is built for the future, unlike the PM system which is about as old as Reddit itself.
We’re sharing this change early because we want your feedback! We've spent months talking to mods, developers, and users to ensure this migration works for everyone (shoutout to u/RemindMeBot fans). But there might be scenarios we've missed, and we need your input to address them. You can share feedback directly with the team working on this project in the comments below.
My sides went into orbit. They aren't even trying to come up with believable lies any more, right?
If the concern was to make Reddit "faster, simpler, and easier to use", they'd ditch chat and keep DMs
"muh futchure" fallacy (appeal to novelty)
pretending that they want/care for user feedback
...I think that the reason is twofold: 1) it's easier to plug advertisement into the new chat system, and 2) chat only works in new.reddit so they can use it as an excuse to deprecate yet another old.reddit system.
pratically what youtube did, got rid of thier DM/pm and forced everyone to comment on videos, so it can be astroturfed and artificially boosts engagement.
And, as usual, advertisers are to be blamed: they're the ones interested on "engagement", and indirectly siccing platforms to artificially inflate their engagement numbers.
It was always a mystery that they maintained two features with basically the same function in parallel for so long. Hopefully they made it better than the last time I gave it a try, because otherwise, oof.
Just a heads up some programs like Redact (for deleting social media posts including Reddit) on iOS require a subscription if you want to delete chat history vs free for dm. I recommend using shreddit anyway, and I would seriously consider you do so asap.
To better monetize your attention and data, we’ve decided to streamline all communication into a single, ad-optimized, engagement-maximized system. Maintaining multiple messaging systems was cutting into our profit margins, so we’re sunsetting the old one — which, let’s be honest, wasn’t generating nearly enough revenue anyway.
Reddit Chat is engineered for the future (read: future monetization opportunities), unlike PMs, which were quaint relics from a time when this site wasn’t a corporate data-mining operation.
We’re announcing this change now so we can say we “listened” when it inevitably breaks the way you use Reddit. We’ve talked to a hand-picked selection of mods and power users (mostly the ones who didn’t complain too much), but there’s still time for you to provide feedback we can pretend to consider. Drop your thoughts in the comments below, where they’ll be skimmed for marketing insights.
Sync for Reddit does not have a chat function, so I won't be using DMs... Not that I even care for it, I guess my "chat request" feed will be bigger for the next time I check on the desktop website (with Ublock Origin ofc) 😅
enshittification, its how youtube went, they removed DM/PM and encourage community chats, and video comments, because they cant mine or sell data easily on PMs.
Also for context for Lemmy users reading this, this is the link I see:
https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1jf1dy5/https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/1jf1bxy/private_messages_will_be_replaced_with_reddit//