Reddit recently removed years of chat and message archives from users’ accounts without warning as part of an infrastructure upgrade. Many Redditors were upset to discover that their chat histories from before January 2023 were no longer accessible. Reddit claims they only migrated data from 2023 forward during the transition to the new chat infrastructure. Some users were able to retrieve some of their old messages by requesting their Reddit data, though others reported that not all messages were recovered. Along with this change, Reddit has recently made other unpopular decisions like ending Reddit Gold, showing a lack of communication and consideration for users’ sentimental attachment to their online data.
To my knowledge, Reddit is owned by private companies and investors. Blackrock and Vanguard have no ownership stake, or a very small and very indirect ownership stake.
For what it’s worth, a significant percentage of every (reasonably liquid) public company on Earth is owned by Vanguard and Blackrock, because those companies manage trillions of dollars in assets (many of which are middle-class people’s retirement investments). They aren’t a conspiracy. They’re asset managers, and mostly passive managers at that.