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1y ago

Reddit abandons user privacy - Ars Technica

arstechnica.com Reddit forces personalized ads, starts X-like user payment program

Like it or not, Reddit wants to "improve ad performance."

I left a couple of months ago. Couldn't be happier.

The writing is on the wall. The leader thinks the Genius-with-hair-transplants is a superstar, despite destroying a globally recognised brand. Inspired by this, Spez is trying to get Reddit ready for an IPO. This means, maximise profits by any means.

BlueReddit @feddit.de

Random_German_Name @feddit.de

1y ago

Reddit abandons user privacy - Ars Technica

arstechnica.com /gadgets/2023/09/reddit-blocks-opting-out-of-personalized-ads-starts-paying-users/

87 1

Reddit @lemmy.world

HLMenckenFan @lemmy.world

1y ago

Reddit forces personalized ads, starts X-like user payment program

arstechnica.com /gadgets/2023/09/reddit-blocks-opting-out-of-personalized-ads-starts-paying-users/

367 44

Privacy Guides @lemmy.one

spaceghoti @lemmy.one

1y ago

Reddit forces personalized ads, starts X-like user payment program

arstechnica.com /gadgets/2023/09/reddit-blocks-opting-out-of-personalized-ads-starts-paying-users/

85 22

181 comments

I love how everybody is so busy about mining your behavior for ad tracking data and then like 2/3 of the ads I actually see are utterly irrelevant gut doctor / toenail fungus / 17 Most Embarrassing Topless Celebrity Moments crap.
(I think the reality is that they're mining that data to identify a small number of people susceptible to high-value scams - like getting addicted to an F2P mobile game and spending $1000s on it - and the rest of us just get generic infill)
- Yea it feels like something has been rotten with the ads industry for a long while. I’ve read a few pieces here and there about how it could collapse and that it’s built almost entirely on dumb lies. But it’s still here.
  I’m no economist, but my best guess is that it’s a little like war and the effort we put into it. Complete trashy waste almost all the time, except for when one person or country decides to put effort into it, because then you have to as well or run huge risks. We’d all be better off without ads, including brands/companies, but when one is doing it every company has to too.
  
  Ads are meant to get brand recognition out there for most things. Then when you're in a store you buy what you've heard of before. They wouldn't do it if it wasn't effective.
  
  Yea it feels like something has been rotten with the ads industry for a long while.
  Advertising only has as much value to the advertiser as it can get in modified consumer behavior.
  If I only have $100/month in truly discretionary income, all the advertising in the world is only fighting for that $100. Realistically, though, we're not all susceptible to the same advertising influences, which is why ad personalization exists. But personalize it all you want and you're still, at most, getting a few percent of my monthly budget to shift towards what you want me to buy.
  That means that advertising is only really worth it for whales. The type of people who might buy hundreds of dollars of goods or services through clicking on ads on Instagram, who have that combination of a huge amount of discretionary income and are fickle enough that they might impulse buy big ticket items.
  
  built entirely on dumb lies
  I see you have learned about “impressions”.
- The simplest explanation is generally the right one. Online advertising is a scam. They manipulate the numbers to create the illusion of value. Scammers scamming scammers. Liars and thieves all the way down.
  
  Sounds perfectly capitalist and job creating.
- As a data programmer I can tell you for a fact that no amount of data can salvage shitty dev time.
- Your data isn’t just being sold to advertisers. There are all kinds of companies that are willing to pay big bucks to get near real-time insights into consumer behaviour, prices, manufacturing and anything else that can be tracked somehow.
  Edit: And there’s a near 0% chance that you’re not part of a dataset that’s being sold to someone, somewhere…
- The reality is that the internet itself is at a tipping point. Advertising platforms know their service is basically worthless as most people use an adblocker, and most companies have idiotic marketing teams that don't know how to properly sell their product/service in the first place. Companies are seeing less and less ROI on their marketing budget. Without ads, the internet goes bye-bye, or it turns into a subscription model for every website.
  
  Or - as many of us hope for - we manage to make the economics of the fediverse work (don't forget to support your instances, people) and the most valuable users move to blissful ad-free places like Lemmy and Mastodon.
  Indeed, throw in open-source AI (thanks, weirdly, to Zuckerberg) and Wikipedia and you can start to see the contours of a post-advertising internet.
  
  Advertising platforms know their service is basically worthless as most people use an adblocker
  most people aren't tech-savvy enough to do that
- You see ads? Bruh…
  
  ^ me when I visit friends...
- Why don't you use applications, plugins and/or DNS settings to never see any ad?
- Think you got the ads meant for me
- I have spent thousands of dollars trying to cure my toenail fungus in the last three months.
  I guess I’m a toenail fungus whale?
  
  Have you tried oral terbinafine?
- Where are you seeing ads? Do you not have uBlock Origin installed?
- Maybe you are good in protecting your privacy
- I love how everybody is so busy about mining your behavior for ad tracking data and then like 2/3 of the ads I actually see are utterly irrelevant gut doctor / toenail fungus / 17 Most Embarrassing Topless Celebrity Moments crap.
  Have you had yourself checked out for toenail fungus bro? Might be a thing.
- They obviously have major whales as customers not caring as much for interest groups trying to get them in. These ad companies have a much clearer image of people as anyone might expect.

And let me guess...there are a bunch of Redditors on Reddit posting on Reddit about how awful Reddit is. And they are giving each other gold stars and slaps on the back for how great their Reddit posts are on Reddit on how bad Reddit is.
- They actually just got rid of the stars, now you just tip people
  https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/16ryhv9/celebrating_great_content_is_as_good_as_gold/
  
  Permanently Deleted
  
  Holy shit I left because I was thinking reddit was over (sort of). That post is beyond what I thought reddit would do. It's like they're trying to fuck themselves and everyone involved for chump change.
  
  This is hilarious. This is WORSE than Digg v4. (Though Reddit did a Digg v4 yeeeears ago when they installed /popular/ and began inflating vote counts heavily)
  
  There's really a guy on there that's shocked that he spent $300+ on coins that give you nothing and that they turned out to be useless. They also have the same regular users saying that they'll finally quit this time, but they're just lying to themselves and for karma. They financially incentivize the website to get worse and are surprised when it does.
- I don't think I've read a truer statement on the internet.

Permanently Deleted
- Regardless. Fuck what Reddit has become. I really hope that people will see the light and move to Lemmy.
  
  Amen.
- I mean, California bans this as well and they aren’t exempt despite being where Reddit is located. Spez doesn’t seem to care what is legal.
- A testament to how important good legislation is... most—if not all—privacy issues that we face today are in large part due to legislative failures.
  
  Legislation and enforcement. There are countless laws on the books that are not enforced. Generally speaking, they may as well not exist.
  
  Yeah I gotta say, I make sure to vote in every election to the European parliament, and I have always voted for the representatives with the strongest privacy oriented agendas, and over the decades I have been blown away by some of the great legislation we have seen with regards to regulating the capitalist hydra trying to devour our freedom of speech and interaction online.
  Holding gargantuan companies accountable like Google, Microsoft, FaceBook et al, dishing out serious fines, GDPR... EU may not do everything right, but these things alone makes me happy to be in it.

Permanently Deleted
- wait, it’s all enshittification?
  always has been

If you wanna keep your bookmarks and the subreddits (communities) that you're subscribed to before deleting your account, I made a free tool to help you store and offload that data.
It's called Reddit Account Manager, and it's 100% free.
You can also use it to manage your Lemmy account(s), of course.
- Thanks for posting the link, just saw this news and decided to finally jump ship. Between this and Reddit wanting to pay for use it’s high time I leave it.
  Isn’t there something that scrapes posts from Reddit like a newsfeed? Or do most people just use lemmy.world now?
  
  Isn’t there something that scrapes posts from Reddit like a newsfeed?
  If you got an Android, there's Stealth. On iOS, you're SOL as far as I know.
  Or do most people just use lemmy.world now?
  This would be the best avenue, yeah. I thought it was gonna be difficult to leave Reddit too, but thankfully, I was wrong.

I haven't been back to reddit since a couple days before the protests started, when I knew reddit was going to die and switched over to Lemmy. After reading this news I finally went back today and deleted my account. What a bunch of fuckin idiots in charge over there.
- it's not going to die, it will be kinda like Facebook is now, very slow death spiral
  
  That's like saying Digg isn't dead because the website is still there. But what was once the front page of the Internet is a forgotten footnote that now stands as a bot content farm. Reddit will go the same way.
  
  Yeah that's true, it won't disappear anytime soon and I should have said "die for me" as I could see where it was heading. But is a zombie really alive?

Reddit's announcement, authored by Reddit's head of privacy, going by "snoo-tuh" on the platform (Reddit has refused to confirm the identity of admins representing Reddit on the site),
Irony
- Reminds me of this classic: Anonymous government officials push for open government
- someone on the article's discussion outed the person because she used that title ("head of privacy of reddit") on linkedin
  
  She got outed again today by the reporter of The Verge article.

It's a shame that so many people will still use it.
- I still use it, just far less, only really for a couple of subreddits that just don't have the same experience here. The mobile app is so shit though that it forces me not to use it on my phone!
  
  These days the only time I use reddit is when I'm searching for some obscure question and that's the only place with an obvious answer. Otherwise, Lemmy is doing everything I needed reddit to do.
  
  I still visit a few small subreddits for answers (for example, /r/unraid) but not made a single post since reddit effectively got rid of most third party apps.
  Once Lemmy (or anywhere else) can cover the questions I look up, that will be 100% the end for me.
  
  Same for me. But I don't use Reddit's own app on mobile. I use Boost, because it's still allowed for moderators, since Reddit's app is shit for that. Doesn't matter if you aren't yet a moderator. Go there on a browser on a PC or Mac. Create a new subreddit. Great, now you're its moderator. Then enter with Boost (on Android), and that's it.
  Anyway, the more people leave Reddit to cross the pond and get to Lemmy, the best.
  
  Relay for Reddit still works
- Not my fault stuff i'm interested in isn't moving here
  
  Permanently Deleted
  
  It is partly your fault since you are apparently doing nothing to help that... do you think stuff happens magically without anyone taking the steps for it? You have everything you need to help it, do that instead of being a fucking idiot.

I guess they didn’t make API millions by charging usage fees? Scraping the bottom of the barrel now while people use the site less and less.
- The API fees clearly weren't made to make money directly though, it was meant to get rid of 3rd party clients so they could more effectively do what the OP is about.
- I bet the they lost single percent of people. And most use it and don't care.
  
  I still use it with patched Boost. The moment the API is gone I am too.
- We don't know their actual engagement numbers, what I do know is: quality on non-default subs has pitfalled. That is subjective, but its common across other reddit users I know.
  
  I've also heavily felt the quality decline.
  I've kept using reddit because relay for reddit kept working without paying... until today.
  Fuck spez
  
  Both the quality has declined, and the tone seems consistently more negative. Like there's an even bigger majority of angry teenagers running the site.

Ars and Reddit are under the same parent company, conde nast or however that's all structured. I also have noticed ars seems to write very frequently about Reddit, even if it is usually in a critical light.
I get mixed feelings about articles like this one.
- I wouldn't say they have a disproportionate amount of Reddit coverage, spez' shenanigans are well within their usual scope. Before the api-pocilipse I don't remember the last Reddit column they put out.
  It think the editorial direction follows the interests of the kind of readers they get. Not so many Facebook or Tiktok stories unless there's particularly egregious behaviour. Their readers are too young to care as much about the former and too old to care about the latter.
  Out of all the social media, xitter gets the most, but then every day is clownshoes there. As Reddit started aping them, they got more coverage.
- They spell the correct relationship out clearly in the article:
  Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.
- They've been separate for more than a decade now
  
  It's at the bottom of the article:
  Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.
  
  No they got bought back a few years later. They're majority owned by the same parent company as Ars. Tencent also has some pretty big investments in Reddit.

I read the announcement about changes to privacy on their website while signing in to delete my account literal second ago and clicked the link in the official post: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/16tqihd/settings_updateschanges_to_ad_personalization/
Safety & Privacy Settings
I kid you not, this is what it shows:
Edit: misspelling
- I tried reading them. I can't because the fucking website doesn't scale to my phone. It realises something should change, but it's so shitty I can immediately see the edges and see text, images and flair cross over where it shouldn't. Ffs.

It's worth pointing out that Ars Technica's parent, Advance Publications, owns a stake in Reddit. And they have been giving no quarter to enshittifiers.

Fucking capitalists

As I said in an earlier post, better get out now and migrate while the communities are still intact rather than slowly bleeding out due to these policies. There is going to be one kind of content on Reddit and that's the ad-friendly, corporate supported kind.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
Reddit spokesperson Sierra Gamelgaard declined to provide further clarification when reached by Ars Technica for comment.
Meanwhile, Reddit's policy update aligns with its outspoken goals to become profitable and its plans to eventually go public.
Other privacy policy changes announced Wednesday include allowing users to choose to see "fewer" ads regarding alcohol, dating, gambling, pregnancy and parenting, and weight loss.
However, clickbait and shock value posts are a strong deviation from what people tend to treasure most about Reddit: real human advice, discussions, and insight.
A support page says Reddit's Contributor Program will avoid "fraud, spam, bad actors, and illegal activities" by putting users through Persona's Know Your Customer screening.
Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.
The original article contains 785 words, the summary contains 125 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
- good bot
- good bot

I think 99% of my interactions with Reddit these days are pulling RSS feeds, most of which just get marked as read. I almost never load the actual site anymore.
- Any app or so to do that? Would love an RSS feed Reddit just for reading
  
  I use Inoreader, works quite well for reddit.
- Damn...i gotta do this...so many threads though.... I did this a while back with youtube and it was very much worth it.

They haven't been trustworthy in years! Reddit is heavily astroturfed by government agents. Ft Elgin was the "most reddit addicted" city and it's also where they conduct propaganda ops. They quietly scrubbed that fact. If you like reddit you must be waiting for your pension from uncle sam otherwise you're a zuck style dumb fuck
- Don’t act like Lemmy can’t be immediately astroturfed as well.
  
  No man made organization is infallible. Due to Lemmy's decentralized nature though it's objectively more difficult. Astroturfing or completely co-opting all possible instances would be quite an impressive feat.
  
  True, yet it still isn't, as far as I can see.

Glad I ripped that band aid off already. Only reason I go there is for buildapcsales now.
- I tried really hard to get the !buildapcsales@lemmy.ml community going here, but I got hit by someone running a script that massively downvoted all my posts going back a month, and it was really disheartening so I stopped.
  
  Damn, that's just sad...

smug face of superiority for not using reddit, facebook, instagram, snapchat, onlyfans nor tiktok, from my linux machine 😏
- Permanently Deleted
- Arch?
  
  Nah, Tumbleweed 🦎
  
  lmao imagine not rolling your own distro

I've thought a lot about this, and I'd like to say: "Reddit can kiss my entire ass."
- that's a lot of kissing

Finally made the jump and just deleted my account... Sad, but their own fault
- You had to delete yours? All of mine were permabanned long ago.
- I just tried to delete and I keep getting an error

I've wasted a lot of time. but not on reddit 🥀 These sites feel like the big 3 car co's. future is hard. some looking to cash out

I got a message from Reddit
https://old.reddit.com/r/u_cy_narrator/comments/16w4uzj/witness_the_carnage/
- I still had my Reddit account just for posteroties sake. I don't anymore now. I refuse to accept changes or rules that allow for them to steal all my data. I've not gotten to this point with Google or Microsoft yet, but they're not far off the chopping block.
  
  But there is a second option, the one I plan to do with this current Reddit account and my Facebook account.
  Dont delete, dont say you will delete. Just stop using. When its out of sight, it becomes out of mind. Maby deactivate Facebook account at most but I think it will be okay if it just stays there
  
  BTW, because I use third party apps all my wall posts got turned NSFW even though none of them are. I wonder if it is indeed the end of time.

Who is still on reddit?
- Permanently Deleted
- Me, none of my niche communities are over here
  
  Me too. Only in 2 subreddits.
  
  Well make it
- The website got flooded with Facebook-types years ago. A lot of the audience are just Facebook mums and dads that found out their anti-vaxx rants weren’t being heard anymore, and TikTok kids who just laugh the cat pics and upvote blindly without commenting.
- Bots and thots
- I go there to watch war videos and porn but 100% of my commenting has moved to Lemmy.
- Bots?
  
  normies.
- theres only one type of content lemmy has yet to master compared to reddit
  and i use reddit results for google searches still otherwise reddit is ass the app is embarrassing
- This time of year, I really miss the college football sub, but I have not succumbed to temptation.
- A lot of people. Many just don't care that much about where they get cute cat pics from.

Step 1: reanimate your old reddit account
Step 2: post inane borderline degen shit
Step 3: get every former redditor on lemmy to upboat your post
Step 4:????
Step 5: get rich
- Step 4.5: Use the money to help fund Lemmy

Reddit abandons users ~~privacy~~
Better headline
- They're not mutually exclusive.

While this is the final straw for me, there is still one thing reddit is good for, searching: is [thing] worth it reddit. You were a good friend Snoo...
- If you use SearXNG sometimes it will load a feddit instance of what you want.
  
  Nice I will have to check that out. Btw what is your favorite searXNG instance?
- We have the moral high ground.

Thanks for the reminder. Reddit account deleted.

Well, if I hadn't already ditched it I would do so now.

This along with the new social credit, starting to wonder if Reddit is selling data to China. Say something bad about China or Winnie the Pooh and they at best turn you away, or at worst incarcerate you.
- Didn't Tencent invest into it? There were a lot of asian-targeting communities they could've been interested in besides affecting american\EU politics. I believe a lot of chinese expats and even chinese people over VPN frequented reddit.

Everything I've read after leaving that site has been proof i made the right choice to go.
Anybody still there? Whats the ads like? Does advlock work?

gentrification of reddit.
'you will all be replaced by yuppies who dont know what privacy is'

If they are storing a this data anyway to make the thing work (so you can go and un-upvote the thing you upvoted five years ago), how is "privacy" reduced if they also have the as system decide to show you an ad because people who upvoted that thing tend to click on the ad?
No new people or businesses are being given any new information bout anyone. Is it because what used to be a passive database is now starting to think, and your privacy is infringed because the system itself is now looking at you when you didn't expect it to?

whats wrong with personalized ads? is it much different from booking different TV channels for different audiences?
- Personalized ads would be fine if it had a checklist or tag/category feature. This is straight up data mining.

181 comments