1y ago

PSA: Reddit is Forcing Users to Accept Personalized Ads

www.macrumors.com PSA: Reddit is Forcing Users to Accept Personalized Ads

Reddit this week announced that it will no longer allow Reddit users to opt out of ad personalization, which means that ads on the platform will be...

TL;DR: Reddit is removing the option to opt out of ad personalization, targeting ads based on user activity. Some specific ad categories can still be limited, but there's no more opt-out option.

100 comments

I have the feeling the whole internet is turning into shit rapidly. Youtube is crap, Reddit is crap, everything you use needs a cloud account, my doorbell is sending me notifications about a new product, wtf is up with that. I paid for that thing and now you send me ads? Pisses me off. This corporate greed is getting too much.
- There are upsides to it, like me spending considerably less time on the random internet surfing because my annoyance overshadows my dopamine kick.
  
  Conversely, I'm so opposed to the enshitification that I've carefully tailored my internet usage to places that aren't shit and have no prospect of becoming shit, like Lemmy. Since I don't even have the motivation of not supporting an evil company, I'm more addicted that ever.
- It’s really accelerated in the past few years. It’s nearly impossible to just read an article or use any product without giving it some kind of information. Lots of people (myself included many times unfortunately) just accept this. I mean, what can be done? If you want or need to use the thing you almost have no choice. If you want to avoid information leaks or being tracked you have to do so much research and work just to find an option, and then hope they don’t get purchased by a company that will reverse it all. I hate it.
  
  I mean, what can be done? If you want or need to use the thing you almost have no choice.
  We have to act collectively.
  Don't buy products or use services that require personal info. Of course, this means being willing to make do without some things, at least until they're convinced/forced to change or alternatives appear. In cases where the thing is a necessity, push back (clearly, articulately, and firmly) before sharing your info. Let them know that they're losing goodwill by being nosy, and that you'll stop buying from them as soon as you can.
  Look for products/services that respect our privacy, and support them when possible.
  Pass legislation that forbids needlessly collecting such info. Some regions (e.g. European Union, California) have already taken small steps in this direction. We need to take it further, everywhere.
  I think it might also be helpful to have some kind of (independently verified) privacy labeling program for products and services. It would ease some of the burden from consumers when shopping around, and could become an easy marketing tool for companies that want to attract customers.
  
  Yes it’s hard to deal with. I try to do my best to boycot companies that do this. Youtube, Reddit, Google search and chrome are things I don’t use anymore and the list keeps growing. My next doorbell will be a different brand but choices are limited ofcourse.
  On the other hand, there are more and more alternatives popping up lately, Mastodon, Lemmy, Peertube. This is a sign that people are getting tired of this shit. I hope this trend continues.
  
  And the big companies are intentionally breaking their services on clients that give any measure of control back to the users. That should be a blatant anti-trust suit, but they don't care. Just the cost of doing business if for some reason one of the politicians they own actually takes any action against them.
- IMHO it's cyclical.
  Computers started out client server because of limited computing capacity
  Then everybody got a PC and for a while, physical media were faster than downloads
  Then we got oodles of bandwidth, so servers seemed practical again
  Now servers are taking advantage of the trust we've placed in them
  Next, we'll all enjoy a brief P2P revolution. Hooray!
  After that, homomorphic encryption will make servers seem appealing again
  Even farther into the future, the attacks against that encryption will no longer be tolerable
  It will be decades more before humanity accepts the teachings of Richard Stallman.
  
  Could you point me to some starting points or good reads by Richard Stallman? He got a solution to the cycle, then I'm down.
- Except it's possible to work around it, with a minimal amount of knowledge, or by using alternatives.
  Reddit? Lemmy.
  Twitter? Mastodon.
  YouTube? Peertube. For youtube just use piped.video
  Ads? UBlock.
- My TV has ads. Not the cable part, like when I turn it on, the menu has ads. I paid $2k for it.

They just went from we love you guys to we don’t even give a fuck bend over boy in like 6 months.
Twitter has also shifted into a dystopian QQ wannabe.
Meta has been a dumpster fire for a decade now.
Tik Tok. heavy sigh
This kinda seems like end of times.
- if this is your version of the end of times, I suggest you take a look out your window at the burning hellscape of western north america and other locations around the globe. I also hope you're not too attached to birds or polar bears.
  
  My world ends whenever someone doesn't understand hyperbole
  
  birds or polar bears
  Phew! Luckily I just like penguins...
- If it's the end of the era of social media, I'm plenty ok with that. Shit's been cancer for almost a decade now.
  
  And may it usher in the era of antisocial media. The era where we all stop trying to impress each other, monetize each other, and just buy a thing and have it do the thing we bought it for, and not be bothered. Long may it reign.

I'm increasingly glad I got the fuck out of there.
- Same.

Glad I left. It can only get worse...

Some of us remember there was a time when things like Reddit didn't exist, and neither did Facebook, Twitter etc. Lots of people lived just fine without them then. It's completely possible to take a hard line on this stuff and just refuse to use sites/apps/products that don't respect your privacy. Remember, there's always a smaller, friendlier or mechanical version.
- Reddit was unique - at least in my experience - in that it expanded my horizons and allowed me to grow in many ways.
  Before Reddit I just searched out sites / forums about my interests.
  Reddit allowed me to organically gain new interests through daily interactions.
  I’ve left it since they killed Apollo but I will admit that there were various good communities that I do miss!

Is that even legal in the EU?
- In select countries, the option to turn off ad personalization will remain, allowing Reddit to continue to comply with GDPR restrictions.
  
  If it's anything like Twitter, it resigns you up to them anyway. There's no "turn off all" as far as I could see. The missus has to run some JS to untick all the boxes for her. Next week she'll go back and it will have ticked more.

Who cares? Haven't touched Reddit since they turned maggot.
- I still dabble over there, but I had long forgotten that they have ads because I use uBlock Origin.

"I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Spezymandias, Admin of Kings;
Look on my Reddit, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
- Hey great poem
  
  Great username. Worth a follow.

Correct me if im wrong, but didn't EU ban this kind of practice?
If true, reddit would be fucked on the European market

I thought all you guys left Reddit already
- I left r/popular and r/all but lemmy still not yet an adequate replacement for non-tech niche hobbies and interests.
  
  Can you give me an example of subreddits that you still follow? I'm setting up a fediversed instance on alien.top, which would mean that you'd be able to follow/interact with people still on reddit from the fediverse.
  
  @gonta
  Is that mostly due to a lack of critical mass of users, or are there other factors?
  @JCreazy

Get Mozilla Firefox and add uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and Ghostery plugins.
For over the top action, but a Raspberry Pi with an ethernet port and install PiHole and change your router DNS to the IP address of the PiHole and bask in glory that 99.999% of the crap out there, will not come or go out of your household.
- It boggles the mind that there are people who still don't use adblocking measures these days.

I don't like Reddit.
- 'Tis a silly place.
  
  On second thought, let's not go there.

I would care if I used Reddit, but I don't.

Who views ads in Reddit? Except for all the shill posts, that is.
- I'm pretty sure it's everyone who uses their app, since every third post and every fourth comment on it is an ad of some sort (or at least that's how it seemed). I'm sure anyone on old.r with an adblocker is unaffected but during the brief time I had their app installed there were enough ads to render it unusable and unnavigable.
- Shill posts, shill posts everywhere.
- There's enough astroturf on Reddit for a continent's worth of obnoxious suburban fake lawns.

funny as im seeing this while nuking my old reddit account. havent used it since they took apollo from me and honestly i won't miss it. they are just digging their own grave at this point.

For those who are paranoid about this - some of you have a Facebook account, and half of you have a Google-filled smartphone. Privacy is important, but IMO there should be a balance between convenience and privacy - unless you actually do stuff that requires the utmost privacy or you need to stay fully anonymous everywhere as much as possible.
Division of identity - that is, having unique profiles/identities for different types of things you do on the web, using alias emails and anonymous email for certain things etc. - is a more viable strategy than trying to be 100% anonymous on the web.
Commercial social media that is free does and will track your activity on the site, whether for personalized ads or for algorithm purposes. Lemmy and Mastodon don't because they're FOSS, and don't run on ads (99.9% of the time).
- Apple is not considerably better for privacy either by rhe way. They just pay more for marketing that says they're more private than the rest of big tech.
- Commercial social media that is free does and will track your activity on the site
  I don't think many people have an issue with this. It's all the bullshit they pull to track you off the site that is the problem, and they do a lot of that.
  Edit: and the selling of that information to third parties that you would never consent to. That's also a huge issue.

They will not be forcing me to accept personalized ads. How are they going to personalize them when I have no reddit account, block their cookies, use a VPN and change my IP address often, and don't use their website.
- Isn't it sad that we have to do all this to prevent our information being spread around the corporate world like a virus
  
  They should teach defensive web-browsing in schools.
- Well if you don't use their website you aren't a user.

I don’t understand how they can do this with iPhone when Apple requires all apps to prompt with the option to deny tracking?

I don't think my adblocker cares what kind of ads they're trying to show me. If anything their algorithms will just get confused for why this guy who used to be here hours every day now only comes to watch war videos once a day but no longer comments or upvotes anything.
- How are people adblocking them on mobile?
  
  Firefox lets you adblock.
  a pihole can get you 90% of the way and it works in all apps and any other smart devices you have., but it doesn't work well if the site isn't using a 3rd party ad service (think YouTube, facebook)
  
  Which mobile? On Android you can use AdAway. A network level adblocker on your router can also take care of many ads for every device connected to it.
  
  Blokada. Firefox with uBlock Origin.

Time to poison their data, I guess.

I use Jshelter alongside Ublock. They’re a good combination.

Best of luck with that.

Have you heard anything about uBlock origin, Ghostery and similar programs?

Here's the best summary I could make of the linked article
Reddit is removing the option for users to opt out of personalized ads. The site will now target ads based on a user's activity and account information. Reddit claims this requires little personal data and will improve ad relevance. However, users will no longer have control over whether their data is used this way. They can only filter ads by category, not opt out entirely. Personalized ads will still be optional in some countries due to GDPR laws.
Overall, Reddit users can expect to see more targeted ads based on their engagement with different communities and content.
This comment was generated by a bot. Send comments and complaints via private message.

I mean, does it really matter? At the end of the day, an obnoxious ad is an obnoxious ad regardless of wether it’s targets or not. Or am I missing something?
Any company/developer that puts ads in their app deserves to fade into irrelevant obscurity. And the more people put up with it and pay into it to remove the ads, the more you’re rewarding the behavior.
And it’s ironic that I’m sure a large percentage of people that pay to remove ads are the same people that whine about people pre-ordering games.
Sorry for the rant. But this shit aggravates me.
- Or am I missing something?
  I think the only distinguishing factor is to target, it must gather data. So that means your activity is being tracked, stored, and shared with third parties. Of course for some people this will matter more than to others, but for those privacy focused you now know for certain they are storing data on you, potentially making money off of selling it, with no way to opt out.
  
  Good point. I missed that.

100 comments

Here's the best summary I could make of the linked article