Reddit abandons user privacy - Ars Technica

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.

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.

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.

Why don't you use applications, plugins and/or DNS settings to never see any ad?

You see ads? Bruh…

Where are you seeing ads? Do you not have uBlock Origin installed?

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?

Think you got the ads meant for me

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.

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 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/

I don't think I've read a truer statement on the internet.

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?

it's not going to die, it will be kinda like Facebook is now, very slow death spiral

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

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!

Not my fault stuff i'm interested in isn't moving here

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.

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 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

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.

good bot

Don’t act like Lemmy can’t be immediately astroturfed as well.

Any app or so to do that? Would love an RSS feed Reddit just for reading

Damn...i gotta do this...so many threads though.... I did this a while back with youtube and it was very much worth it.

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.

that's a lot of kissing

Neeeeerd!

Although you're right.

Arch?

You had to delete yours? All of mine were permabanned long ago.

I just tried to delete and I keep getting an error

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.

People who don’t know how to sign up to sites that don’t have “Log In with Facebook”.

Me, none of my niche communities are over here

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?

I go there to watch war videos and porn but 100% of my commenting has moved to Lemmy.

Bots and thots

A lot of people. Many just don't care that much about where they get cute cat pics from.

This time of year, I really miss the college football sub, but I have not succumbed to temptation.

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

Step 4.5: Use the money to help fund Lemmy

They're not mutually exclusive.

We have the moral high ground.

If you use SearXNG sometimes it will load a feddit instance of what you want.

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.

Personalized ads would be fine if it had a checklist or tag/category feature. This is straight up data mining.