The final nail in Reddit's coffin dropped today:
Dear User,
We will soon begin rolling out changes to Reddit's User settings. It is getting a refresh that includes changes to ad personalization, privacy preferences, and location settings.
As part of these changes, we are retiring a setting that you have previously turned on that limited how we used your activity from the Reddit platform to personalize ads. We have replaced the setting with a new option to select categories of ads that you may not wish to see.
More details are available in our announcement and help center.
These changes are rolling out starting today and you may see the changes over the next few days.
Users will be tracked with no opt out. Posts may be monetized, which will make content even worse No refund or any type of usable credit for users that spent hundreds on Reddit coins The entire vibe has done a 180° since all these new "positive changes" are rolled out.
I don't like reddit... But here's my question though, since lemmy is federated and all that data is available for access... what's stopping anyone to integrate into the system, collect it all, analyze it and sell it?
Good job. You now have tons of data. Where do you show the ads?
The other websites you track the user to.
How are you tracking them to other sites? There's not really anything that links a user account to an actual person in the data that gets federated.
Good thing it's anonymized as fuck and lemmy does not have an official app that tracks it either. Scraping isn't cheap and the upside is basically nothing.
So, what is the point of buying said data if it's all available for access?
Somebody is going to detect that and hopefully fediverse will defederate from those instances