Reddit abandons user privacy - Ars Technica
arstechnica.com
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.
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.
You're putting too much faith in the talent and insight of marketing executives. Large companies throw tens of millions of dollars at their marketing department. They'll spend the money on a diverse ad campaign that ticks boxes, not one that is actually effective. People don't buy based on the commercial they saw last. People buy what's shoved in their faces.
That's great, but you're still wrong.
Absolutely spot on reply.
Brand recognition and memory triggers is what big brand ads are about.
Cleanex, Hoover, Coke, most cologne/perfume ads, Old Spice...
Late reply, but-- the above makes much sense to me when it comes to inexperienced / first-time buyers of a product. And/or buyers who simply get in to a rut and keep buying that product without trying anything else out.
But for everyone else, I would think they sample enough tissues, sodas, perfumes, etc to gain an understanding of the ins & outs of a product, settling on choices which best represent their favorites / desired price point. For bigger-cost stuff like vacuum cleaners, I'm thinking people in this group also learn to use review resources to evaluate best choices rather than buy a Hoover just because some ads ran.
So what does this all mean? Aside from overlap between these two groups, that there's enough revenue being produced by the former childlike group such that ad systems can afford to almost completely ignore the latter, more adult group..?
The most effective ads I've seen in my lifetime have been podcast ads. I don't remember shit I see in mobile apps or on most corners of the internet. I could personally sell Blue Apron or Harry's Razors for all I've heard about them on podcasts though. The smartest companies allow the podcasters to joke around in their ads too. My Brother, My Brother, and Me will say some borderline offensive but hilarious stuff in their ads and I'll be damned if it doesn't keep me listening to their ads and hearing about the products being advertised.
They wouldn't do it if they didn't think it was effective.
You've forgotten the second layer of advertising, convincing companies they need to buy ads
Yeah, you go ahead and try to sell something to a mass market of people without ads or any brand recognition and let me know ow how that goes for you.
With very, very few exceptions, any time I see an ad I make a mental note to never buy that product. As such, most products I am familiar with(presumably because I saw an ad) I will not buy. The exception is pretty much just Hershey's chocolate bars, I can't live without them.
You had me on board until... Hershey's chocolate? That's not even chocolate anymore, it's like putrid brown wax!
And by definition it's still nothing but systematic brain washing. It's actually very 1984, and I can't understand how some people are ok with being manipulated into buying shit 24/7 and think that global perpetual invasive advertising is this perfectly normal thing that humanity has always had around...
I think capping it 1984 is a bit extreme, but I do agree with the overall sentiment. We've gone wag overboard in trying to monetize evert aspect of modern life. It gets old.
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.
It literally just dawned on me that some people intentionally click on ads. That's such an outlandish idea, it feels like fiction.
Clickthrough rates are one thing, but plenty of ads don't rely on the ad being in the actual chain of purchase. Ads for small stuff like movies, beverages, snacks, etc., or big stuff like cars, furniture, etc., try to get consumers to buy those things outside of the medium that the ad is being presented.
Plus native advertising when you're looking for a specific purchase can sometimes factor in. Someone might pay more for a particular hotel room to get more prominent placement in results, and I'm not going to intentionally ignore that sponsored placement when choosing between a bunch of hotels. Maybe the ad didn't actually make a difference (in theory my purchase decision would've considered that hotel anyway, and if it's the best for my needs then they would've gotten my business without the ad), but I've definitely purchased sponsored results when searching for a product that I already intend to buy.
And if it counts as an ad, paid referral links from recommendation websites I trust are an easy way to "support" an outlet that I use.
I'm not disagreeing with your point, but it's funny; if a result is "sponsored", my first thought is "what is wrong with it? Is it crap?".
I see you have learned about “impressions”.
I don’t believe I know what you’re referring to.
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.
A problem I see is scalability. For example on Lemmy once an instances hits a high enough user count the costs far outweigh donations and moderation becomes a full time job. It’s ad-free for now but costs are going to keep increasing as the demand for storage and constant moderation increase with the userbase.
most people aren't tech-savvy enough to do that
Anecdotal but I don’t know anyone, including old people who don’t use Adblock. Sure I installed it for half of the ones I know, but the others found it all on its own. The ads are just insanely disruptive so one could see why it would happen naturally.
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?
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?
Have you tried oral terbinafine?
It’s on my toenails, not my mouth.
Stop sticking your toes in your mouth. That oughta fix it
But it's not in my mouth.
In that case you need to start sticking your toes in your mouth. That oughta fix it
What’s with all you fucks and toes in mouths?
Y’all perverts.
It takes months (I think almost a year) for the toenails to fully regrow, and if its still in your feet you will reinfect your toenails while using toenail specific meds.
What worked, for someone I know, was the oral meds, using a separate towel for feet and not using it for nails, and after about a month when your feet are mostly healed you have to throw away and buy ALL of your shoes new.
They also replaced all of their socks, but you might be able to wash them in 90°C. (Issue is, most water heaters can't keep the temperature up for long enough so it's probably not worth the risk)
Think you got the ads meant for me
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.
Maybe you are good in protecting your privacy
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/
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.
It’s absolutely insane to me that anyone would have ever spent money on that shithole of a site, let alone $300 on worthless jerkoff tokens
I honestly find it worse then NFTs. With NFTs you're only destroying the environment a little bit and supporting much smaller mom & pop ponzi schemers. With Reddit you're supporting a mega corporation that is actively harmful to a much wider population.
I am guilty of buying reddit gold but it was a long time ago. And it was out of spite. by gawd id do it AGAIN.
That's the problem with traditional local internet currencies: reddit doesn't support them anymore and they become useless. If only these coins were crypto-blockchained nfts - if reddit decided to no longer support those, then they'd be just as useless, but much more bureaucratically documented.
I don't think I've read a truer statement on the internet.
I remember Reddit. It's a shame what happened there. 🤷♂️
I never thought I'd be talking about Reddit in the past tense like when I talk about Digg.
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?
If you got an Android, there's Stealth. On iOS, you're SOL as far as I know.
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.
Has Reddit's popularity dipped? We know its quality dipped, but it's probably better known now than it ever has been. Doesn't matter how many bots there are if there are also real people there too.
It's been hard to tell because reddit isn't releasing user retention statistics that are easy to find for other social media sites (minutes per user per day), also due to vote obfuscation it can be difficult to know from vote counts because they could just manipulate the bias.
There's also a lot of established communities around media/internet personalities that are largely unaffected by the changes and unlikely to move without significant fan pressure.
But people go where the content is, last time I checked the top 5 posts on Reddit were under 30k votes and were all tiktoks. That tells me that the content creators and the progressive adaptors have all moved on already, the rest is attrition over time as the service and content continues to stagnate.
The one thing reddit has propping it up artificially is it's remaining position as a valuable information resource particularly for niche topics and especially while the fediverse doesn't get boosted in seo yet.
Your last paragraph is precisely why I deleted all of my niche topic content that had a ton of votes. I didn’t want Reddit making SEO money with ads on my content since the service I used to post it was being forced to shut down.
I haven’t had a Reddit account since 1 month after Apollo shut down. Deleted everything.
I do visit still, using bookmarks, to the old subdomain, with Adblock.
Are you considering reposting your content to relevant sublemmys?
Maybe Elon musk can buy Reddit and further ruin it. He loves owning echo chamber bot farms, just look at the steaming pile of shit that was twitter.
This isn't far from reality. Spez has his head so far up Elon's arse he's wearing his face.
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?
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.
Unfortunately, the more noche your hobbies, the less lemmy is able to replace Reddit. Stuff like news, gaming, politics? Lemmy is great. Do you want a community for an obscure martial art? Then you go to old school forums or Reddit.
It's true I lost out on some of the engagement for a number of my hobbies. I'm less in touch than I was.
Turns out I can manage like that just fine, though, so...
Niche gaming is really rough too. I sim race, there’s maybe a million people worldwide who consistently engage with the hobby. The subreddits were already quiet, and on Lemmy there’s like 4 active users over the last few months.
I’ve found myself on Reddit a lot more recently cause I want to be in the know about what’s happening.
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
Move it here.
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:
They've been separate for more than a decade now
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.
It's at the bottom of the article:
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.
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.
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.
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.
After posting, I actually found Stealth to be just what I needed. It webscrapes Reddit so no api, but also no Interaction which is fine for me.
Damn...i gotta do this...so many threads though.... I did this a while back with youtube and it was very much worth it.
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
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.
You don't need to, you only need to go after the large ones. I'm already on my third instance, and having to move is such a giant pain in the ass, I don't think I'd do it again.
What motivated you to switch instances? Did your early ones fill up with junk posts etc? I was thinking that since I use a reader app (Boost for Lemmy) and everything is federated it wouldn't matter much if I joined one of the large and general-purpose instances.
Or was it more about performance issues... service/instance traffic overload leading to slow response time?
Performance issues, which of course is the issue with federation. Sometimes it was my instance having issues, other times it was the instance I was posting too. One of them defederated from a large one and didn’t allow downvoting, which I would forget via a third party app and it would hang before erroring out.
Thanks for the info! Yeah, it's going to take the fediverse in general some time to get smoother. I'm excited to watch it improve even if the pace is slow.
True, yet it still isn't, as far as I can see.
It absolutely is, even if your particular instance hasn't been. Lemmy.world probably takes the brunt of it.
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
smug face of superiority for not using reddit, facebook, instagram, snapchat, onlyfans nor tiktok, from my linux machine 😏
Neeeeerd!
Although you're right.
Arch?
Nah, Tumbleweed 🦎
lmao imagine not rolling your own distro
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...
Definitely one of the downsides to the Fediverse. Makes it harder for one admin team to detect scripts and take action.
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.
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
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?
https://opnxng.com/ is the one I am using.
Alright thanks
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.
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.