This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
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
Not in GDPR countries 😎
Regardless. Fuck what Reddit has become. I really hope that people will see the light and move to Lemmy.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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
I've thought a lot about this, and I'd like to say: "Reddit can kiss my entire ass."
Glad I ripped that band aid off already. Only reason I go there is for buildapcsales now.
smug face of superiority for not using reddit, facebook, instagram, snapchat, onlyfans nor tiktok, from my linux machine 😏
Finally made the jump and just deleted my account... Sad, but their own fault
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/
