Opt-Out for Personalized Reddit Ads Removed
reddit.comRegarding their privacy commitment, visiting the link with Tor browser gives "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable". https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lqtecn/update_to... works - for now.
It didn't use to be this way - they wait for network effects to create lock-in, before turning hostile. Almost like a trap.
Reddit is so user hostile, it's not even funny at this point. I've been using libreddit instead but of course, you can't comment through that.
>you can't comment through that
Honestly, that might be a bonus for me.
This announcement is a great example for the current state of tech PR.
What's actually happening is pretty straight forward: Reddit staff tries to improve their ad efficiency by using and collecting more data.
That's great for advertisers and for reddit, but bad for users since tracking increases and ads get more trippy and powerful.
The common sense way to communicate such a change would be empathically admitting what you are doing for which reason, explaining why you need the revenue, acknowledging its drawbacks and highlighting positive stuff you did/do/plan to do to mitigate some of the bigger concerns around this change.
But instead of doing that they chose to go full psychopath/gaslighting mode and wrote about how amazing this change is, now that all the dumb users aren't confused anymore.
There is a very small set of situations in which such an approach might actually work. For example in a setting where there is not a lot of community actually reading the thing. (Where it only needs to withstand someone glossing over the piece in a long list of articles.) ...or on a platform where there is no way of giving feedback. (Where you could assume that the trust from those who see through it is less valuable than the assumed beneficial impact of those that buy your narrative.)
A platform where this mode of PR absolutely does not work is reddit though.
Just look how almost everyone points out their lies and cynicism in the comments.
All of that because someone in their PR department thought that their psychopath/gaslighting mode works so well, it will fly under the radar of their users.
...and of course there were no checks and balances. Nobody that knew about that text felt able to say "guys, that's not working. Nobody will believe that stuff you made up to hide the content."
Pretty telling..
I'm not convinced the end-game is ads. There are a lot of entities that would pay good money for a profile of troublesome individuals.
The announcement was written for Reddit’s customers (VC and ad providers), not their users, so this makes total sense.
> We will no longer support the option to opt out of personalization of ads based on your Reddit activity.
I use uBlock and a hosts file. Didn't even know reddit had ads.
I also use uBlock on Firefox on desktop and mobile. I'm not installing that app if I can just go to the webpage.
Did anyone even know this option existed?
Seems like they should have just quietly buried the option even deeper.
Why bother? They've all but taken over the forum and internet community space so now it's time to chase those margins so they can keep that fantasy of infinite growth alive in the hearts of their shareholders.
I've seen and used the option (ie: I'd opted out).
Moving forward I'll only be consuming Reddit via API. Which also means, I'll be participating less (but it was already very little).
Id started my API client before this tho, cause their website is super crashy (oops! Something went wrong)
Reddits feature removal is probably evidence for people using the opt-out.
Why would they actively remove it AND go through such a communication debacle for no change in revenue and/or data collection?
I'll be reporting this to my country's GDPR rep, please do the same where you're from.
Here's the list of reps, you can check your country here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_data_protection_aut...
Arguably illegal under the GDPR.