Which is illegal in the EU and about to be illegal in Australia
¯\_(ツ)_/¯The EU just does so many things right.
America: “SoCiALisM”
Oh nooooo who could have seen this coming… anyway continues using Lemmy
Is reddit owned and operated by a malicious entity? I used to be addicted to that platform, but now I can’t stand it.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
From https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
This is going to be the most quoted literary work of the 21st century
they are preparing for IPO, the most inherently malicious owner there is!
Are they really still just preparing?
Have been for years. Reddit is mismanaged, and the IPO is just an effort to get whatever they can before letting suckers hold the bag. They will never reach the valuation they had.
yeah they aren’t IPO yet, I think a lot of stuff didn’t play nicely for them, with the ukraine war, the tech bubbles popping and the general global economic conditions things aren’t exactly favourable. I think also the backlash to 3rd party apps and their general shittiness has been hurting them a bit more than they have said.
The largest owners are Advance Publications and Tencent. Advance also own Condé Nasty (Reddit even used to be under the Condé Nast banner). Weirdly they also own everyone’s favorite plagiarism detection service Turnitin.
how much does tencent actually own? I could swear they only bought company stocks and not direct controls over reddit.
ＥＮＳＨＩＴＴＩＦＩＣＡＴＩＯＮ
I haven’t used reddit in months
I still check in to certain niche subreddits that don’t exist on lemmy. Those feel pretty close to how they used to. The other day I took a look at /r/all and… ooof. It’s very apparent quality has completely nosedived. Lemmy /c/all is a much better representation of pre-blackout reddit /r/all right now.
Sometimes I’ll check in to see if anyone’s asking me a question and it always just ends up being some random groyped up nazi posting vitriol on a comment that’s like, 3 years old. Now I don’t even get that because everyone’s either lost interest or jumped ship.
All the adds look like posts and all the posts are actually just adds now.
Has anybody seen that shitty boomer comic that’s been boosted to the top ad space on every YouTube video for the last two weeks.
Those have been the top post on comics for the last two days.
It is primarily bots advertising to each other at this point and liberals circlejerking each other that they’re the good guys for “critically” supporting nazis.
Uhm, that option was intreduced by sites and ad networks because the GDPR requires it so unless they plan to shut down buisness in the EU it’s probably going to fail!
If we’re serious about transforming the conversation around this issue, we’ve got to be more intentional with the words we choose. Let’s call a spade a spade: labeling them as “personalized ads” is a gross understatement.
It’s more than that. It’s like someone constantly lurking behind you, watching every move you make, and getting into the private spaces of your mind. It isn’t mere content tailoring—it’s relentless stalking and a brazen assault on our psyche.
We need to call it what it is.
watching every move you make
Just like The Police.
I agree with you but let’s cut the hyperbole please? It is not “a brazen assault on our psyche”. Ain’t no one of sound mind seeking out a therapist for trauma because reddit changes it TOS.
I think they are an assault on free will. Ads aren’t well reasoned arguments for the purchase of a product or service; they’re whatever they need to be to get you to change your behavior. If they have to scare, shame, trick, etc. they’ll do it.
Just out of curiosity how old are you? My sense is your opinion is probably shared by those younger people who came of age during the beginning of the death throws of cable.
I’m not saying your opinion is wrong for you. But I’m 46 now. I grew up inundated by commercials. They have always done all those things you mention. We were raised in an environment where media literacy included commercials allowing us to better see and smell the bullshit. Maybe that is what is lacking?
They are definitely not an “assault on free will” as you put it. Advertising is one of the oldest industries known to man and it will continue to exist and evolve.
That said, you are very correct in that it has gotten worse in recent years. This is predominantly (I feel) because government has stopped regulating specifically what is marketed to kids (thanks 1980’s!). There is also an angle that we stopped teaching media literacy like we used to.
I’m in my late thirties, actually. I think the difference in the ads we were exposed to compared to young people today is that nearly all of ours were broadly targeted. ie there was no micro targeting or anything really tailored to the individual outside of direct mail. We all watched the same commercials, you know?
Modern ad tech is much less “spray and pray” but as to what difference that makes vis-a-vis people’s ability to see BS, idk. I’d imagine the proportion of young people who are skeptical of advertising hasn’t changed much but the effectiveness of ads on those who are susceptible to it has increased. But again, I’m just talking out my ass here haha.
But all ads share the goal of altering your behavior to their own ends. Isn’t that in and of itself a reduction of your free will? An idea or thought you might have had is supplanted by one placed there by an advertiser, right?
Maybe this is where we differ then. I agree with everything you’re saying but at the same time in no way do I feel like my choice to choose is being taken away. I am not being forced to buy anything.
No, you’re not being forced of course. But advertisers are absolutely trying to bend your decision making process towards their products. That’s how ads work, right? They ultimately want you to spend money on something. Not saying you’re like Homer Simpson driving down the road stopping to obey all the billboards, I’m just saying it’s the inherent nature of ads. I didn’t mean to imply anything else
transforming the conversation
are we ever going to do shit about it or are we going to continue to sit and talk about the same thing over and over uselessly
some of us ARE doing something about it
lol I have yet to see barely a finger lifted by suburb libs to do anything for the rest of us
dude, don’t just assume my political beliefs based on nothing more than a comment…
sis if you have the ideology of a suburb liberal while not being one, you are an even sadder motherfucker than I thought you were
if caring about privacy and not wanting companies and governments to watch everything you do is “the ideology of a suburb liberal”, then fine, I’m a “suburb liberal” lol
EDIT: reading your profile you’re (in your words) a “Firm believers in Marxism Leninism, cartoons, and the need for Gulags” so I don’t think I will continue this discussion. have a nice day ^^
if caring about privacy and not wanting companies and governments to watch everything you do is “the ideology of a suburb liberal”, then fine, I’m a “suburb liberal” lol
strawman, love to see it. How is any of what you said relevant?
Im unapologetic about my love of Marxist freedom, I wonder why you feel the need to hide your ideology…
I urge everyone to install Adnauseum. You know what’s better than trying to starve advertisers of info? Filling their ad profile for you with total garbage.
Just use Revanced app to remove adds from Reddit
Well it doesn’t opt you out from the tracking across the whole site
Thats where tools like NextDNS or TrackerControl come into play.
I actually enjoyed ad personalization when it first started. I got shown ads for things that were actually interesting to me, video games hardware etc, but at this point it resembles what cable TV ads were when I stopped watching TV: car commercials, prescription drugs, baby and feminine products (am not parent, am not female). So now they just spying your behavior to learn the best way to trick you into buying crap you don’t need and don’t supply any sort of reach around.
The reason I hate ad personalization is because they flat out lie about what you’re into. I hate crypo with a passion and shortly after I joined shitter they sold a package which said that I just looooved cryptocurrency and got nothing but the most cancerous crypo ads for the next year.
Like if you’re going to be building a profile around me and selling it to fucking everyone at least have the courtesy not to fucking lie.
Solution: only use Reddit for porn.
Lol same… and I still feel dirty whenever I do it. Not because it’s porn, but because it’s reddit. Eww.
The reddit experience: Scrolling through someone just absolutely caked with human feces and going “ew, transphobic slur in the title”
And use Revanced to patch the shit out of Reddit app.
You can also use revanced to patch your own api key into Infinity and use that instead
That ad personalization will not be pretty.
That’s the point.
Advertisers hate porn. Anything that’s not safe and broad-appeal is bad for their image.
Our society sucks because advertisers would rather be associated with far-right fascists than content that like 90% of the internet is for.
The speed at which they are destroying Reddit is just impressive. Spez saw Musk taking a shit on Twitter on the daily and became inspired.
As much as I want to hate Reddit’s management, this is not a move that will affect the average user too much. It’s really bad from a privacy standpoint, but a huge percentage of people don’t care too much about privacy (until it bites them). So this does (unfortunately) make ton of sense from a business standpoint.
Yeah, this is no different from how every other social media platform operates. Unfortunately it’s just the way these websites make money to stay “free for consumers”.
The only (distant) solution I can see will be the fediverse, paid for by UBI and decreasing server costs (i.e. green energy and tech breakthroughs)
paid for by UBI
What years of neoliberal propaganda does to a mfer.
Okay so what I really mean by UBI is the point that humans have successfully created an autonomous supply chain that keeps everyone fed and sheltered. AI has taken the majority of necessary jobs that humans do not wanna do, creating a surplus of resources that (in a utopia) even if 1% is distributed among the population, could be more than enough to keep fediverse software running on a server farm powered by green energy.
I don’t mean some fox news version of UBI that they think just means higher taxes and everyone becoming fat and lazy.
UBI is a compromise made by neoliberals to distract people from socialism. In practice, it challenges none of the contradictions of capitalism and will, given enough time, decay into neofeudalism. Does the idea of your life becoming an enclosure sound like a utopia?
In other news, services that cost money to operate seek to make money in the process. More at 7
you can’t really believe reddit, a gigantic media megacorp, is somehow strapped for cash?
how is this news, all social media is doing this. Its an inevitable consequence of capitalist internet ownership.
