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.

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…

You see ads? Bruh…

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 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.

Have you had yourself checked out for toenail fungus bro? Might be a thing.

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?

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.

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 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:

Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.

They’ve been separate for more than a decade now

wait, it’s all enshittification?

always has been

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.

Any app or so to do that? Would love an RSS feed Reddit just for reading

Damn…i gotta do this…so many threads though… I did this a while back with youtube and it was very much worth it.

You had to delete yours? All of mine were permabanned long ago.

I just tried to delete and I keep getting an error

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.

If you use SearXNG sometimes it will load a feddit instance of what you want.

We have the moral high ground.