TL;DR: Reddit is removing the option to opt out of ad personalization, targeting ads based on user activity. Some specific ad categories can still be limited, but there’s no more opt-out option.
I have the feeling the whole internet is turning into shit rapidly. Youtube is crap, Reddit is crap, everything you use needs a cloud account, my doorbell is sending me notifications about a new product, wtf is up with that. I paid for that thing and now you send me ads? Pisses me off. This corporate greed is getting too much.
There are upsides to it, like me spending considerably less time on the random internet surfing because my annoyance overshadows my dopamine kick.
Conversely, I’m so opposed to the enshitification that I’ve carefully tailored my internet usage to places that aren’t shit and have no prospect of becoming shit, like Lemmy. Since I don’t even have the motivation of not supporting an evil company, I’m more addicted that ever.
My TV has ads. Not the cable part, like when I turn it on, the menu has ads. I paid $2k for it.
IMHO it’s cyclical.
- Computers started out client server because of limited computing capacity
- Then everybody got a PC and for a while, physical media were faster than downloads
- Then we got oodles of bandwidth, so servers seemed practical again
- Now servers are taking advantage of the trust we’ve placed in them
- Next, we’ll all enjoy a brief P2P revolution. Hooray!
- After that, homomorphic encryption will make servers seem appealing again
- Even farther into the future, the attacks against that encryption will no longer be tolerable
It will be decades more before humanity accepts the teachings of Richard Stallman.
Could you point me to some starting points or good reads by Richard Stallman? He got a solution to the cycle, then I’m down.
Free software, Free society is his collection of essays.
Except it’s possible to work around it, with a minimal amount of knowledge, or by using alternatives.
Reddit? Lemmy.
Twitter? Mastodon.
YouTube? Peertube. For youtube just use piped.video
Ads? UBlock.It’s really accelerated in the past few years. It’s nearly impossible to just read an article or use any product without giving it some kind of information. Lots of people (myself included many times unfortunately) just accept this. I mean, what can be done? If you want or need to use the thing you almost have no choice. If you want to avoid information leaks or being tracked you have to do so much research and work just to find an option, and then hope they don’t get purchased by a company that will reverse it all. I hate it.
I mean, what can be done? If you want or need to use the thing you almost have no choice.
We have to act collectively.
- Don’t buy products or use services that require personal info. Of course, this means being willing to make do without some things, at least until they’re convinced/forced to change or alternatives appear. In cases where the thing is a necessity, push back (clearly, articulately, and firmly) before sharing your info. Let them know that they’re losing goodwill by being nosy, and that you’ll stop buying from them as soon as you can.
- Look for products/services that respect our privacy, and support them when possible.
- Pass legislation that forbids needlessly collecting such info. Some regions (e.g. European Union, California) have already taken small steps in this direction. We need to take it further, everywhere.
I think it might also be helpful to have some kind of (independently verified) privacy labeling program for products and services. It would ease some of the burden from consumers when shopping around, and could become an easy marketing tool for companies that want to attract customers.
Honestly, number 3 is the only thing that would have marginal impact. Consumers don’t have the time and energy to research every product to the depth required foe the first two.
Consumers don’t have the time and energy to research every product to the depth required foe the first two.
You don’t need to go on a research project to see the personal info fields in a sign-up form.
For more complicated stuff, a labeling program would help.
You don’t need to go on a research project to see the personal info fields in a sign-up form.
That’s not the only way companies get data about you though. Some collect it through their app - the sites that try and force you to use the app instead of the site are usually the worst offenders. Others just buy data from data brokers like Acxiom, Experian, LiveRamp, etc. and correlate it with the details they have on you (phone number, email address, ad targeting ID, etc).
Where possible, use sites instead of apps, since it limits the types of data that can be collected (as sites are highly sandboxed compared to apps). Good sites let you install them as PWAs for a more app-like feel.
That’s not the only way companies get data about you though.
Nobody said it was.
I was mostly replying to the top level comment about choosing companies/products that respect your privacy. It’s pretty much impossible to tell if a company cares about or respects your privacy just from the sign up form.
Some of us remember there was a time when things like Reddit didn’t exist, and neither did Facebook, Twitter etc. Lots of people lived just fine without them then. It’s completely possible to take a hard line on this stuff and just refuse to use sites/apps/products that don’t respect your privacy. Remember, there’s always a smaller, friendlier or mechanical version.
Reddit was unique - at least in my experience - in that it expanded my horizons and allowed me to grow in many ways.
Before Reddit I just searched out sites / forums about my interests.
Reddit allowed me to organically gain new interests through daily interactions.I’ve left it since they killed Apollo but I will admit that there were various good communities that I do miss!
Get Mozilla Firefox and add uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and Ghostery plugins.
For over the top action, but a Raspberry Pi with an ethernet port and install PiHole and change your router DNS to the IP address of the PiHole and bask in glory that 99.999% of the crap out there, will not come or go out of your household.
It boggles the mind that there are people who still don’t use adblocking measures these days.
funny as im seeing this while nuking my old reddit account. havent used it since they took apollo from me and honestly i won’t miss it. they are just digging their own grave at this point.
I would care if I used Reddit, but I don’t.
I’m increasingly glad I got the fuck out of there.
Same.
They just went from we love you guys to we don’t even give a fuck bend over boy in like 6 months.
Twitter has also shifted into a dystopian QQ wannabe.
Meta has been a dumpster fire for a decade now.
Tik Tok. heavy sigh
This kinda seems like end of times.
if this is your version of the end of times, I suggest you take a look out your window at the burning hellscape of western north america and other locations around the globe. I also hope you’re not too attached to birds or polar bears.
My world ends whenever someone doesn’t understand hyperbole
Now I become death, destroyer of literary device
You became Death? How did you manage that?
By taking things literally, apparently
birds or polar bears
Phew! Luckily I just like penguins…
I have bad news. Penguins are a hybrid of bird and polar bear.
If it’s the end of the era of social media, I’m plenty ok with that. Shit’s been cancer for almost a decade now.
I don’t think my adblocker cares what kind of ads they’re trying to show me. If anything their algorithms will just get confused for why this guy who used to be here hours every day now only comes to watch war videos once a day but no longer comments or upvotes anything.
How are people adblocking them on mobile?
Firefox lets you adblock.
a pihole can get you 90% of the way and it works in all apps and any other smart devices you have., but it doesn’t work well if the site isn’t using a 3rd party ad service (think YouTube, facebook)
My assumption was that at this point the majority of people are using the official reddit app, but I guess that’s an option for now.
On Android anyway. No AdBlock (at least ublock) still on Firefox for IOS I believe due to platform restrictions. But would be cool if I’m wrong.
RedReader still works. If you’re gonna look at reddit, I recommend it. You can even turn off all the interaction buttons, so it’s like a “look, don’t touch” museum.
I uninstalled it though. Reddit is in too terrible a state to bother with any longer, except sometimes as a search result, imo.
Edit: I’m speaking of android though. Idk if redreader has an ios version or not.
Correct me if im wrong, but didn’t EU ban this kind of practice?
If true, reddit would be fucked on the European market
Glad I left. It can only get worse…
They will not be forcing me to accept personalized ads. How are they going to personalize them when I have no reddit account, block their cookies, use a VPN and change my IP address often, and don’t use their website.
Well if you don’t use their website you aren’t a user.
Isn’t it sad that we have to do all this to prevent our information being spread around the corporate world like a virus
They should teach defensive web-browsing in schools.
Have you heard anything about uBlock origin, Ghostery and similar programs?
Is that even legal in the EU?
In select countries, the option to turn off ad personalization will remain, allowing Reddit to continue to comply with GDPR restrictions.
If it’s anything like Twitter, it resigns you up to them anyway. There’s no “turn off all” as far as I could see. The missus has to run some JS to untick all the boxes for her. Next week she’ll go back and it will have ticked more.
I mean, does it really matter? At the end of the day, an obnoxious ad is an obnoxious ad regardless of wether it’s targets or not. Or am I missing something?
Any company/developer that puts ads in their app deserves to fade into irrelevant obscurity. And the more people put up with it and pay into it to remove the ads, the more you’re rewarding the behavior.
And it’s ironic that I’m sure a large percentage of people that pay to remove ads are the same people that whine about people pre-ordering games.
Sorry for the rant. But this shit aggravates me.
Or am I missing something?
I think the only distinguishing factor is to target, it must gather data. So that means your activity is being tracked, stored, and shared with third parties. Of course for some people this will matter more than to others, but for those privacy focused you now know for certain they are storing data on you, potentially making money off of selling it, with no way to opt out.
Who views ads in Reddit? Except for all the shill posts, that is.
Shill posts, shill posts everywhere.
I’m pretty sure it’s everyone who uses their app, since every third post and every fourth comment on it is an ad of some sort (or at least that’s how it seemed). I’m sure anyone on old.r with an adblocker is unaffected but during the brief time I had their app installed there were enough ads to render it unusable and unnavigable.
There’s enough astroturf on Reddit for a continent’s worth of obnoxious suburban fake lawns.
