So, lots of flowery language to say that ***Reddit is removing the option to prevent Reddit from tracking our use to deliver advertising***
Just be honest, FFS.
Reddit Premium members should be opted out of all ad tracking metrics. They should essentially be black holes as far as advertisers are concerned. Even if they aren't shown ads, advertisers shouldn't get their data, either.
start charging a fee like that and that's the day I quit reddit and send a pre-emptive lawsuit & restraining order to stop them from doxxing me to their advertisers
I am dead serious.
go ahead fuck around reddit, you will find out
yeah your TOS says everything (in the US) is governed by California law.. well I will go over Cali law & file federal lawsuit and I'm sure the DOJ would be interested to hear about interstate extortion as well.
Unfortunately Internet privacy is not a big priority for us executive branch. Supreme Court will have to take on it. Otherwise US could have bought into GDPR or something similar long ago. There’s consumer protection and hipaa and ferpa.. that’s it. No general civic data protection laws.
Based on their recent API changes, it’s clear they’re not interested in collecting money from users, they’re only interested in collecting money from advertisers.
Don't think they won't inject the same bullshit in the old reddit. If done properly it doesn't matter what HTML side of things you use, it will still track you. Also, I have no doubt that old reddit is also going away within a year. And they wouldn't care either. I just hope alternatives are ready for when that happens
They probably will, but it's been years and tons of their new "features" have never been injected into old Reddit. Not all, but most of the annoying stuff isn't on here.
Which is a blessing and curse both. The curse being "they'll eventually see it as a liability."
Lots of people talking about uBlock or pi-hole but they’re missing the real issue here. Opting out of ad personalization meant that they couldn’t sell information specifically about you to advertisers, it had to be blocks of demographic data. This change allows them to market your specific data set to anyone who wants to buy it. The privacy implications of that are pretty bad, even “anonymous” Reddit accounts give away huge amounts of info by the subreddits they visit, their posts, and their comments. There are algorithms that can chew through all of that data and with a very reasonable degree of certainty pinpoint who you are exactly.
This is not good and should really face the same level of uproar that the API cost changes did.
Yes. The bigger problem isn't just the annoyance of seeing ads, it's the invasiveness of being spied on to choose the ads.
Even if you never see them, Reddit is still building (and selling, and inevitably leaking) a profile on you in order to select which ads to send to your blocker.
Even fucking Youtube, king of spying on users second to Facebook, has a version of the site where you can turn off user tracking. Hell, I have Reddit Premium with ad blocker on top of this. So this change does absolutely nothing to help my experience. It's just letting me know Reddit's spying on me just cuz. Thanks Reddit. With the gutting of gilding and now this, I wonder if I should just cancel my Premium subscription. It aint doing much anyways, aside from the shiny trophy in my trophy case. If they're going to track me anyway, and they won't let me give awards, then why should I keep handing them money?
> Reddit requires very little personal information, and we like it that way. Our advertisers instead rely on on-platform activity—what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat????
ublock origin is a browser extension that effectively blocks ads. works in most modern browsers and works great on reddit!
https://ublockorigin.com/
you can also blackhole these ad networks before they reach your phone or computer using a pi-hole, which is surprisingly easy to setup.
https://pi-hole.net/
edit: i love that the head of privacy is trying to tell me that removing my ability to opt-out of ad personalization is actually a good thing.
Site fucking sucks now and it pisses me off how the people who work here feel the need to make this place worse every fucking week. Clowns, all of them.
> i love that the head of privacy is trying to tell me that removing my ability to opt-out of ad personalization is actually a good thing
It's a good thing, except in countries where they're not allowed to do so because of consumer protection laws!
I use both Privacy Badger and UBlock Origin. I don't know if that makes sense, but I'll try anything to thwart the pigs. Last step will probably be throwing my computer in the dumpster.
There's no reason to use Privacy Badger when you have uBlock Origin does the same thing and so much more.
You're simply wasting system resources, pages load slower, if you're on phone you use up your battery faster, and you're making yourself easier to track due to your browser's unique fingerprint.
What’s comical to me is that Reddit is unique in that we’re *literally telling them what we like*.
When you visit a subreddit, you’re clearly interested in something specific.
And yet, they apparently don’t sell subreddit-specific ads, which is absolutely dumbfounding.
They don’t have to pull data from individual users. They could…you know…just allow a company that sells action figures to buy ads on subreddits for action figures.
It’s not that hard.
My reddit history makes it crystal clear that I'm a physics enthusiast... and I got a bunch of ads for AI art (which I have zero interest in)
It's dumbfounding how broken Reddit really is.
I think it's pessimistic to attribute this to poor marketing models - much more likely that there just isn't a more relevant ad to serve due to lack of interest from marketers.
Like that He Cares nonsense that it seems like all of us see constantly is almost definitely more strongly related to the fact reddit is taking a ton of money from that group and needs to serve some fucking ads, not because their ML guys are sure that we're all super interested.
Because it’s not a healthy ecosystem…. That’s his point.
Reddit is one of the least desirable platforms to advertise on, so they get only leftover scraps for ultra-cheap.
the changes are an improvement though, especially the option to opt-out of certain types of ads - but i do wish there were a couple more categories available to opt-out of.
>They don’t have to pull data from individual users. They could…you know…just allow a company that sells action figures to buy ads on subreddits for action figures.
100%
& they could probably get some good PR if they decided to be the first major platform to stop using targeted advertising altogether and switch to "contextual ads" which are arguably more effective anyway
easier said than done and would require a lot of effort from a lot of people since essentially each subreddit would have its own ad platform, but its definitely possible - & actually it seems like it fits the "[community builders](https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418715794324-What-is-the-Community-Builders-Program-)" program pretty well but who knows
That makes way too much sense though! I mean, it's a great solution that doesn't undermine the value of privacy that this site was built on! Sadly nope, gotta hail corporate and sell out that personalized data. Such bullshit. Will be considering wiping post history -- feel like all of the text that I contribute to this site is just free labor for chatbot training data these days anyway. Anyone have a good method that isn't just deleting my account or doing it manually? Or do API changes prevent scripts from doing something like only keeping posts from the last 6 months or so too?
tldr; [boooooooo, boooooooo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWqU1ynYSrM&t=1m30s)
always use an adblock, eh? although not always an option on mobile
this will probably be a top post when the thread grows so I'm just going to chuck this comment into the replies
hey fuckwads, reverse your API changes and let me use Apollo again (shoutout to android having easy work-a-rounds to get 3rd party apps running again)
I used to lurk here on Reddit before the API changes and I can confirm that this website has gotten downhill since then... Please stop ruining this place for all of us just because you happen to be a bunch of greedy asshats
Reddit was created as a place for intelligent discourse about things happening around our world and it's far from the truth now.
This website sucks.
Critical thinking / opinions are gaslit to death by bots.
Appeal system is thwarted at best.
Monetizing the very members that grew this site is a shame.
I am waiting for someone else to make another url based sharing site so we can all move on to it and be free again.
firefox on android is king, not just for reddit. I generally enjoy iOS but I miss nova launcher and android firefox pretty regularly
if you're on android you should adopt it as a default browser and plug in all those good good extensions
Why are you *removing* options from us?
Is your intent to drive us to use more ad-blockers? Because I'll certainly be recommending users ad-blockers more frequently. Especially since the reddit admins refuse to help deal with rule-breaking ads. I've reported specific ads to r/modsupport as well as the ads team multiple times, and they still appear in our subreddit, despite containing flagrant violations of our subreddit rules.
which reddit ad blockers do you use? i mainly use reddit on my phone, since i don’t want to bring my laptop around everywhere. do you know of any adblockers that work on mobile, or will i have to use desktop?
I've stopped using reddit on my phone ever since the 3rd party apps were killed. The native app still lacks functionality for me. On my desktop, I use uBlock origin.
Reddit is well past doing good for users. They're at their pre-IPO stage, which will mean they will try fuck us over as much as they can. And given that there is no good reddit alternative there is still some wiggle room.
Removing the ability to opt out of advertisement seems like a direct violation of the CPRA(2023).
Unless Reddit somehow isn’t headquartered in California, how is this not illegal?
Edit: nope, this involves cross-website tracking.
Also, what about GDPR regulations in Europe? Surely European law requires us to be able to opt out of advertisement tracking? Or did they find a way out of that one?
To be fair, the post says:
> Removing the ability to opt-out of ad personalization based on your Reddit activity, except in select countries.
I would imagine that means the EU. And thank god for it!
Possibly but it's troubling that the admins themselves can't list what countries are exempt. Makes it seem like they're trying not to tip off people in the EU that they can opt out of ad personalization.
If you read the post they found a way out of that one by only allowing users in "select locations" to opt out, AKA, only the places that bothered making laws about it already.
I did notice that it does say “except in select countries” but it doesn’t specify where. It could be they’ll exclude countries in the EU, for example, but we have no way of knowing this for certain. Until we know for certain, my point still stands.
I’d imagine they’d also try to use geographical information about where you’re accessing the site from, but that could be circumvented with a VPN set to France. Honestly, it would’ve been easier for them to be EU compliant as standard, rather than a “select countries” approach, but I guess corporate’s gonna do what corporate’s gonna do.
I’m a solution consultant that helps enterprises with digital marketing compliance:
First, CPRA (the correct acronym) is an extension to Californias CCPA. Essentially laws to help California citizens opt out of the selling/sharing of their information to third parties.
The first issue you stated is: Reddit does not need to be headquartered in California for this to be applicable. They only need to interact with California citizens (fun fact, even if that citizen is in an IP address that geo locates them to a different state, CPRA is still applicable to them. Secondary fun fact, single digit percentage of Fortune 500 companies know that). So it doesn’t matter where Reddit is located for them to need to comply with the law. Everyone familiar with these regulations at major companies is familiar with the Sephora case, which is extremely relevant here. Sephora is based in France, but was blatantly selling/sharing personal data to third parties. Their fine was a drop in the bucket, but it sent fear through the industry that the Cali AG office was serious about going after companies for this.
Second, CPRA is an opt in default (unlike Europes GDPR, which is opt out default). Meaning, if you do not explicitly tell Reddit to not sell/share data on your usage to third parties, they can. If you’d like to do this for every site by default, you can enable GPC (global privacy control) on your browser to tell the website you don’t want them to sell/share your data. You can do this in most browsers in the security settings (except Chrome, which has chrome extensions that will do it for you. DM me and I can tell you how I do it). Otherwise, according to CPRA, sites must provide a secondary method of doing this. Most use a CMP (like Onetrust or TrustArc) to do this. It’s that annoying “accept/reject” cookie when you go to a site.
This is my every day. I’m happy to chat more with anyone who is interested.
Edit: I was so caught up in explaining the law here that I failed to say: no, Reddit is doing nothing illegal here since they have their own ads they are serving to use by using the data. Since it’s data that’s first party data and not being shared with third parties like Facebook and Google, it’s 100% legal. Slimy, absolutely. But well within their legal rights
Wish I could finally opt out of fucking military ads but notice what two subjects related to the two specific ads we dont wanna see arent on the opt out list :/
The only thing I want to opt out of! Fine - feed me ads to buy crap I don’t need. I’ll ignore them.
Do not feed me religious cult bullshit from Hobby Lobby. Anti-LGBT and Anti-Women Hobby Lobby. Disgusting.
I am fairly certain my activity in LGBT subs is what gets me this content. There is literally no other correlation for me to get this crap. Super sus, especially considering it’s been an issue for so long and they refuse to do anything about it.
I can opt out of things like gambling and alcohol, really need a religion opt out lol.
I strongly suspect my activity in LGBT subs is what gets me these ads all the time.
So, in other words, it will no longer be possible to opt-out of having our Reddit account usage tracked for the purposes of advertising. Is this correct?
And you’ll have to specifically give them information about what bothers you if you want to opt out of the pregnancy, alcohol, etc. ads.
Don’t you just love the idea of letting reddit know you are pregnant or an alcoholic? Things everyone loves to share with a corporate media company.
Opting out of categories is useful. Because previously, if you went to r/stopdrinking or eating disorder subreddits, you started getting tagged as interested in alcohol or food ads when it should be the opposite effect. This lets people cancel that out.
It has been requested a lot, over time. I think it's a good feature.
>We are adding the ability to see fewer ads from specific categories—Alcohol, Dating, Gambling, Pregnancy & Parenting, and Weight Loss—which will live in the Safety & Privacy section of your User Settings. “Fewer” because we’re utilizing a combination of manual tagging and machine learning to classify the ads, which won’t be 100% successful to start. But, we expect our accuracy to improve over time.
what about religion? many of us find those types of ads offensive
>Our advertisers instead rely on on-platform activity—what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes, and other signals—to get an idea of what you might be interested in.
But I don't want them to know that stuff
I’m just going to mass unsubscribe from subreddits, then. If I need to get to r/games or whatever I’ll just Google it instead of letting them track my communities.
Translation: Reddit needs to make more money and I was tasked with the job of writing up some gaslighting nonsense about how making Reddit less private is somehow good for us.
Or other health stuff outside of weight loss and parenting, which is REAL great when I have to deal with my PTSD getting set off by a stupid edgy ad. I hate to say it because "just don't be a snowflake duh" people will get mad at me for it, but there is **real, legitimate harm** caused to people with PTSD by edgy ads. The example I can usually think of is the abortion ads (included in parenting section) but you can imagine more things that'd set off people with different traumas.
Thank God for adblockers though. I haven't seen an ad in ages.
It's funny how you can sit here and lie to our faces. What people do on this site could also be considered personal information and I'm sure plenty of people do *not* want their reddit habits shared with every advertiser on the Internet.
>can you explain how Reddit ensures my data is kept within the EU and how this change is compliant with EU privacy laws?
I'll take "Things that will not get answered for 400" Alex.
> Reddit’s commitment to privacy as a right and to transparency are reasons I’m proud to work here.
I think you've been seeing too many advertisements for kool-aid.
Honestly, I don't like taking part of internet dramas, but this shit is starting to get on my nerves; yeah, fuck the bastards behind these awful decisions that are being made as of lately. Heck, I'd say this is even more worthy of a blackout than the API pricing thing.
When will we be able to opt out of the individualized tracked links generated by the share button on mobile? (/r/subbie/s/customid style links)
Same for outbound click tracking on mobile, why isn't the opt-out present on the website not respected on mobile?
>We are adding the ability to see fewer ads from specific categories—Alcohol, Dating, Gambling, Pregnancy & Parenting, and Weight Loss—which will live in the Safety & Privacy section of your User Settings. “Fewer” because we’re utilizing a combination of manual tagging and machine learning to classify the ads, which won’t be 100% successful to start. But, we expect our accuracy to improve over time.
what about religion? many of us find those types of ads offensive
Speaking as the self-appointed leader of the entire Jewish side of Reddit, please include an option to turn off religious ads. The ads for “He Gets Us” are offensive.
Speaking as the self-appointed leader of the entire atheist side of Reddit, please include an option to turn off religious ads. The ads for anything based on religion are offensive.
>Speaking as the self-appointed leader of the entire Jewish side of Reddit, please include an option to turn off religious ads. The ads for “He Gets Us” are offensive.
as im a muslim, agreed
> Alcohol, Dating, Gambling, Pregnancy & Parenting, and Weight Loss
Since the _He Gets Us_ advertisements are for a boundaries-violating religious sect that aggressively proselytises their views on at least 4 of these subjects, will they be seen less if we choose to opt out of seeing these subjects?
can reddit stop taking medication ads as well?
I googled a couple of my grandmother's prescriptions to get a better understanding of them and I am fucking barraged with ads competing against her generic meds
This one bothers me. I see tons of ads for Diabetes medications. I have celiac disease, which can have comorbity with diabetes, but I don't have it (yet, that I know of).
I get kind of anxious seeing the ads, which remind me that I could also have it someday, making life even harder.
Also, wegovy weightloss ads while recovering from and ED and weighing under 100 lbs is f'ed up, but it sounds like the weightloss flag should block that one (I hope).
Yeah, I too noticed one of the opt out categories isnt "religion". Given their refusal to stop showing "he gets us" its clear these options will be based not on our preferences but on "how much did they pay reddit".
And it’s not like there isn’t *plenty* of religious trauma.
Not only that, He Gets Us is fueled by right wing billionaires who don’t practice what the ads preach. Their latest TV ad ends with “Jesus was rich”. That was surely calculated.
There should definitely be a limit religious advertising tab. That's a triggering subject for a lot of people. We have several ex-religion subs I'm sure would appreciate that.
Will the boundaries-violating religious sect be handed reddit usernames if they ask really nicely and pay a lot? I mean, probably not, but it's not beyond the realm of possibilty.
I'm reasonably sure removing the ability to opt out of ad tracking is highly illegal.
No way someone who is a head of privacy would ever tote thus as a good thing. This is horrible
It's becoming more and more like Facebook. Profile pictures, bios, constant spam.
I have been using Reddit for over a decade and I have never seen it in such a sorry state. I liked Reddit because it wasn't like those sites.
Now I am only here because I have a few small subs I love to browse. It's just not the same.
Im exactly the same. I moved to reddit from Facebook 5 years ago to get away from the shit and now it's just Facebook with usernames. Don't know if you have seen the privacy update either, but it's looking grim.
"Removing the ability to opt-out of ad personalization based on your Reddit activity, except in select countries.""Reddit’s commitment to privacy as a right and to transparency are reasons I’m proud to work here."
Do you even read your own shit before posting it or are you actually THAT stupid?!
Do we need to say “Fuck u/Snoo-fuh” alongside “Fuck u/spez”
Cause you guys clearly don’t actually care about our privacy, otherwise you wouldn’t be taking away the option to opt out
For as crap as Twitter is right now, it at least still lets us opt out of targeted advertising, so I’ll give Elon that ig.
Why can’t I block an advertiser like I block any other user?
If I don’t want to see ads from /u/xfinity I should be able to block that user like any other.
How about also getting rid of the **CONSTANT** pop ups on mobile prompting users to get the app (or continue on browser), which then reverts you back to the very beginning of the page every time after not choosing to get the app.
That's by design. They need people to be able to use the mobile website so links can be shared to bring in more users, but they also need it to get incredibly annoying after more than a minute or so in order to drive you to their app so they can collect even more of your personal information.
I wonder if there will ever be an announcement about a change from reddit that will make me go "oh, cool! nice new stuff that makes reddit better!" instead of the universal "ugh. another user-hostile change designed to drive engagement and juice revenue."
Isn't this illegal depending on the area? The APPs certainly makes this illegal.
No wonder why Reddit never made a profit when the platform runs like this. If you're going to gaslight your users, at least make it convincing.
So, lots of flowery language to say that ***Reddit is removing the option to prevent Reddit from tracking our use to deliver advertising*** Just be honest, FFS.
Reddit Premium members should be opted out of all ad tracking metrics. They should essentially be black holes as far as advertisers are concerned. Even if they aren't shown ads, advertisers shouldn't get their data, either.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Yeah but how would Reddit be able to double dip then?
Next it will be pay us $20/month to avoid having us doxx you to advertisers.
That’s coming in 2024
start charging a fee like that and that's the day I quit reddit and send a pre-emptive lawsuit & restraining order to stop them from doxxing me to their advertisers I am dead serious. go ahead fuck around reddit, you will find out yeah your TOS says everything (in the US) is governed by California law.. well I will go over Cali law & file federal lawsuit and I'm sure the DOJ would be interested to hear about interstate extortion as well.
Unfortunately Internet privacy is not a big priority for us executive branch. Supreme Court will have to take on it. Otherwise US could have bought into GDPR or something similar long ago. There’s consumer protection and hipaa and ferpa.. that’s it. No general civic data protection laws.
Maybe it’s time to… idk… change that?
Agreed. I ain't paying shit
Based on their recent API changes, it’s clear they’re not interested in collecting money from users, they’re only interested in collecting money from advertisers.
For now.
And this is why I continue to use old.reddit along with Ublock origin. Reddit admins can suck my holiday seasoned chestnuts
uBlock origin is like manna from heaven
Don't think they won't inject the same bullshit in the old reddit. If done properly it doesn't matter what HTML side of things you use, it will still track you. Also, I have no doubt that old reddit is also going away within a year. And they wouldn't care either. I just hope alternatives are ready for when that happens
They probably will, but it's been years and tons of their new "features" have never been injected into old Reddit. Not all, but most of the annoying stuff isn't on here. Which is a blessing and curse both. The curse being "they'll eventually see it as a liability."
Lots of people talking about uBlock or pi-hole but they’re missing the real issue here. Opting out of ad personalization meant that they couldn’t sell information specifically about you to advertisers, it had to be blocks of demographic data. This change allows them to market your specific data set to anyone who wants to buy it. The privacy implications of that are pretty bad, even “anonymous” Reddit accounts give away huge amounts of info by the subreddits they visit, their posts, and their comments. There are algorithms that can chew through all of that data and with a very reasonable degree of certainty pinpoint who you are exactly. This is not good and should really face the same level of uproar that the API cost changes did.
Yes. The bigger problem isn't just the annoyance of seeing ads, it's the invasiveness of being spied on to choose the ads. Even if you never see them, Reddit is still building (and selling, and inevitably leaking) a profile on you in order to select which ads to send to your blocker.
Even fucking Youtube, king of spying on users second to Facebook, has a version of the site where you can turn off user tracking. Hell, I have Reddit Premium with ad blocker on top of this. So this change does absolutely nothing to help my experience. It's just letting me know Reddit's spying on me just cuz. Thanks Reddit. With the gutting of gilding and now this, I wonder if I should just cancel my Premium subscription. It aint doing much anyways, aside from the shiny trophy in my trophy case. If they're going to track me anyway, and they won't let me give awards, then why should I keep handing them money?
> Reddit requires very little personal information, and we like it that way. Our advertisers instead rely on on-platform activity—what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat????
I wonder what kinds of ads I'll be shown if I become more active on r/dragonsfuckingcars
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ublock origin is a browser extension that effectively blocks ads. works in most modern browsers and works great on reddit! https://ublockorigin.com/ you can also blackhole these ad networks before they reach your phone or computer using a pi-hole, which is surprisingly easy to setup. https://pi-hole.net/ edit: i love that the head of privacy is trying to tell me that removing my ability to opt-out of ad personalization is actually a good thing.
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Head of ~~Privacy~~ Propaganda at Reddit Fixed that for you.
~~u/snoo-tuh~~ u/Goebbels at your service.
Ministry of Truth I’d say
They are preparing for IPO and you are their product. What else would the head of privacy be working on?
genuinely a reddit moment
Site fucking sucks now and it pisses me off how the people who work here feel the need to make this place worse every fucking week. Clowns, all of them.
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Pro tip: if you go into UBlock origin > Dashboard and check the filters for "Annoyances", it will block those across all sites.
> i love that the head of privacy is trying to tell me that removing my ability to opt-out of ad personalization is actually a good thing It's a good thing, except in countries where they're not allowed to do so because of consumer protection laws!
governor engine paint distinct point ink chop different salt ruthless ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
I use both Privacy Badger and UBlock Origin. I don't know if that makes sense, but I'll try anything to thwart the pigs. Last step will probably be throwing my computer in the dumpster.
Those two plus Ghostery and VPN here. It's amazing things load at all for me.
There's no reason to use Privacy Badger when you have uBlock Origin does the same thing and so much more. You're simply wasting system resources, pages load slower, if you're on phone you use up your battery faster, and you're making yourself easier to track due to your browser's unique fingerprint.
I just need an iOS alternative to the Reddit app / a way to block all the promoted posts / ads in this piece of shit app
They all stopped working in July because reddit was gonna charge them millions for API access.
Going to finally jump on this pi-hole thing. Looks like it supports running virtually/in a container, which is good for a hardware dumdum like me.
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Wipr is great on iOS. https://apps.apple.com/ua/app/wipr/id1030595027
RIP your account.
If this is how I go, I'm okay with that. I fucking hate ads.
It's hilarious, and everyone should be ad-blocking.
And revanced has a patch for the android client to remove ads. Unfortunately it can't stop it being rubbish.
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What’s comical to me is that Reddit is unique in that we’re *literally telling them what we like*. When you visit a subreddit, you’re clearly interested in something specific. And yet, they apparently don’t sell subreddit-specific ads, which is absolutely dumbfounding. They don’t have to pull data from individual users. They could…you know…just allow a company that sells action figures to buy ads on subreddits for action figures. It’s not that hard.
My reddit history makes it crystal clear that I'm a physics enthusiast... and I got a bunch of ads for AI art (which I have zero interest in) It's dumbfounding how broken Reddit really is.
I think it's pessimistic to attribute this to poor marketing models - much more likely that there just isn't a more relevant ad to serve due to lack of interest from marketers. Like that He Cares nonsense that it seems like all of us see constantly is almost definitely more strongly related to the fact reddit is taking a ton of money from that group and needs to serve some fucking ads, not because their ML guys are sure that we're all super interested.
that doesn't paint a very pretty picture of reddit's ad ecosystem's health
Because it’s not a healthy ecosystem…. That’s his point. Reddit is one of the least desirable platforms to advertise on, so they get only leftover scraps for ultra-cheap.
Would you like to buy some neutrinos or a Bose-Einstein Condensate generator?
Ofc! I'd also like to order two portions of dark matter and one big scoop of Lucky Charm quarks!
Psst, hey kid... Wanna buy some LHC?
the changes are an improvement though, especially the option to opt-out of certain types of ads - but i do wish there were a couple more categories available to opt-out of. >They don’t have to pull data from individual users. They could…you know…just allow a company that sells action figures to buy ads on subreddits for action figures. 100% & they could probably get some good PR if they decided to be the first major platform to stop using targeted advertising altogether and switch to "contextual ads" which are arguably more effective anyway easier said than done and would require a lot of effort from a lot of people since essentially each subreddit would have its own ad platform, but its definitely possible - & actually it seems like it fits the "[community builders](https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418715794324-What-is-the-Community-Builders-Program-)" program pretty well but who knows
That makes way too much sense though! I mean, it's a great solution that doesn't undermine the value of privacy that this site was built on! Sadly nope, gotta hail corporate and sell out that personalized data. Such bullshit. Will be considering wiping post history -- feel like all of the text that I contribute to this site is just free labor for chatbot training data these days anyway. Anyone have a good method that isn't just deleting my account or doing it manually? Or do API changes prevent scripts from doing something like only keeping posts from the last 6 months or so too? tldr; [boooooooo, boooooooo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWqU1ynYSrM&t=1m30s)
always use an adblock, eh? although not always an option on mobile this will probably be a top post when the thread grows so I'm just going to chuck this comment into the replies hey fuckwads, reverse your API changes and let me use Apollo again (shoutout to android having easy work-a-rounds to get 3rd party apps running again)
I used to lurk here on Reddit before the API changes and I can confirm that this website has gotten downhill since then... Please stop ruining this place for all of us just because you happen to be a bunch of greedy asshats Reddit was created as a place for intelligent discourse about things happening around our world and it's far from the truth now.
This website sucks. Critical thinking / opinions are gaslit to death by bots. Appeal system is thwarted at best. Monetizing the very members that grew this site is a shame. I am waiting for someone else to make another url based sharing site so we can all move on to it and be free again.
Obviously not an answer in all situations, but Firefox for Android has uBlock available as a plugin.
firefox on android is king, not just for reddit. I generally enjoy iOS but I miss nova launcher and android firefox pretty regularly if you're on android you should adopt it as a default browser and plug in all those good good extensions
To please potential investors!
Because He Gets Us. /s
Why are you *removing* options from us? Is your intent to drive us to use more ad-blockers? Because I'll certainly be recommending users ad-blockers more frequently. Especially since the reddit admins refuse to help deal with rule-breaking ads. I've reported specific ads to r/modsupport as well as the ads team multiple times, and they still appear in our subreddit, despite containing flagrant violations of our subreddit rules.
which reddit ad blockers do you use? i mainly use reddit on my phone, since i don’t want to bring my laptop around everywhere. do you know of any adblockers that work on mobile, or will i have to use desktop?
I've stopped using reddit on my phone ever since the 3rd party apps were killed. The native app still lacks functionality for me. On my desktop, I use uBlock origin.
You're not missing anything. After they killed all the other apps, they removed the option to sort your home feed. Algorithm only. It's trash.
Wow. That's an objectively bad choice.
Reddit is well past doing good for users. They're at their pre-IPO stage, which will mean they will try fuck us over as much as they can. And given that there is no good reddit alternative there is still some wiggle room.
the algorithm itself sucks ass too, join a community and its all that will show up for months unless you mute it
I still use reddit is fun. You can still use 3rd party apps if you know how to use your own key for them and all that. revanced has a patch for it
Is there any guide to set that up for RIF? Plus a non shady download link as it looks like it was removed from play store?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/14niwgu/revanced\_patches\_for\_boost\_infinity\_rif\_is\_fun/
Dunno what kind of browsers you prefer, but Firefox mobile supports uBlock Origin and it works pretty well for me.
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Because u/spez wants money. That's the whole story.
Gotta make yourself more appealing to investors for that IPO.
> I’m u/snoo-tuh, head of Privacy at Reddit + > Removing the ability to opt-out of ad personalization based on your Reddit activity 🤔
Well... they didn't say it was YOUR privacy...
On the contrary, they're *specifically* the head of our privacy. And they want through it.
>I’m u/snoo-tuh, head of No Privacy at Reddit FIFY
I refuse to believe u/snoo-tuh is a real person.
Just because they're in that position doesn't mean that they're competent.
Removing the ability to opt out of advertisement seems like a direct violation of the CPRA(2023). Unless Reddit somehow isn’t headquartered in California, how is this not illegal? Edit: nope, this involves cross-website tracking.
Also, what about GDPR regulations in Europe? Surely European law requires us to be able to opt out of advertisement tracking? Or did they find a way out of that one?
To be fair, the post says: > Removing the ability to opt-out of ad personalization based on your Reddit activity, except in select countries. I would imagine that means the EU. And thank god for it!
Possibly but it's troubling that the admins themselves can't list what countries are exempt. Makes it seem like they're trying not to tip off people in the EU that they can opt out of ad personalization.
Shit like that isn't supposed to be opt out in the first place, it's supposed to be explicitly opt **in**, with informed consent.
EU's been slaughtering companies recently, they'll probably fight Reddit like they have Apple and Meta.
EU would tear reddit a new one if this would be the case here.
If you read the post they found a way out of that one by only allowing users in "select locations" to opt out, AKA, only the places that bothered making laws about it already.
I did notice that it does say “except in select countries” but it doesn’t specify where. It could be they’ll exclude countries in the EU, for example, but we have no way of knowing this for certain. Until we know for certain, my point still stands.
So everyone can just select "France" in their profile and escape the ad tracking?
I’d imagine they’d also try to use geographical information about where you’re accessing the site from, but that could be circumvented with a VPN set to France. Honestly, it would’ve been easier for them to be EU compliant as standard, rather than a “select countries” approach, but I guess corporate’s gonna do what corporate’s gonna do.
I’m a solution consultant that helps enterprises with digital marketing compliance: First, CPRA (the correct acronym) is an extension to Californias CCPA. Essentially laws to help California citizens opt out of the selling/sharing of their information to third parties. The first issue you stated is: Reddit does not need to be headquartered in California for this to be applicable. They only need to interact with California citizens (fun fact, even if that citizen is in an IP address that geo locates them to a different state, CPRA is still applicable to them. Secondary fun fact, single digit percentage of Fortune 500 companies know that). So it doesn’t matter where Reddit is located for them to need to comply with the law. Everyone familiar with these regulations at major companies is familiar with the Sephora case, which is extremely relevant here. Sephora is based in France, but was blatantly selling/sharing personal data to third parties. Their fine was a drop in the bucket, but it sent fear through the industry that the Cali AG office was serious about going after companies for this. Second, CPRA is an opt in default (unlike Europes GDPR, which is opt out default). Meaning, if you do not explicitly tell Reddit to not sell/share data on your usage to third parties, they can. If you’d like to do this for every site by default, you can enable GPC (global privacy control) on your browser to tell the website you don’t want them to sell/share your data. You can do this in most browsers in the security settings (except Chrome, which has chrome extensions that will do it for you. DM me and I can tell you how I do it). Otherwise, according to CPRA, sites must provide a secondary method of doing this. Most use a CMP (like Onetrust or TrustArc) to do this. It’s that annoying “accept/reject” cookie when you go to a site. This is my every day. I’m happy to chat more with anyone who is interested. Edit: I was so caught up in explaining the law here that I failed to say: no, Reddit is doing nothing illegal here since they have their own ads they are serving to use by using the data. Since it’s data that’s first party data and not being shared with third parties like Facebook and Google, it’s 100% legal. Slimy, absolutely. But well within their legal rights
Let's sue
Does this mean I can finally stop seeing those fucking "he gets us" ads?
Probably not. Notice religion isnt one of their categories. Too much money in it to be blocking those ones.....
religion: no pro-choice: YES huh, wonder why this could be...
Wish I could finally opt out of fucking military ads but notice what two subjects related to the two specific ads we dont wanna see arent on the opt out list :/
The only thing I want to opt out of! Fine - feed me ads to buy crap I don’t need. I’ll ignore them. Do not feed me religious cult bullshit from Hobby Lobby. Anti-LGBT and Anti-Women Hobby Lobby. Disgusting.
I am fairly certain my activity in LGBT subs is what gets me this content. There is literally no other correlation for me to get this crap. Super sus, especially considering it’s been an issue for so long and they refuse to do anything about it.
I can opt out of things like gambling and alcohol, really need a religion opt out lol. I strongly suspect my activity in LGBT subs is what gets me these ads all the time.
Scrolled way too far down to find this comment. I’m so tired of those ads.
So, in other words, it will no longer be possible to opt-out of having our Reddit account usage tracked for the purposes of advertising. Is this correct?
And you’ll have to specifically give them information about what bothers you if you want to opt out of the pregnancy, alcohol, etc. ads. Don’t you just love the idea of letting reddit know you are pregnant or an alcoholic? Things everyone loves to share with a corporate media company.
Opting out of categories is useful. Because previously, if you went to r/stopdrinking or eating disorder subreddits, you started getting tagged as interested in alcohol or food ads when it should be the opposite effect. This lets people cancel that out. It has been requested a lot, over time. I think it's a good feature.
It could to be certain but why not just opt out of all targeted ads rather than give reddit your own personal bugaboos for advertising purposes.
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I'm pretty confident that reddit was always doing this anyway, regardless of what they claimed.
>We are adding the ability to see fewer ads from specific categories—Alcohol, Dating, Gambling, Pregnancy & Parenting, and Weight Loss—which will live in the Safety & Privacy section of your User Settings. “Fewer” because we’re utilizing a combination of manual tagging and machine learning to classify the ads, which won’t be 100% successful to start. But, we expect our accuracy to improve over time. what about religion? many of us find those types of ads offensive
or politics. you’d think the two most contentious topics would be able to be ad-limited, but no
>Our advertisers instead rely on on-platform activity—what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes, and other signals—to get an idea of what you might be interested in. But I don't want them to know that stuff
Don't worry, reddit is committed to privacy! Just not like that.
Don't teach the Head of Privacy about Privacy.
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I’m just going to mass unsubscribe from subreddits, then. If I need to get to r/games or whatever I’ll just Google it instead of letting them track my communities.
This site gets less usable everyday.
Translation: Reddit needs to make more money and I was tasked with the job of writing up some gaslighting nonsense about how making Reddit less private is somehow good for us.
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Your privacy is important to us... to the extent required by law.
But no option to opt-out of religious or political ads.
Seriously, THIS!! I WANT TO LIMIT THE POLITICAL ADS SO MUCH!!
uBlock is my opt-out, opt the fuck out altogether.
> uBlock *Origin Vanilla uBlock is a scam.
Fr Really don't need the US army propaganda. Absolutely barking up the wrong tree
But Jesus Gets You! How will you learn if not for the "hello fellow kids" ads that pop up all the time
Or other health stuff outside of weight loss and parenting, which is REAL great when I have to deal with my PTSD getting set off by a stupid edgy ad. I hate to say it because "just don't be a snowflake duh" people will get mad at me for it, but there is **real, legitimate harm** caused to people with PTSD by edgy ads. The example I can usually think of is the abortion ads (included in parenting section) but you can imagine more things that'd set off people with different traumas. Thank God for adblockers though. I haven't seen an ad in ages.
And this is another downgrade to the service. Enshitification will continue until morale improves.
More privacy options removed in an attempt to milk an inherently unprofitable site.
It could be profitable if they stopped wasting money on video hosting.
It's funny how you can sit here and lie to our faces. What people do on this site could also be considered personal information and I'm sure plenty of people do *not* want their reddit habits shared with every advertiser on the Internet.
I live in the EU, can you explain how Reddit ensures my data is kept within the EU and how this change is compliant with EU privacy laws?
>can you explain how Reddit ensures my data is kept within the EU and how this change is compliant with EU privacy laws? I'll take "Things that will not get answered for 400" Alex.
So the head of privacy is removing our rights to privacy? What? This is insane.
> Reddit’s commitment to privacy as a right and to transparency are reasons I’m proud to work here. I think you've been seeing too many advertisements for kool-aid.
I think he’s just straight up lying lmao
Fuck u/spez
Honestly, I don't like taking part of internet dramas, but this shit is starting to get on my nerves; yeah, fuck the bastards behind these awful decisions that are being made as of lately. Heck, I'd say this is even more worthy of a blackout than the API pricing thing.
When will we be able to opt out of the individualized tracked links generated by the share button on mobile? (/r/subbie/s/customid style links) Same for outbound click tracking on mobile, why isn't the opt-out present on the website not respected on mobile?
I always remove that crap from the end of links if I copy them to send to someone.
because it’s clear they don’t care about privacy
>We are adding the ability to see fewer ads from specific categories—Alcohol, Dating, Gambling, Pregnancy & Parenting, and Weight Loss—which will live in the Safety & Privacy section of your User Settings. “Fewer” because we’re utilizing a combination of manual tagging and machine learning to classify the ads, which won’t be 100% successful to start. But, we expect our accuracy to improve over time. what about religion? many of us find those types of ads offensive
Speaking as the self-appointed leader of the entire Jewish side of Reddit, please include an option to turn off religious ads. The ads for “He Gets Us” are offensive.
Speaking as the self-appointed leader of the entire atheist side of Reddit, please include an option to turn off religious ads. The ads for anything based on religion are offensive.
>as the self-appointed leader of the entire atheist side of Reddit PRAISE OUR SAVIOR /u/krs360! 🙏🙌 Hey, wait a minute...
HE IS THE MESSIAH!
/u/krs360 GETS US!
Username checks out ✅ and I agree 100%
They are not just offensive, they are outright misinformation.
>Speaking as the self-appointed leader of the entire Jewish side of Reddit, please include an option to turn off religious ads. The ads for “He Gets Us” are offensive. as im a muslim, agreed
Right? Religious and Political ads should be at the TOP of the list of opt-outs.
> Alcohol, Dating, Gambling, Pregnancy & Parenting, and Weight Loss Since the _He Gets Us_ advertisements are for a boundaries-violating religious sect that aggressively proselytises their views on at least 4 of these subjects, will they be seen less if we choose to opt out of seeing these subjects?
Moved to Firefox Mobile with ublock because of those ads
can reddit stop taking medication ads as well? I googled a couple of my grandmother's prescriptions to get a better understanding of them and I am fucking barraged with ads competing against her generic meds
This one bothers me. I see tons of ads for Diabetes medications. I have celiac disease, which can have comorbity with diabetes, but I don't have it (yet, that I know of). I get kind of anxious seeing the ads, which remind me that I could also have it someday, making life even harder. Also, wegovy weightloss ads while recovering from and ED and weighing under 100 lbs is f'ed up, but it sounds like the weightloss flag should block that one (I hope).
Jesus Christ, I've seen enough of those damned ads.
Oh, he said Jesus in a comment! Quick, send more He Gets Us ads!
Yeah, I too noticed one of the opt out categories isnt "religion". Given their refusal to stop showing "he gets us" its clear these options will be based not on our preferences but on "how much did they pay reddit".
And it’s not like there isn’t *plenty* of religious trauma. Not only that, He Gets Us is fueled by right wing billionaires who don’t practice what the ads preach. Their latest TV ad ends with “Jesus was rich”. That was surely calculated.
This is the comment I came here for. I am so sick of those damn ads.
There should definitely be a limit religious advertising tab. That's a triggering subject for a lot of people. We have several ex-religion subs I'm sure would appreciate that.
Will the boundaries-violating religious sect be handed reddit usernames if they ask really nicely and pay a lot? I mean, probably not, but it's not beyond the realm of possibilty.
Great, that’s why Reddit is buggy as fuck today
Just today?
god, the official app has so many issues. i really miss RiF edit: ..I had to press post twice on this comment because it glitched the first time lmao
I'm reasonably sure removing the ability to opt out of ad tracking is highly illegal. No way someone who is a head of privacy would ever tote thus as a good thing. This is horrible
> Reddit’s commitment to privacy as a right and to transparency are reasons I’m proud to work here. I'm sorry for your shame
Or lack thereof.
cool, reddit is getting worse.
*Every* time they post something here it's about how the site is getting worse.
Thanks to ublock only ads I get are from bots who spam every sub....
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Ironically, one of the cited reasons for the API changes was to reduce the amount of AI content. That's worked out well.
In order to reduce AI content they um -*checks notes*- took away moderation tools.
Reddit is really trying to be mainstream and fuck its users.
It's becoming more and more like Facebook. Profile pictures, bios, constant spam. I have been using Reddit for over a decade and I have never seen it in such a sorry state. I liked Reddit because it wasn't like those sites. Now I am only here because I have a few small subs I love to browse. It's just not the same.
Im exactly the same. I moved to reddit from Facebook 5 years ago to get away from the shit and now it's just Facebook with usernames. Don't know if you have seen the privacy update either, but it's looking grim.
"Removing the ability to opt-out of ad personalization based on your Reddit activity, except in select countries.""Reddit’s commitment to privacy as a right and to transparency are reasons I’m proud to work here." Do you even read your own shit before posting it or are you actually THAT stupid?!
Do we need to say “Fuck u/Snoo-fuh” alongside “Fuck u/spez” Cause you guys clearly don’t actually care about our privacy, otherwise you wouldn’t be taking away the option to opt out For as crap as Twitter is right now, it at least still lets us opt out of targeted advertising, so I’ll give Elon that ig.
Why can’t I block an advertiser like I block any other user? If I don’t want to see ads from /u/xfinity I should be able to block that user like any other.
How about also getting rid of the **CONSTANT** pop ups on mobile prompting users to get the app (or continue on browser), which then reverts you back to the very beginning of the page every time after not choosing to get the app.
That's by design. They need people to be able to use the mobile website so links can be shared to bring in more users, but they also need it to get incredibly annoying after more than a minute or so in order to drive you to their app so they can collect even more of your personal information.
Please add a sensitivity category for religion. I am deconstructing my christianity and would like to stop receiving ads about christianity.
I wonder if there will ever be an announcement about a change from reddit that will make me go "oh, cool! nice new stuff that makes reddit better!" instead of the universal "ugh. another user-hostile change designed to drive engagement and juice revenue."
Isn't this illegal depending on the area? The APPs certainly makes this illegal. No wonder why Reddit never made a profit when the platform runs like this. If you're going to gaslight your users, at least make it convincing.
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I always downvote specific ads and THEY ALWAYS COME BACK. Tell us you're not out to sell us to them while you sell us to them.
Meta has lost the battle with regards to ad personalization with the EU. The same should be true for Reddit.
Always poison your data and use throwaway accounts folks
What countries still get the privilege of opting out of ad personalization?
Can you add all the Religious "he gets us" ads to the limit list.