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
Which is illegal in the EU and about to be illegal in Australia
¯\_(ツ)_/¯The company said that it will still have opt-out controls in “select countries” without specifying which ones.
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.
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?
I haven’t used reddit in months
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.
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.
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”
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.
