To amplify its advertising strategies, a popular virtual meeting place, Reddit, has made a big announcement: its users will no longer have the option to opt out of ad personalization based on their activity on the platform. This major revamp in its advertising, privacy, and location settings was revealed last Wednesday, with Jutta Williams, Reddit’s head of “privacy” leading the conversation.
From the perspective of the company, this move is constructive, offering them an opportunity to “better predict which ad may be most relevant” to each user. According to Williams, the fact that Reddit requires minimal personal information from its users makes this shift plausible. However, this perspective could be concerning from a privacy standpoint, as it potentially accelerates invasive data surveillance.
Expounding her statements, Williams insisted the bulk of Reddit’s users would notice “no change to their ads,” and the new measure would not lead to an increase in ads or sharing of on-platform activities with advertisers, even for users who earlier opted out of ad personalization.
Critics argue that this decision may subtly influence user behavior and preferences by narrowing the presented information.
Are they killing themselves, though? I think they know (and probably have the science to back up) that the number they’ve done on co-opting social movements and how they’ve made their product addictive makes any move of theirs securely fine for their profits and user base. Of course there will be articles and chatter (on social media), and maybe a fraction of a percentage will close their accounts. But a good chunk of that fraction will reinstate their account or lie about closing it while still using it.
It’s rare for people to follow through on anything that they know they should do when the other option is indulging a habit. These sites will not be the juggernauts they once were (see Facebook), but their power is still immense and they’ve gotten so involved with the actual function of the internet that losing users on their flagship sites aren’t really a big deal anymore.
Totally unrelated: have you ever lived in bogota?
Unfortunately this is probably true. I for one did delete my account and am working on figuring out Lemmy now but hey.
The way I see it, yes people stay, but they still get fed up with it all regardless. When you use these platforms, you can constantly feel them minorly pissing you off all the time. The moment a better alternative comes along, they’ll go the way of MySpace. At that point these platforms will be too set in their way to change and just slowly wither.
For me personally, switching to Lemmy was entirely painless and it immediately felt like the way Reddit used to be. Every time I have to look something up on Reddit, it’s extremely painful. If Lemmy grows a bit more it is an easy 1:1 replacement. Average users always tend to flock to “cool, trendy” new platforms when they’ve become popular enough, then they usually turn to shit. That was my experience with Imgur, which was great at the beginning.
Another thing is that these big social media companies ban so much great content in a bid to stay AD-friendly, that that opens up a very sought after nieche that smaller social media can exploit.
I’m hoping the fediverse will be more resistant to these trends, because the friction to leaving a bad instance is much lower.
I think Reddit will be one of the first to go, as they don’t have much value add to offer. That’s why they’re closing down so much, so people are forced to stay if they want to browse their back catalogue of posts. But Reddit users basically just read the most recent posts, and rarley top-all, so if you can offer them interesting most recent posts on Lemmy, it is easy to switch. Reddit also doesn’t really benefit from the network effect much like Facebook and Youtube do.
YouTube will be much harder to replace because of their giant library. And Facebook too because they add a lot of value to users because there are so many users. So I’m pretty sure these two will stick around for a while.
Even if they don’t get replaced with the Fediverse another new traditional social media company could easily swoop in and profit off of their user’s ambient dissatisfaction.
Sure there’s always people that will stay but they eventually leave too.
I see it kind of like cable vs streaming. At first cable was great, then it got shit, got replaced by streaming which was great, now streaming is shit again, eventually it will be replaced by something good again.
That’s what I see happening with social media too. Yes people stay way longer than they should, but they will leave the instant a better alternative is here.