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.
Maybe I’ll “move to Europe” lol
fires up VPN
Or maybe I’ll just stop visiting reddit entirely?
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That would probably be for the best.
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No :(
I really should though.
I live in europe! On the internet!
Opt-out is still illegal in many cases… a lot must be opt-in based. Typically consent must be freely given.
Will they become liable if I don’t opt-out?
In the EU, they certainly aren’t allowed to “assume consent”.
It depends if someone bothers to sue them or not. In the EU court decisions until now point that profiling for advertising should be opt-in not opt-out but companies keep trying to find loopholes or at least hoping to not attract too much attention with their defaults.
In EU no one individual needs to sue them. The what-ever-the-office-might-be-responsible at EU burecracy will just send them an nicely worded letter that says “play by the book or we’ll give you fine big enough to bankrupt you no matter how much money you think you have”. The fine is based on company revenue (or sales, I don’t remember what it spesifically was) and there’s no way you’ll weasel yourself out of that no matter how many american lawyers you can hire. The same folks forced Apple to adapt usb-c, so good luck Spez if you try to challenge that.
One small correction: There is no EU office responsible for GDPR enforcement, the EU member states are responsible for handling GDPR breaches within their jurisdiction (Art. 51 GDPR). As an individual you can also file a complaint against offenders (Art. 77 GDPR).
Countries where they’re legally required to.
Australia? How ? Isn’t Australia one of the five eyes country? Like more the data these companies collect its better for Australia.
I’ll be very surprised if our govt does anything positive when it comes to digital rights. The current shower of arseholes in government supported the previous even bigger shower of arseholes to pass diabolical legislation like data retention and assistance and access bills.
The EU just does so many things right.
America: “SoCiALisM”
This may or may not be illegal, depending on what the “this” is you’re agreeing to. As a simple example, if it is “you agree to functional cookies by continuing to use the site”, that’s fine. If it is “you agree to us scraping your computer and selling everything we find to China”, that is most definitely not legal, nor is refusing service if you don’t agree.
Oh nooooo who could have seen this coming… anyway continues using Lemmy
Consider redacting your data and deleting your account
https://old.reddit.com/r/redditseppuku/comments/14frr4u/reddit_seppuku_how_to/
First, delete all of your comments using the automated tools
Didn’t these all stop working when they shutdown the public API?
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I thought it would too, but some replies indicate it still works!
Your mileage may vary.
No, redact your data, get banned and still request your data every 30 days under GDPR (just submitted my 3rd).
Meh. I pondered this but leaving it helps users still using the platform.
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
This is going to be the most quoted literary work of the 21st century
Do you think maybe it’ll be different with a federated and thus less centralized platform like Lemmy? Or do you think it will just delay this process? Cause right now lemmy and kbin seem to be pretty good.
I think that the FOSS Fediverse platforms are significantly resistant to enshittification.
That same article explores what enables enshittification and what precludes it:
The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability).
Fediverse platforms:
- are highly interoperable - e.g. you can use Lemmy or Kbin and still see the same posts
- mostly FOSS, so anyone can fork them whenever they want if they don’t like some particular change
- most instances currently aren’t operated for profit - certainly if your instance started displaying ads you could switch to another instance (or set one up) and still access all the same content as you did previously
Hmm yeah that’s what I was thinking… May kbin and lemmy live long and prosper 🖖
There’s no business platform here. So it will go a different path. Buy eventually the mods and instance admins who are volunteering their time and money to keep this going will wish to spend their time and money elsewhere. What happens after the first round of people who really work to make a free platform like this succeed go away? If there’s not a good deal of planning and acculturation for new people, there’s a high likelihood that a second generation of mods takes over who have different motives and reasons for running the place and the platform sees noticeable changes. Or nobody steps up at all and individual sections just end.
I honestly think the only way this could work is like email. So you either take the gmail like privacy destruction and ads, or you pay for a service. Back in the day it was bundled by the ISP, but now I think it’s way more likely to end up being some bundled ‘online service’ company that for a monthly fee provided a swath of federated content and services. But that it hasn’t sprung up implies that it’s not a workable model.
I mean the mods and admins won’t all go away at once, right? It’s probably gonna be gradual, so maybe the existing mods can keep any new/replacing mods in check? I dunno…
Plus, do you think maybe a donation model could be viable for platforms like this? It’s split over multiple instances so surely at least the smaller ones could be ran off of donation money?
Hard to say. My experience with people in general is that they’ll keep going even if things aren’t great, but they’ll get upset. And eventually things will come to a head and there’s a major change in a short period of time. This being a somewhat democratic platform, I would bet that we’ll have that sort of trajectory.
As for donations, it’s just very hard to get people to donate enough and often enough to support this kind of thing. Think of the regular donation appeals on public radio, or Wikipedia, or even The Guardian. They have a whole organization and system built around soliciting donations, and even then they are always operating on a shoestring. How often do you donate? How often do your friends and family?
As long as humans are involved and we are looking at a long enough timeframe, the answer is probably always yes.
In fediverse, the data is already public. You’ll just need to run an instance, start federating and the data will flow directly into your instance. Whether someone will somehow find a way to extract profit from this system is remain to be seen.
Whether someone will somehow find a way to extract profit from this system is remain to be seen.
I think it’s inevitable that someone will find a way to profit, even if it’s just scraping the data for training LLMs, or for something like those shitty sites that just duplicate GitHub issues.
The question of enshittification isn’t whether someone can find a way to profit, it’s whether someone can find a way to change the platform to increase their profit.
they are preparing for IPO, the most inherently malicious owner there is!
Are they really still just preparing?
yeah they aren’t IPO yet, I think a lot of stuff didn’t play nicely for them, with the ukraine war, the tech bubbles popping and the general global economic conditions things aren’t exactly favourable. I think also the backlash to 3rd party apps and their general shittiness has been hurting them a bit more than they have said.
Have been for years. Reddit is mismanaged, and the IPO is just an effort to get whatever they can before letting suckers hold the bag. They will never reach the valuation they had.
Certainly by a greedy one. Greed and stupidity are often better explanations than outright malice, but… yeah, they’re a bunch of assholes, too.
I mean, I’m not denying they’re making wrong choices, and I’ve left Reddit myself, but given that they’re losing money I don’t understand how it’s considered ”greedy” to try and change that.
The largest owners are Advance Publications and Tencent. Advance also own Condé Nasty (Reddit even used to be under the Condé Nast banner). Weirdly they also own everyone’s favorite plagiarism detection service Turnitin.
I know of Tencent and the controversy about them… I don’t know anything about Advance though. Are they also controversial?
Halon’s Razor.
If you look at who Spez idolizes (Musk) and how he treated and talked about the protesters…. No. He or the board doesn’t get a pass for this. This is a move stemmed 100% from financial gain and malfeasance
The actual razor in that case; incompetent malice.
They think their platform is unique - incompetence.
They think this users are morons to be milked - malice.
Eventually the second part becomes true as the intelligent users realize the first is not l, leaving only morons who are easily milked.
Is that anything like Hanlon’s Razor?
Uhm, that option was intreduced by sites and ad networks because the GDPR requires it so unless they plan to shut down buisness in the EU it’s probably going to fail!
The company said that it will still have opt-out controls in “select countries” without specifying which ones.
I’m guessing that’s how they plan to get around that. They will leave the toggle enabled for people registered in EU countries, and disable it everywhere else. A fairly risky way to handle it in my opinion.
Well, that’s certainly illegal too, the GDPR requires opt-in and while there is room for interpritation (see all the shitty cookie banners) if you enable anything by default it’s not going to fly!
About the cookie banners: I heard some time ago that EU wants to force browsers to have an option to automatically decline all non-essential cookies because those banners are pissing everyone off. What’s with that plan, any updates?
The feature is actually older than any cookie banner (do not track request) but idk if the EU will overwork the law that way, it’s a miracle that it passed at all and I would be surprised if the loopholes aren’t made for some lobbyists in the first place!
While that’s true, I’ve seen GDPR enforcement to be sparse, at best. Someone has a cookie banner and they aren’t questioned, but even if you “deny all” there is still spyware on the site. I will do the usual. Hope for the best, expect the worst
The method of “enforcment” for that part of the GDPR is awful but for a big and fairly hated player like Reddit it will probably actually work, some organization or competitor just has to file a formal complaint. There was some NGO a few years ago that filed cimplaints against various big players and got platforms like Twitch to fix their banners that way but idk what happened to them!
Oh yeah not saying it won’t make waves for something like Reddit, it just wish it was more actively enforced from reports
I couldn’t agree more, a single look at our newspapers in Austira reveals a sad trueth, even the good ones use illegal “consent or pay” cookie banners!
Something that always pissed me off is that while I might not be living in the EU currently I’m still a citizen but companies get to just fuck me over anyways?
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I haven’t used reddit in months
I still read some niche subs from time to time, but I don’t post or vote on anything any more. It could just be confirmation bias, but the comments do seem to be more full of assholes than before the API change.
Not that it’s not confirmation bias but I can confirm what you’re seeing.
They lost a lot of active, enthusiastic, altruistic friendly people. I don’t think they’ve drawn in worse people, but there are less nice voices to balance out the vitriol. Under the circumstances there’s also less downvoting toxicity.
I’m pretty sure it’s a real thing but how much it’s felt probably varies community by community.
I also wonder if the combination of losing modding tools and mods being treated like garbage by reddit made them less enthusiastic about doing their (unpaid) job, too.
I still check in to certain niche subreddits that don’t exist on lemmy. Those feel pretty close to how they used to. The other day I took a look at /r/all and… ooof. It’s very apparent quality has completely nosedived. Lemmy /c/all is a much better representation of pre-blackout reddit /r/all right now.
Same. I left once the Apollo app stopped working and haven’t looked back.
Every time I see any news of Reddit, I’m glad I left
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.
They’re gonna remove old reddit aren’t they?
I’m actually surprised it’s still running, but it seems inevitable especially when they aren’t milking that sweet sweet af revenue.
With old reddit you can block ads on the side and ads that pretend to be posts have a blueish hue, so it’s easy to scroll past without paying attention.
“New” reddit the images/videos are already open so I’m sure eventually they’ll look at the decrease in ad impressions and make up an excuse to get rid of it.
Assuming none of that has changed in the couple months since I left.
All moderation tools were not available on new design last time I was there. It is still not on par with old design
That’s not gonna stop them
They cannot for now, old.reddit still drives a LOT of traffic for them and most of the reddit oldheads from what ive seen just use old reddit to surf the site, so if they’re not stupid enough to drive a huge part of their userbase away from their shithole to sites like lemmy and turn into digg 2.0, I don’t see old reddit dying for awhile but remember this is spez we’re talking about in the end, the self proclaimed Elon fanboi, so I cannot expect any intelligent decision from him.
so if they’re not stupid enough to drive a huge part of their userbase away from their shithole to sites like lemmy and turn into digg 2.0
HAHAHAHAHHA oh man that’s funny
According to Reddit last year, while only 4% of users are on old.reddit, 60% of all mod actions are carried out on it. They can’t get rid of it for now, but they are working on bringing updates to modding on new.reddit or newnew.reddit (nickname given by me).
Early 2024 is the estimated rollout for this, so I’d say mid-to-late 2024 is when old.reddit is kicked to the curb.
If those users are just dead weight to them, it makes business sense to even convert 10% them to their main ad filled product, and let the 90% go away. They want to go public and sell, they are definitely last stage of pulling a cash grab.
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”
This is exactly how I feel. I wiped my primary account but not my porn alt, and I’m sad about it
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.
Advertisers are commercial.
Commercial interests are capitalist.
Capitalist interests are hierarchical.
Hierarchical interests have to retain their structure either through deception or by power of force.
As a Venn diagram its a bunch of concentric circles.
The internet spreads information like California wildfire, which nullifies false notion about the failure of capitalist equity.
So yes, fascist rhetoric, disinformation and obstruction of internet interconnectivity are the last recourses of commercial enterprises.
Yayyyyyy American puritanism!
But will it be filthy?
Nsfwbrowser.com means you don’t even have to use Reddit to see Reddit porn
Thanks for the tip!
And use Revanced to patch the shit out of Reddit app.
You can also use revanced to patch your own api key into Infinity and use that instead
Or Sync, or Boost…
it says you need root to access the split apk
or locate to an apk file instead
how do I do that? do I just download an apk from apkmirror or some random website?
Apkmirror :) download APK from there.
Lol what ads. Old.reddit with Reddit enhancement suite and Ublock Origin. That’s the only way I ever browse Reddit anymore. I have never seen an ad on Reddit. If they ever get rid of old Reddit I’ll never go back there. As it is my Reddit usage has decreased by 95% since using Lemmy and never browsing Reddit any other place than my pc.
Problem is not just the ads they serve you, but also that they sell this data…
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So we come to Lemmy where anyone can spin up an instance, collect our data, and sell it.
Or you can spin up your own and control your own data
Now we just need to figure out how to actually sell our data ourselves!
Sure, but because of federation other instances can collect your posts and vote data. Federation is the antithesis of privacy.
I’ll bet cash that it’s only a short matter of time before old.reddit is shutdown and within 6 months of that happening Reddit access will be locked behind account login.
I guarantee you the C-suite at reddit regularly kick themselves for giving into public backlash and keeping old.reddit. People weren’t happy with the redesign, but they would have definitely gotten used to it fairly quickly. Now, removing it will be another nail in the coffin they’re so desperate to build.
I suspect you’re correct, although I doubt removing old.reddit will cause much of a stir.
Notice how Reddit is releasing 1 shitty update every few weeks rather than all at once? By the time one shit update is released the vast majority of users have forgotten the previous one. Remember the API change? I reckon most of Reddits existing users don’t anymore. I suspect old.reddit will go the same way.
The only thing keeping the main community that I still visit reddit for (not nearly often enough, since I only look at it on old Reddit) on Reddit is discoverability. People search Google and the Reddit community is in the results, so I don’t think they’ll make it log in to view
That same community will probably leave the platform when old.reddit (with Reddit Enhancement Suite) is closed, unless Reddit actually adds comparable mod tools
A lot of sites show up in Google results and then force you to log in to actually see the content. I think most of them just get away with hiding the content a second after loading it in, that way the crawler bot still is able to see all the page but the user isn’t
Similar to twitter.
If I go to twitter mainpage I can’t see anything without logging in.
If I go direct to a profile I see can’t see anything without logging and;
If I go to a specific post, I can read the initial post but nothing else.
That’s what I expect will happen to Reddit
I wouldnt take that bet because I 100% agree.
Do you also get redirected to some random post with 2 up votes when you click on any i.reddit url/picture. I use the same setup and was wondering if I messed up some settings or if it reddit messing up the old interface.
But old reddit has changed a lot. Bringing it close to the newer interface.
- for what ever reason sometimes even internal links inside reddit opens up a new tab with the new interface
Old. Reddit still looks the exact same as it always has for me. I use Reddit enhancement suite so so maybe that’s it. Just turn off “use subreddits style” for every subreddit. Dark mode on. Ad blocker enabled. I don’t have the new tab issue. I can see that this won’t last forever though and eventually Reddit won’t exist to me anymore.
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.
Sure, why not? As the user base narrows, those who are left are the ones willing to put up with the most shit, so that is what they get.
Does it narrow? Let’s be realistic, Reddit isn’t the wasteland you want it to be.
Most of the subs I used to care about are more of a wasteland than I could’ve imagined. And come to think of it I’m starting to suspect that the demographics of social media participation in general are beginning to get narrower as well. After starting with a select few early adopters in the 1980s and then taking 30-some years to gradually broaden out to include basically “everyone” (in the anglosphere at least), people who are tired of the whole affair are perhaps starting to drop out or at least reduce their participation in significant numbers. I wonder how many of the people perceptive enough to leave reddit for one reason or another simply didn’t find anything worthy of replacing it.
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?
Who didn’t see this coming? Kill all good third party apps and funnel everyone into their dogshit, undercooked app and then leverage every metric and interaction for advertising
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.
It’s theft is what it is. Personal data has value - so much value that companies like Google and Facebook have used solely data to become some of the wealthiest businesses in the world. These companies take our data for free, tell us it’s so worthless it isn’t worth paying us, and then they make pure profit. We might not know how to do what they do with the data, but you can’t build a car without paying for the nuts and bolts; we should be paid our fair share for every data point they collect.
People on sites like this really need to understand that for good or bad we are a vocal minority. People by and large understand “if you aren’t paying for it you’re the product”. Many people have come to terms with this be it reddit, or Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.
Does it make it right? Or course it doesn’t.
But I seriously don’t know, outside of a serious privacy breach involving hundreds of deaths, how do we effectively change the narrative in a way the masses can not only consume but understand?
I’m in my echo chamber here but at the same time I’ve come to terms that if it’s online expect it to be sold and nothing is private.
I disagree with you there, what people need to understand - the masses in general - is that this is a completely new and deeply flawed way for human beings to trade value between each other. One where the things one party is giving up are poorly defined, and they don’t get anything in return or have any room to negotiate. Hell, it isn’t even really a transaction, they just invite you in and then rummage through your pockets.
We have a long-established set of rules for forming deals, called contract law, that we’ve developed over thousands of years. Mass commercial data collection flouts the core principles of this.
we should be paid our fair share for every data point they collect.
And every time they sell it, every transaction it leads to.
I think a flat one time fee per access is fine, so long as it’s proportional to the sales they make. Data has a value with respect to time anyway, new data is more valuable than old data, even if the data is the same, so it’s not like they’ll just be getting it one time.
watching every move you make
Just like The Police.
Sting has a lot to answer for
I agree with you but let’s cut the hyperbole please? It is not “a brazen assault on our psyche”. Ain’t no one of sound mind seeking out a therapist for trauma because reddit changes it TOS.
I think they are an assault on free will. Ads aren’t well reasoned arguments for the purchase of a product or service; they’re whatever they need to be to get you to change your behavior. If they have to scare, shame, trick, etc. they’ll do it.
Just out of curiosity how old are you? My sense is your opinion is probably shared by those younger people who came of age during the beginning of the death throws of cable.
I’m not saying your opinion is wrong for you. But I’m 46 now. I grew up inundated by commercials. They have always done all those things you mention. We were raised in an environment where media literacy included commercials allowing us to better see and smell the bullshit. Maybe that is what is lacking?
They are definitely not an “assault on free will” as you put it. Advertising is one of the oldest industries known to man and it will continue to exist and evolve.
That said, you are very correct in that it has gotten worse in recent years. This is predominantly (I feel) because government has stopped regulating specifically what is marketed to kids (thanks 1980’s!). There is also an angle that we stopped teaching media literacy like we used to.
I’m in my late thirties, actually. I think the difference in the ads we were exposed to compared to young people today is that nearly all of ours were broadly targeted. ie there was no micro targeting or anything really tailored to the individual outside of direct mail. We all watched the same commercials, you know?
Modern ad tech is much less “spray and pray” but as to what difference that makes vis-a-vis people’s ability to see BS, idk. I’d imagine the proportion of young people who are skeptical of advertising hasn’t changed much but the effectiveness of ads on those who are susceptible to it has increased. But again, I’m just talking out my ass here haha.
But all ads share the goal of altering your behavior to their own ends. Isn’t that in and of itself a reduction of your free will? An idea or thought you might have had is supplanted by one placed there by an advertiser, right?
Maybe this is where we differ then. I agree with everything you’re saying but at the same time in no way do I feel like my choice to choose is being taken away. I am not being forced to buy anything.
No, you’re not being forced of course. But advertisers are absolutely trying to bend your decision making process towards their products. That’s how ads work, right? They ultimately want you to spend money on something. Not saying you’re like Homer Simpson driving down the road stopping to obey all the billboards, I’m just saying it’s the inherent nature of ads. I didn’t mean to imply anything else
My intention wasn’t to equate ads with psychological trauma, but rather to emphasize the profound impact such invasive practices can have on our sense of privacy and autonomy. The terminology of ‘personalized ads’ can often obscure the magnitude of surveillance behind it. I understand that this might come across as hyperbolic to some, but it’s essential to articulate the depth of concern many feel.
This is how my love for uBlock Origin grows day by day…
I don’t know how anyone lives without it.
Fuuck I run 12 adblockers at once to chew up all ads and burn them.
they’re used to it. my mother forbid me from setting up ad protection on her phone, because she’s used to them and didn’t want to learn how to switch it off when necessary (e.g. when it breaks a site she needs)
I use Blokada 5 on my phone to block ads and trackers and the fucking banking app stops working if I have it turned on. FFS you already have my money why did you guys need to harvest more of my data (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)
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GDPR violation.
No chance they will block out the entire EU market. They will probably just do the same as everyone else and make a specific EU policy.
Actually I think Meta Threads is still not available in EU for the same reasons.
The company said that it will still have opt-out controls in “select countries” without specifying which ones. It mentioned in a blog post that users won’t see more ads but they will see better-targeted ads following this change.
The “selection” will all be yellow stars on a blue background. Can’t wait to see Vestager tear them a new one. Heeeere’s the EU, legislating your aaaaass!!
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Isn’t that illegal under GDPR or something?
