Reddit said Wednesday that the platform is revamping its privacy settings with an aim to make ad personalization and account visibility toggles consistent. Most notably though, it is removing the ability to opt out of ad personalization based on Reddit activity.
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.
“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, and other signals—to get an idea of what you might be interested in,” Reddit said.
The company is essentially removing the option to not track you based on whatever you do on Reddit.
Additionally, Reddit is consolidating two toggles on showing ads based on activity and information from partners into one toggle. So there is no way to separate those two settings now.
Reddit is seemingly removing toggles for getting post recommendations based on “general location” and activity on partner sites and apps. It’s not clear if this means those parameters will be used for post suggestions by default and there is no way to turn them off.
The social network said it will also roll out controls to limit certain advertising categories such as alcohol, weight loss, dating, gambling pregnancy, and parenting.
The company noted that ad-limiting controls will possibly show you fewer ads from mentioned categories if the toggles are turned off, but won’t possibly filter out all ads. Reddit justified this by saying it uses manual tagging and machine learning to label ads, so there is a chance that it is not 100% accurate.
Reddit is also simplifying its location customization setting under a single menu, which will be easily accessible through settings on apps and on the web.
The social platform has made several changes to increase monetization. It infamously made changes to its data API terms that led to many third-party clients shutting down and subreddits protesting in retaliation. Last week, it rolled out a new creator rewards program to incentivize people to post more and better content on the platform. But it also introduced a change that made it easier for users to purchase Gold rewards.
In an interview with The Verge in June, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman responded to IPO rumors and said “Getting to breakeven is a priority for us in any climate.”
Unlike Twitter or other news sites, reddit already has a sorting algorithm: voting, and personalized feeds defeats the entire point of reddit, since now everybody gets a different front page, which is good for selling targeted ads but bad for promoting genuine engagement where people naturally talk to each other about what everyone wants to talk about.
I don’t think the leaderships at reddit understands their own product at all, but that’s not a surprise at this point.
By the way, anyone notice that circlejerks are pretty rare here compared to reddit?
The things that happen on each kind of online platform are to a large extent a result of how the platform is structured. Lemmy and Reddit are structured in pretty much exactly the same way.
As the userbase of Lemmy grows, it will become more like Reddit, whether people like it or not. I wish we had a social media platform structured like a traditional phpBB-style web forum, with thread bumping and all.
They completely disregard that, the recommendation system really has its own ways to do things you didn’t ask for in the first place. Also forums as big as reddit are not manageable without fine tuned mod tools. They do not have those. Never fully implemented.