I left a couple of months ago. Couldn’t be happier.
The writing is on the wall. The leader thinks the Genius-with-hair-transplants is a superstar, despite destroying a globally recognised brand. Inspired by this, Spez is trying to get Reddit ready for an IPO. This means, maximise profits by any means.
They haven’t been trustworthy in years! Reddit is heavily astroturfed by government agents. Ft Elgin was the “most reddit addicted” city and it’s also where they conduct propaganda ops. They quietly scrubbed that fact. If you like reddit you must be waiting for your pension from uncle sam otherwise you’re a zuck style dumb fuck
No man made organization is infallible. Due to Lemmy’s decentralized nature though it’s objectively more difficult. Astroturfing or completely co-opting all possible instances would be quite an impressive feat.
You don’t need to, you only need to go after the large ones. I’m already on my third instance, and having to move is such a giant pain in the ass, I don’t think I’d do it again.
If they are storing a this data anyway to make the thing work (so you can go and un-upvote the thing you upvoted five years ago), how is “privacy” reduced if they also have the as system decide to show you an ad because people who upvoted that thing tend to click on the ad?
No new people or businesses are being given any new information bout anyone. Is it because what used to be a passive database is now starting to think, and your privacy is infringed because the system itself is now looking at you when you didn’t expect it to?
Regardless. Fuck what Reddit has become. I really hope that people will see the light and move to Lemmy.
A testament to how important good legislation is… most—if not all—privacy issues that we face today are in large part due to legislative failures.
Legislation and enforcement. There are countless laws on the books that are not enforced. Generally speaking, they may as well not exist.
Yeah I gotta say, I make sure to vote in every election to the European parliament, and I have always voted for the representatives with the strongest privacy oriented agendas, and over the decades I have been blown away by some of the great legislation we have seen with regards to regulating the capitalist hydra trying to devour our freedom of speech and interaction online.
Holding gargantuan companies accountable like Google, Microsoft, FaceBook et al, dishing out serious fines, GDPR… EU may not do everything right, but these things alone makes me happy to be in it.
I love how everybody is so busy about mining your behavior for ad tracking data and then like 2/3 of the ads I actually see are utterly irrelevant gut doctor / toenail fungus / 17 Most Embarrassing Topless Celebrity Moments crap.
(I think the reality is that they’re mining that data to identify a small number of people susceptible to high-value scams - like getting addicted to an F2P mobile game and spending $1000s on it - and the rest of us just get generic infill)
The reality is that the internet itself is at a tipping point. Advertising platforms know their service is basically worthless as most people use an adblocker, and most companies have idiotic marketing teams that don’t know how to properly sell their product/service in the first place. Companies are seeing less and less ROI on their marketing budget. Without ads, the internet goes bye-bye, or it turns into a subscription model for every website.
Or - as many of us hope for - we manage to make the economics of the fediverse work (don’t forget to support your instances, people) and the most valuable users move to blissful ad-free places like Lemmy and Mastodon.
Indeed, throw in open-source AI (thanks, weirdly, to Zuckerberg) and Wikipedia and you can start to see the contours of a post-advertising internet.
A problem I see is scalability. For example on Lemmy once an instances hits a high enough user count the costs far outweigh donations and moderation becomes a full time job. It’s ad-free for now but costs are going to keep increasing as the demand for storage and constant moderation increase with the userbase.
Advertising platforms know their service is basically worthless as most people use an adblocker
most people aren’t tech-savvy enough to do that
I love how everybody is so busy about mining your behavior for ad tracking data and then like 2/3 of the ads I actually see are utterly irrelevant gut doctor / toenail fungus / 17 Most Embarrassing Topless Celebrity Moments crap.
Have you had yourself checked out for toenail fungus bro? Might be a thing.
I have spent thousands of dollars trying to cure my toenail fungus in the last three months.
I guess I’m a toenail fungus whale?
The simplest explanation is generally the right one. Online advertising is a scam. They manipulate the numbers to create the illusion of value. Scammers scamming scammers. Liars and thieves all the way down.
Yea it feels like something has been rotten with the ads industry for a long while. I’ve read a few pieces here and there about how it could collapse and that it’s built almost entirely on dumb lies. But it’s still here.
I’m no economist, but my best guess is that it’s a little like war and the effort we put into it. Complete trashy waste almost all the time, except for when one person or country decides to put effort into it, because then you have to as well or run huge risks. We’d all be better off without ads, including brands/companies, but when one is doing it every company has to too.
Ads are meant to get brand recognition out there for most things. Then when you’re in a store you buy what you’ve heard of before. They wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t effective.
You’re putting too much faith in the talent and insight of marketing executives. Large companies throw tens of millions of dollars at their marketing department. They’ll spend the money on a diverse ad campaign that ticks boxes, not one that is actually effective. People don’t buy based on the commercial they saw last. People buy what’s shoved in their faces.
You’ve forgotten the second layer of advertising, convincing companies they need to buy ads
And by definition it’s still nothing but systematic brain washing. It’s actually very 1984, and I can’t understand how some people are ok with being manipulated into buying shit 24/7 and think that global perpetual invasive advertising is this perfectly normal thing that humanity has always had around…
With very, very few exceptions, any time I see an ad I make a mental note to never buy that product. As such, most products I am familiar with(presumably because I saw an ad) I will not buy. The exception is pretty much just Hershey’s chocolate bars, I can’t live without them.
The most effective ads I’ve seen in my lifetime have been podcast ads. I don’t remember shit I see in mobile apps or on most corners of the internet. I could personally sell Blue Apron or Harry’s Razors for all I’ve heard about them on podcasts though. The smartest companies allow the podcasters to joke around in their ads too. My Brother, My Brother, and Me will say some borderline offensive but hilarious stuff in their ads and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t keep me listening to their ads and hearing about the products being advertised.
Yea it feels like something has been rotten with the ads industry for a long while.
Advertising only has as much value to the advertiser as it can get in modified consumer behavior.
If I only have $100/month in truly discretionary income, all the advertising in the world is only fighting for that $100. Realistically, though, we’re not all susceptible to the same advertising influences, which is why ad personalization exists. But personalize it all you want and you’re still, at most, getting a few percent of my monthly budget to shift towards what you want me to buy.
That means that advertising is only really worth it for whales. The type of people who might buy hundreds of dollars of goods or services through clicking on ads on Instagram, who have that combination of a huge amount of discretionary income and are fickle enough that they might impulse buy big ticket items.
It literally just dawned on me that some people intentionally click on ads. That’s such an outlandish idea, it feels like fiction.
Your data isn’t just being sold to advertisers. There are all kinds of companies that are willing to pay big bucks to get near real-time insights into consumer behaviour, prices, manufacturing and anything else that can be tracked somehow.
Edit: And there’s a near 0% chance that you’re not part of a dataset that’s being sold to someone, somewhere…
