Dear User,

We will soon begin rolling out changes to Reddit’s User settings. It is getting a refresh that includes changes to ad personalization, privacy preferences, and location settings.

As part of these changes, we are retiring a setting that you have previously turned on that limited how we used your activity from the Reddit platform to personalize ads. We have replaced the setting with a new option to select categories of ads that you may not wish to see.

More details are available in our announcement and help center.

These changes are rolling out starting today and you may see the changes over the next few days.

Users will be tracked with no opt out. Posts may be monetized, which will make content even worse No refund or any type of usable credit for users that spent hundreds on Reddit coins The entire vibe has done a 180° since all these new “positive changes” are rolled out.

  • TehWorld@lemmy.world
    3624·
    1 year ago

    I’m not spending much time on Reddit these days but in no way is this the end for Reddit. The VAST majority of the user base just doesn’t care. We may see more users trickling in and Lemmy is sure more ready now than ever but people are so used to being advertised to, that this won’t be a big issue long term. People are dumb.

    • foggy@lemmy.world
      1321·
      1 year ago

      Idk man, literally asked a bunch (3) of friends how reddit is lately who had no idea what was going on this summer with the API changes and didn’t care when I told them. Here are there responses:

      “They’ve gotten really bad at putting relevant shit in front of me”

      “Been a ton more ads lately”

      And

      “dude thank you for telling me reddit had porn lol”

        • Shush@reddthat.com
          18·
          1 year ago

          I always wondered if there were people oblivious to porn on reddit. It always seemed like common knowledge those days.

          It’s not the usual manufactured porn by companies, it’s usually people showcasing a video of themselves.

          • DrQuint@lemm.ee
            14·
            1 year ago

            A lot of people’s approach to social media is

            • login an absolute total of times equal to one, on an app, and never again, that session better last

            • do zero content curation, what comes is what you eat

            • mostly scroll past shit, don’t interact, don’t produce

            • maybe click on a navigation link once or twice per month

            So of course they don’t know there’s porn. They’re basically only seeing their feed (which is a clone of /r/popular, so a bunch of clones of /r/funny and ragebait) and the default subs, which doesn’t have porn by default ever since reddit removed its ability to show up on default feeds.

            • Shush@reddthat.com
              5·
              1 year ago

              I meant more around “reddit is known for having porn channels” and less “reddit pushes porn in your default feeds”.

              You’re right though, the casual dead-minded scroller wouldn’t know about it.

          • JackFrostNCola@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            It used to be moreso, but before i left reddit it turned into people spamming promoting their onlyfans accounts, some subs felt like scrolling through a gallery of ads.

        • lud@lemm.ee
          6·
          1 year ago

          The amount of porn on reddit is astonishing.

          Just go to r/randnsfw a few times.

    • Rolando@lemmy.world
      691·
      1 year ago

      The hope is that the non-dumb people will leave for here, and that they’re the ones who make quality content.

    • Jah348@lemm.ee
      20·
      1 year ago

      This is for sure the final nail, it’s going to collapse just like Facebook and Google did after all that ad stuff. Profiting off a user data is clearly a failed business model and we see that time and time again.

      • Vanon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        2016: All I need, to have hope for the future, is a large majority of people willing to slightly inconvenience themselves to produce positive changes.

        2023: Human intelligence has peaked, idiocracy is here, I for one welcome our AI overlords, earthonfire.jxl, etc.

    • ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world
      5·
      1 year ago

      I completely agree with this!

      Also, it’s an unfortunate rule of thumb that, when you see a sensationalized headline, most likely it won’t have the effect it claims to have…

      Well, let’s hope there’s a steady migration to Lemmy (though numbers are small here)

      Edit: added last line

    • Doc Blaze@lemmy.world
      20·
      1 year ago

      does Reddit still have a .onion site? I feel like perhaps you can use the .onion site and be able to escape this. the tor browser was specifically modified from Firefox to avoid fingerprinting.

      • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
        71·
        1 year ago

        Fingerprinting is mostly pointless once you’re logged into the site.

        You can use Mullvad which is TOR but without the TOR.

        • PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          1 year ago

          Can you explain more about Mullvad wrt Tor? I’m shopping for a new VPN & looked into Mullvad extensively because it’s my #1 choice so far. What about it specifically makes you say that?

          • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
            7·
            1 year ago

            Mullvad the browser, not the VPN. They partnered with the TOR project to create it. So it has all the same browser protections of the TOR browser except that it doesn’t go through the TOR network so it’s actually mostly useable for general daily use.

            Mullvad is probably the best choice exclusively for VPN. I chose Proton only because of their “suite” of products under a single subscription.

            • PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works
              4·
              1 year ago

              Ahhhh, my apologies…I completely misunderstood!

              Thank you for taking the time to explain all that, and for the positive words about Mullvad VPN. My current subscription is almost up, so I should get it soon. Have a good one :)

      • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        I think this is more for accounts, since it tracks upvote/downvote, etc

    • DrQuint@lemm.ee
      16·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, people think tracking you for ads will dissuade anyone? Like, Instagram has a content to ad ratio of 33%, and people give zero fucks.

      I don’t think people will ever leave, and I don’t think we should want them to leave either. We can build better, smaller platforms much more easily than we can’t fix the world’s attitude and consumption trends towards the large ones.

      • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
        2·
        1 year ago

        I mean, having some users isn’t the same as having a ton of users using the product for hours a day. They can still say people are using it, but it’s far from how it used to be (actually goes for Instagram and Facebook as well). There will always be people still using them, but for less time and getting less enjoyment out of it. The majority of users will not use it much at all, only out of some sense of necessity. Instagram and Facebook are literally unusable in my opinion due to ads and sponsored content, most people I know that used to spend hours on those two sites now barely use them at all, and that’s the direction Reddit wants to head in.

  • Smacks@lemmy.world
    811·
    1 year ago

    No, this won’t kill Reddit. If they can essentially remove every third-party app, they’ll easily be able to start selling user data. Whether we like it or not, the majority stayed on Reddit.

    Nothing short of somehow breaking through ad blockers like Twitch did will make people stop using it, even if that.

      • Genericusername@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 year ago

        Facebook kind of died and used the momentum it had to reinvent itself. Back in the day I used to see updates from my friends, and I used to interact with them. I stopped using Facebook at some point a few years ago and recently got back to it. I use Marketplace, and in my country people with the same hobby as me seem to interact over Facebook more than anything else. Younger people rarely upload except for a few very active outliers. Most of the content is these clickbaity short videos of 5-minute crafts or live-feeding frogs to slightly larger frogs because Facebook thinks I’m into it for some reason. They just made an addictive never-ending stream of content.

      • beefcat@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        If you have irl friends/family that’s only on facebook you can’t really leave.

        they can all still talk to you via phone, text, email, in person, etc. that is what i told all my family when i hopped off facebook

        • InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world
          8·
          1 year ago

          No easy way to share vacation or gathering photos. If I post one and my aunt comments everyone can see that discussion and join. Not so with just chat groups. Overwhelming majority want this layout and there is no easy way around it.

    • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.worldEnglish
      181·
      1 year ago

      Whether we like it or not, the majority stayed on Reddit.

      The fight may not be over though.

      Where people didn’t really care about an API change for third party apps, they may care a lot more about having ads shoved in their faces whether they like it or not.

      It’s all about breakings their inertia to change.

      • Sunroc@lemmy.world
        41·
        1 year ago

        People en mass make “economic” decisions. If they view an alternative such as lemmy as too difficult to use, or their communities are not here they will rather tolerate the ads. Learning to use a new app or having to start the community themselves is too much effort for most people.

    • thisisthelastonebtw@lemmy.world
      16·
      1 year ago

      If there are still Facebook and Twitter users, of which we know there are, nothing will kill Reddit.

      However, I’ll say I’m someone not good at change but am agoraphobic, so my only “connection” was Reddit, and I finally gave in and deleted for good.

      Still getting used to this platform, but hopefully can find less toxic users here. Social media seems to be made special for bullies.

    • Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      7·
      1 year ago

      Thanks for bringing up Twitch. I’m one of the folks who quit using the site after the ad block changes. Did an alternative ever come along?

  • HiramFromTheChi@lemmy.world
    571·
    1 year ago

    If you wanna keep your bookmarks and the subreddits (communities) that you’re subscribed to before deleting your Reddit account, I made a free tool to help you store and offload that data.

    It’s called Reddit Account Manager, and it’s 100% free.

    You can also use it to manage your Lemmy account(s), of course.

      • HiramFromTheChi@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 year ago

        Yep, the ideal workflow for migrating would be something like this:

        1. Use Reddit Account Manager to neatly organize and store your Reddit accounts, bookmarks, and subscriptions
        2. Request your data archive from Reddit itself
        3. Use something like Redact or Power Delete Suite to remove your content from Reddit
        4. Permanently delete your accounts from Reddit
        5. Move to a federated alternative (optional)
      • HiramFromTheChi@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        You could use a service like SimpleLogin, Addy, Duck, or just a temporary fake email generator. I don’t mind if you give me a fake email address—you have a right to privacy.

        If it helps, my website’s hiram.io. I realize that’s still “random” in the grand scheme of things, but it should at least show you I’m a real person, and I build stuff to build a better web.

      • Amends1782@lemmy.ca
        2·
        1 year ago

        You should be using an email forwarding/alias service such as SimpleLogin, or apples proprietary hide my email service for example. You can have an infinite amount of alias emails that all forward to your main, and have 100% control over.

        The other option is older school, just make another account somewhere. You can also create automated rules to just forward all emails from their to your main too.

        • noodlejetski@lemm.ee
          21·
          1 year ago

          sure, but people could also host their freeware in a way that doesn’t require me to do any of those.

            • noodlejetski@lemm.ee
              2·
              1 year ago

              *sigh* because sometimes instead of telling someone “it sucks that in order to get that one piece of software from your website you make me create an account despite me never going to visit it again”, you can phrase it a bit more politely and hope that they, you know, figure out the intent behind the question rather than take it so incredibly literally.

          • HiramFromTheChi@lemmy.world
            1·
            1 year ago

            I’d open source it if I could, but since Reddit Account Manager is built without code, I can’t host it on GitLab or GitHub.

      • HiramFromTheChi@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        Your question’s a little nuanced, so let me try to answer this as thoroughly as possible:

        The short answer is: If the platform you choose to use it is accessible from your Android phone, then yes. But it’s not Android- or iOS-specific.

        Out of the platforms that it’s available on (Airtable, Notion, Coda, ClickUp, and Baserow), all of them except for Baserow have native mobile apps. With that said, Baserow is also mobile responsive, so you don’t need a native mobile app to work with Reddit Account Manager.

        • Reddit Account Manager is a template built on top of those tools (Airtable, Notion, Coda, ClickUp, and Baserow), so you’ll need an account with at least one of those to use it.
        • Reddit Account Manager is built without code.

        Hope that clears things up. :)

        • Mango@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          Uhh yeah that didn’t clear things up.

          I don’t have a computer and I want all my Reddit content deleted without having to do manual labor for the next several months.

  • christophski@feddit.ukEnglish
    38·
    1 year ago

    This is just the continuation of the instagrammification if reddit. They want to turn it into a influencer platform where people are desperately trying to make money so that they can take a big cut of it.

  • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
    36·
    1 year ago

    People aren’t going to leave reddit all at once right away, because structure means that individual subreddits are very much isolated from one another in terms of users.

    However, it’s likely that we will be seeing some kind of cultural shift happening there as quality get worse. I feel it’s inevitable that there will be more low effort content pumped out as quickly as possible than ever before now there is an actual monetary incentive instead of imaginary Internet points, and all personalized feed and ad is going to do is isolate individual users in their individual bubble and not allowing human connections to form between them.

    Things are getting better here. The regulars recongnize each other’s name and personalitu, whereas on reddit all the usernames all blends together into an amorphous mass unless it’s one of those novelty accounts or e-celeb or something. That’s the key difference between Lemmy and reddit right now.

    • jaek@lemmy.world
      151·
      1 year ago

      Couldn’t agree more. Those novelty e-celeb accounts on Reddit are getting really put of hand, aren’t they, Margot Robbie

      • flathead@lemm.ee
        12·
        1 year ago

        Academy award-nominated actress Margot Robbie does actually spend most of her free time modding an android group on Lemmy - but you will never see that mentioned on mainstream social media.

          • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.worldEnglish
            71·
            1 year ago

            Any advice you’d like to give that would make somebody starting modding a lot easier, would be appreciated.

            • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
              8·
              1 year ago

              Don’t micromanage, I just let people do whatever they want but encourage them to do their best, and only remove/ban for people who absolutely won’t listen to reason.

              You should also get involved with your comm by talking to people there a lot, so they don’t think you are just some asshole who’s only there to ban.

      • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
        10·
        1 year ago

        Oh absolutely, especially those celebrities who comes in, promote their latest project, say some catchphrases, and leave. Why would they do such a thing?

        Also, that’s Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie to you!

        • Makeshift@sh.itjust.works
          5·
          1 year ago

          I still have my account and check like once every couple weeks for 2-3 communities.

          On PC, old.reddit, and no chance of getting a single ad in my face. I’m not technical enough to know if they’re getting other data from my bimonthly visits, but that’s a far cry less than my old every night visits.

          As soon as they get rid of old.reddit it won’t even be reddit to me anymore. Just an ugly new thing overwriting the site I once enjoyed.

        • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
          1·
          1 year ago

          yea, if I hadn’t been permabanned that would have done it for me but there’s still enough people on there that don’t even know old.reddit is a thing for that to really kill the site. I have a feeling a lot of people are willing to just put up with their shit for the sake of not really having anywhere else to go. Unfortunately at the moment unless you want to talk about politics or Linux the pool of content on Lemmy is pretty dry and I don’t know of any better options besides going back to independent forums.

  • Haui@discuss.tchncs.de
    361·
    1 year ago

    As a mod on reddit (who only reacts to pings these days) I would like to post an undramatic message „here‘s what happened, if you‘re interested to join our lemmy mirror, here‘s the link.“

    Anyone got something I could use which will not set off reddit stans or get me replaced and the message deleted?

    • DrQuint@lemm.ee
      22·
      1 year ago

      I found that the best approach is to just have the link in the sidebar. This was how several communities first started introducing discords when it was basically an unknown piece of software. It became normalized without anyone noticing when.

  • vinhill@feddit.de
    32·
    1 year ago

    Looking at Twitter/X, this won’t be the final nail. People stick to the platforms they’re on as long as it doesn’t directly Negative impacts them too much.

    • Gestrid@lemmy.caEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      The difference, I think, which may make it easier to switch is that, on Twitter, you follow specific people. On Reddit, you only subscribe to specific communities, many of which have already been replicated in some way on Lemmy. You can’t replicate people, though. Yet.

      • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.world
        41·
        1 year ago

        I think you forgot that Mastodon exists. Either that or you simply refuse to mention it because it’s so desolate in there.

        • Gestrid@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          No, I didn’t forget it. It’s just that the “specific people” haven’t moved over to Mastodon, so people who follow those specific people haven’t moved over.

          The “specific communities” (or at least the large ones) have moved over or been copied to Lemmy, so it’s easier for people who subscribe to those communities to move over.