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Is it that hard to make money? They have a huge userbase for advertisements. Surely they get money from various organizations to circulate narratives. If I wanted to spread propaganda in the English-speaking world, I'd head straight to reddit, facebook, twitter. Even though moderators have power over subreddits, the admins control what posts get popular and what doesn't. There was considerable suppression of T_D for a while, till they left as well. Reddit seems like valuable territory to hold.
On Facebook and Instagram, 100% of users are “logged in”. That means Meta likely has their date of birth, sex and name. Users who post content (a substantial proportion of Facebook and Instagram users) share their picture, location tags on the places they’ve been and - in most cases - their whole list of real-life friends and social connections (as friends/followers) with Meta.
On Reddit, most users aren’t logged in. Most users who are logged in never post or comment. They certainly don’t share their real face, age or in most cases gender directly with Reddit. The issue on Reddit is therefore a hybrid of Twitter’s issue with lurkers (which implemented an extremely harsh login wall that even Elon Musk has maintained, so even scrolling down on someone’s Twitter forces an unblockable pop up demanding sign-in), and anonymous forums’ issues with anonymity.
You can predict that an account that follows a college subreddit, the NFL subreddit, the Tinder subreddit and some videogame subreddits is a young, single, college-age male, but that’s nowhere close to the data that Meta has on that person’s account.
Reddit is trying to do what Instagram and TikTok did, and what Twitter is trying to do, by attempting to force all regular users into making an account even if they just want to scroll through this week’s top fifty cat gifs or the latest ice hockey news. Third party apps often provide a very high quality signed-out user experience that Reddit wants to kill, plus they often reduce or remove ads and reduce or remove the additional feature (like avatars) that Reddit uses to try to encourage users to make accounts and engage more with personalizing their profile (and so being more likely to add further data points to be sold to advertisers).
Just an aside, but I think that has actually been removed now. I don't have a twitter account and I haven't seen the login wall in months.
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Yeah, the third party apps are great. I rather liked pholder, I even thought redditisfun was their official mobile app.
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Honestly in my experience as an advertiser/buyer-of-ads I've found a lot more productive use out of interest data/short-funnel than demographic stuff. Vast majority of people I know who interface with Facebook as an advertiser privately admit that it doesn't seem to accomplish anything, and the only time it does is when you let Facebook run its own attribution model/targeting (and essentially mark its own homework), in which it will forensically, passionately, accurately locate your existing customers and preach to the choir
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Limited user data for Reddit is an issue. They can’t target ads as well or have the data to upsell ads.
I wouldn’t be shocked if Twitter ends up being a gold mine. But that’s in part because Musks will adds products like payments.
ML/LLMs can probably solve quite handily this based on browsing/posting history -- this will be a lot of work for Reddit though, and I'm not sure they have the capabilities/vision to pull it off.
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They would have to figure out a way to sell moderation without selling the site itself. Twitter is “valuable”, but it does not generate much income.
Twitter didn’t generate much previously but it was also overly bloated and hadn’t thought through different ways of monetizing user base. Curious if now it is (or will become) profitable.
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Twitter doesn't generate income because its politics don't match that of marketing companies. Reddit doesn't have that problem.
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Yeah I don't see this directly hurting their profitability in long run, since they make most of the money from ad revenues and premium memberships. What I found interesting is that, many of the most upvoted comments on this issue describe the lack of moderation of far right content becoming an issue, but this was never one to begin with as every alt right sub has been axed since 2019 and they aren't coming back.
Upon a bit more reading on this issue, I'd say it's probably wise to consider that this could really be little more than just compliance with GDPR regulations as adviced by their legal team. So it does seem unfair that basically everyone commenting on this issue is jumping on the "evil corporation" bandwagon, and they'd probably react the same if reddit said they weren't gonna remove Pushshift's access to their API. But honestly, I'm beyond pissed with reddit in general to really feel sorry for them now. If they keep pulling hasty decisions like this one in a way that even pisses off all the left wing users, I say let em burn and I won't grab a single bucket to douse the flames.
How do these API changes enforce GDPR?
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