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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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