It didn't use to be this way - they wait for network effects to create lock-in, before turning hostile. Almost like a trap.
Honestly, that might be a bonus for me.
What's actually happening is pretty straight forward: Reddit staff tries to improve their ad efficiency by using and collecting more data.
That's great for advertisers and for reddit, but bad for users since tracking increases and ads get more trippy and powerful.
The common sense way to communicate such a change would be empathically admitting what you are doing for which reason, explaining why you need the revenue, acknowledging its drawbacks and highlighting positive stuff you did/do/plan to do to mitigate some of the bigger concerns around this change.
But instead of doing that they chose to go full psychopath/gaslighting mode and wrote about how amazing this change is, now that all the dumb users aren't confused anymore.
There is a very small set of situations in which such an approach might actually work. For example in a setting where there is not a lot of community actually reading the thing. (Where it only needs to withstand someone glossing over the piece in a long list of articles.) ...or on a platform where there is no way of giving feedback. (Where you could assume that the trust from those who see through it is less valuable than the assumed beneficial impact of those that buy your narrative.)
A platform where this mode of PR absolutely does not work is reddit though.
Just look how almost everyone points out their lies and cynicism in the comments.
All of that because someone in their PR department thought that their psychopath/gaslighting mode works so well, it will fly under the radar of their users.
...and of course there were no checks and balances. Nobody that knew about that text felt able to say "guys, that's not working. Nobody will believe that stuff you made up to hide the content."
Pretty telling..
Seems like they should have just quietly buried the option even deeper.
Moving forward I'll only be consuming Reddit via API. Which also means, I'll be participating less (but it was already very little).
Id started my API client before this tho, cause their website is super crashy (oops! Something went wrong)
Why would they actively remove it AND go through such a communication debacle for no change in revenue and/or data collection?
Here's the list of reps, you can check your country here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_data_protection_aut...
