When you post on reddit, instagram etc. you’re giving the company your valuable data. (And it often is valuable, you put your thoughts into it and all that). Consider if you take 15 minutes to create value content, you’d get paid $5 or sth if you were doing it commercially. Now all that value is donated to big tech companies. (that’s the only reason why they have value at all.)
So what’s the problem with that? The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I’m not joking. Look at these:
when i want to see content on reddit (for research) or instagram (for local community) they don’t allow me to see the data that users have contributed. Reddit claims that it blocks VPNs for “security reasons”, meanwhile i’m using VPNs in browser’s incognito mode to not be tracked. Instagram wants you to sign in sothat they amass more users and can take leverage of the network effect even more.
I can understand restricting who can post to limit bot activity, but reading must always be possible. After all, it’s our data. That’s exactly what happens when you give your data to big companies to “communicate with other people”: your data becomes a source of income for them, at our expense.
The irony is that this argument will probably get more attention on Reddit than on any open forum: Centralised platforms are great for discovery and awful for preservation. Use them as the billboard, not the library. Keep the valuable stuff where you control the rules, the backups and the future.
agreed there, the rule should be, if your goal is to make sure your information is out there… don’t limit it to one place. Post it to Lemmy, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, keep it on your PC, and a flash drive, and have off site backups.
Exactly. Platform loyalty is a bad archiving strategy. If one platform disappears, changes the rules, or buries old content, your work and links still survive instead of vanishing with someone else’s business decisions.
I’ve been slowly replacing, by hand so it doesn’t trigger their detection alerts, all of my 15 years of comments on Reddit, a lot of it valuable answers to tech questions or programming problems, with a randomly prompted unrelated paragraph of ChatGPT whatever.
When one of the first exodi(?) came, a lot people replaced their comments with random words through scripts, back then it was not as detected and prevented (which Reddit promptly scrambled to prevent), and thanks to people doing that I’ve eventually blocked Reddit from my Kagi altogether, simply because 90% of what I found was either questions with scrambled answers, comments that are just ads from bots, or just unrelated bullshit. So, it does have an actual impact.
Have fun selling that to AI companies.
LIke you I deleted all my comments and verified they were deleted. When I looked a couple of months later, Reddit had actually restored each and every one.
I’m slowly deleting them again. Maybe this time they’ll stay gone.
Deleting (or editing) comments does not change what the hosting website has, it just updates what they display. so there will be lines in a database saying:
- the original comment was “blah”
- on the 6th of August 2024 it was changed to “blah2”
- and the 20 of January the comment was deleted
There isnt a way for you to remove that unless there is some legal mechanism for you to force them to remove all data about you.
Even with GDPR requests there’s zero guarantee they actually comply with deletion requests. They may decide to show something that may lead to think they have complied. That’s it…
That’s why I went with editing them to something random, unrelated to the thread, but still a feasible paragraph, in hope that this won’t trigger this mechanism.
Have you tried a GDPR request?
You should back those up first and consider contributing them elsewhere. Maybe even just a WriteFreely blog with all your old comments and context.
I wish there was a third-party reddit archive, because before it enshittified it was a great resource for a lot of niche topics.
The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I’m not joking. Look at these:
Those aren’t paywalls.
meanwhile i’m using VPNs in browser’s incognito mode to not be tracked
That’s not what a VPN or incognito modes do.
Reddit sucks for a number of reasons, but your internet literacy also kinda sucks.
The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I’m not joking. Look at these:Those aren’t paywalls.
They are. You pay with you being tracked, profiled, your data etc for advertisement and other uses. That’s what these “free” services use to monetise the user.
Yea but thats not what a paywall actually is.
well it feels like one
Toy companies don’t expect kids to spend their own money on the products they learn of though targeted advertising.
meanwhile i’m using VPNs in browser’s incognito mode to not be tracked
That’s not what a VPN or incognito modes do.
VPNs prevent the site from attaching an IP address to the site visit, and incognito mode means that browser cookies routinely get scrapped.
VPNs prevent the site from attaching an IP address to the site visit
While this is a popular selling point that VPN providers like to advertise, it’s pretty misleading in terms of what this actually means with regards to tracking. Realistically, this does almost nothing to prevent sites from tracking you. They don’t see you at your home IP as “John Smith” and see you on your VPN as “Hans Schneider”, instead they see you at your home IP as “John Smith” and on your VPN as “still John Smith, but either traveling in Germany or using a European VPN”.
Advertisers have tens of thousands of individual data points on nearly every single person who uses the internet at all for any purpose. All a VPN does is obfuscate ONE data point. That’s less than 1% effectiveness at hiding your identity from advertisers. A VPN does basically nothing against all the other fingerprinting methods advertisers have.
Think of using a VPN like speaking into a walkie-talkie: your voice comes out at a different location, but if the person on the other end already knows what your voice sounds like, then they still know who you are, just not necessarily where you are. Unless you’re taking other efforts to mask your voice, the walkie-talkie isn’t protecting your identity in any way. Likewise with a VPN, if you go to the same sites from the same devices and log into the same accounts and otherwise engage in the same online behavior, the VPN is only hiding where you are, but it’s still trivially easy for an advertiser to determine who you are.
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, because VPN providers harp on this idea so hard in their advertisements that it tricks people into thinking VPNs are capable of things that they just simply are not.
yeah i get your point but that’s not what i meant. i’m using VPNs to do google searches, for example, in incognito browsing tab. so google knows the 10k searches i did, but it cannot connect them to each other, as session cookies between them are deleted each time i close the browser (which is about every few minutes). and i don’t log in to any account in the incognito tab either, so it can’t use account identities as fixed points either. and it cannot associate the queries by IP address either.
edit:
after seeing this website … https://amiunique.org/fingerprint i get what you mean now. i have to think about this.
A few browser extensions can help with that further. UBlockOrigin, NoScripts, CanvasBlocker, Privacy Badger, Consent-O-Matic, etc. Maybe Decentraleyes but I don’t fully understand that one yet.
Then there’s DNS proxying and/or DoH, and a variety of other settings that can be tweaked for maximum privacy.
Any one of these things alone will leave holes, but putting them all together can significantly reduce your trackability and fingerprint. Of course it’s a trade-off because some of these will break websites, but most allow granular exceptions so you can still use the sites you need.
In any case, a VPN is an important part of that, but the main purpose is to make it harder for your ISP to track you. Obscuring your IP from web hosts is just a bonus.
So how would one acquire the obfuscation they are seeking for? Making advertisers don’t know who you are for everything you visit. Is it possible?
Uss the Librewolf browser. You need to turn off reduceFingerprinting and turn on WebGL to make some sites work, but even then if you go to CreepJS you will see that compared to Chrome, there is much less information like battery level, actual core/RAM count, etc for sites to use. And the browser has uBlock Origin to block ads and trackers, although turn off the Quick Fixes list as it might break YT bot protection and shadowban comments.
Not the OP you asked, but realisticly, your single best option is not giving any data. Use settings to prevent cross-site tracking in your browser where available, but really just post as little information as possible. The less you reveal, the less they will know.
I think you are overestimating the capacity and will of advertisers to actually identify people like that. The data may be available for it in theory, but it’s unlikely they built the systems to make it happen because they don’t really have much economical interest to do so. They care about market segments, not individuals.
I had to work a bit on this kind of things. Most of those systems are really shitty and ineffective.The little advertisers aren’t the scary ones. It’s Meta, Alphabet and Amazon that are scary and absolutely do fingerprint in this way. That said, the scale of these systems really does roll right past the individual user, unless someone really cares about YOU, but unless you’re doing something wrong, they don’t really give a shit. CSAM, illicit substances, amd more could probably be pretty easily rooted out by these systems, but that wouldn’t make-line-go-up so it doesn’t happen.
Try this while on a VPN and in incognito mode: https://amiunique.org/fingerprint
I bet you’ll be surprised at the methods companies use to fingerprint you - browser agent, Do Not Track enabled/disabled, timezone, screen size… not accepting cookies is also a data point to filter you by.
wtf. why does my browser send such an uniquely identifying token. wtf
(there’s more to the right of it, i cut it to preserve privacy)
WTF
TIL. the way trackers can do stuff
Opens your eyes quite a bit, heh? It’s like you start seeing the matrix. Then you think of your friends and family, the “normies”, and realize they have zero chance. We have all become a cog in this advertising machine.
NoScripts and CanvasBlocker can help reduce your fingerprints.
Basically, most websites these days run javascript to harvest this info from your device. Sometimes they even integrate it into their basic functionality so that it breaks the site if you block it.
deleted by creator
Damn, that sucks. We really do live in a dystopian hellscape…
Deleted my previous comment - you’re right, it’s not able to identify the screen resolution etc without JavaScript.
Unfortunately I’m still fingerprinted though - no JavaScript is itself an identifiable marker.
That’s not what a VPN or incognito modes do.
It absolutely is. I’ve verified this by toggling the VPN off and wallah access is restored.
That’s because Reddit bans VPN IP addresses. You still have an IP address when using a VPN, and VPN IPs aren’t exactly secret information. Reddit blocks all the VPNs they know of with an ever-updating blacklist.
Yes, that’s what was said…
wallah
Please tell me this is a joke/reference.
Not a reference, just a little BoneAppleTea for breakfast 😉
I don’t contribute anything worthwhile anywhere.
I see you, too, are a man of culture
What I’m particularly concerned about lately is the growing share of online forums that don’t even publish their content on the web.
The most famous example of this type of forum is probably Discord.
As those of you on Lemmy know, many people chose Discord as an alternative after Reddit’s deterioration.
Hasn’t this problem already escalated to the point where access to content isn’t guaranteed not only to some bots but even to individuals without accounts?
Shouldn’t those who love the web be extremely wary of online communities that don’t even try to be based on the web?
That’s what I think.
If search engines truly only show the “existence” of forums, then the open web is truly over.
I don’t think that we should be wary of them. It is only natural that when the whole web is overrun by bots, these gated communities will pop up. It’s an easy way to keep a lot of bad traffic out, while a space for users to interact and be authentic.
And yes, I think the open web is truly over.
Good man.
(I agree wholeheartedly)
I hate that “you were blocked by network security” page so much. Fucking smug fedora wearing neck beard with his arms crossed. What the fuck fo you think is going to be the difference of someone using a VPN vs being logged in with a VPN on network security? You’re just lying to me reddit.
It’s likely so they can block scraping and DDoSing from people behind a VPN by just banning their account.
That would be a bitch ass move reddit would do, yeah. “Oh don’t worry, you can use a VPN, just log in!”
logs in
banned
Half of what I post anywhere is horseshit, but you won’t know which half or even whether this reply is included in it. Good luck.
It’s way too late
If we all agreed to this when google was handing out invite only keys to gmail, then maybe we could’ve made a difference
My biggest beef with this new shaky-information world is that they hardly ever accurately date-stamp and time-stamp things anymore. This took me less than a minute to type and I find it mostly worthless so I’ll be donating this one for free.
But I get upvotes. They are more valuable than my time or money.
Pay me and I will remove my downvote.
Nice try but downvotes are disabled on my instance.
They are still counted on the downvoter’s instance.
I don’t see those. For me I only ever get upvotes.
Pay me and I will upvote
Have an upvote
Thanks!
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
After a decade of reddit and over a half million karma I quit for multiple reasons. Primarily the cash grab for the API and forcing the reddit app, but also the explicit acknowledgement that the mods and community were absolutely being exploited for unpaid labor and anyone who didn’t bend a knee could get fucked.
If I could make money off my posts and comments, I could probably support myself.
Not wrong, but I feel like you’re preaching to the Choir here.
it helps to clarify one’s mind from time to time :)
I abandoned my 250k+ karma account two years ago when I saw where Reddit was headed.
