Hello all,
I hope I don’t incur too much flak for this post, but I have been wondering about how reddit profits from its users. I left reddit mobile along with most everyone else when RIF went down, but since then I’ve still been browsing reddit on desktop with uBlock origin. So they aren’t getting ad revenue from me, but I do occasionally make comments. Aside from the principle of still contributing to reddit when I know I shouldn’t be, is it possible that doing so still earns revenue for reddit?
Thanks friends
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Reddit’s product is the ad sell on their site. People visit the site because of the user generated content. If you’re interacting with other users on Reddit, you’re still contributing to the company’s income.
I’m assuming they don’t charge advertisers for blocked ads, but you never know.
It is speculated that Reddit is selling all of its users data to train large language models (AI). The exorbitant API fees are just slated to be the collection method, so in a sense you’re contributing to them still by providing valuable training data.
As far as getting hate for it goes, most people probably don’t care one way or another. There may be a subset of people that do, but don’t let it get to you.
they don’t get ad revenue from you, they get it from the firms they will be selling your data to. If you are commenting and you have a profile then whatever info they have or can guess about your demographic will be monetized.
Thank you everyone. I’m humbled. It’s just that reddit has been a daily routine for me for years, and giving up RIF was relatively easy compared to desktop browsing, but I suppose now is better than never.
it was an 11 year habit that I replaced it with kbin overnight.
the fediverse is functionally more interesting anyway.
If you are logged in they still have access to your activity and usage statistics which they can sell to third parties.
So it’s true that you are not ‘directly’ generating profit for them in an easily measurable way, and they would consider you among the ‘freeloaders’ that they called all third party app users.
However, you still indirectly benefit them just by using the platform. Especially if you leave comments or post content. If you just use it, lurk at most and come to lemmy for the discussions.
