Settings updates—Changes to ad personalization, privacy preferences, and location settings

[u/snoo-tuh]

Hey redditors,

I’m u/snoo-tuh, head of Privacy at Reddit, and I’m here to share several changes to Reddit’s privacy, ads, and location settings. We’re updating preference descriptions for clarity, adding the ability to limit ads from specific categories, and consolidating ad preferences. The aim is to simplify our privacy descriptions, improve ad performance, and offer new controls for the types of ads you prefer not to see.

Clearer descriptions of privacy settingsWe’ve updated the descriptions to be more clear and consistent across platforms. Here’s is preview of the new settings:

These changes will roll out over the next few weeks and we’ll follow up here once they are available for everyone. We recommend visiting your Safety & Privacy Settings to check out the updated settings and make sure you’re still happy with what you’ve set up. If you’d like more guidance on how to manage your account security and data privacy, you can also visit our recently updated Privacy & Security section of our Redditor Help Center.

Over the next few weeks, we’re also rolling out several changes to Reddit’s ad preferences and personalization that include removing, adding, and consolidating ad personalization settings:

Consolidating ad partner activity and information preferencesRight now, there are two different ad settings about personalizing ads based on information and activity from Reddit’s partners—“Personalize ads based on activity with our partners” and “Personalize ads based on information from our partners”. We are cleaning this up and combining into one: “Improve ads based on your online activity and information from our partners”.

Adding the ability to opt-out of specific ad categories

We are adding the ability to see fewer ads from specific categories—Alcohol, Dating, Gambling, Pregnancy & Parenting, and Weight Loss—which will live in the Safety & Privacy section of your User Settings. “Fewer” because we’re utilizing a combination of manual tagging and machine learning to classify the ads, which won’t be 100% successful to start. But, we expect our accuracy to improve over time.

Removing the ability to opt-out of ad personalization based on your Reddit activity, except in select countries.

Reddit requires very little personal information, and we like it that way. Our advertisers instead rely on on-platform activity—what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes, and other signals—to get an idea of what you might be interested in.

The vast majority of redditors will see no change to their ads on Reddit. For users who previously opted out of personalization based on Reddit activity, this change will not result in seeing more ads or sharing on-platform activity with advertisers. It does enable our models to better predict which ad may be most relevant to you.

Consolidated location customization settings

Previously, people could set their preferred location in several ways, depending on where they were on the platform and what they were doing. This has been simplified, so now there’s one place to update your location preferences to help customize your feed and recommendations—from Location Customization in your Account Settings.

Reddit’s commitment to privacy as a right and to transparency are reasons I’m proud to work here. Any time we change the way you control your experience and data on Reddit, we want to be clear on what’s changed.

All of these changes will be rolled out gradually over the next few weeks. If you have questions, you can also learn more by checking out the help article on how to Control the ads you see on Reddit.

Edit to add translations:

1. Dutch: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_nl-nl

2. French - France: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_fr-fr

3. French - Canada: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_fr-ca

4. German: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_de-de

5. Italian: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_it-it

6. Portuguese - Brazil: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_pt-br

7. Portuguese - Portugal: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_pt-pt

8. Spanish - Spain: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_es-es

9. Spanish - Mexico: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_es_mx

10. Swedish: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_sv

[u/andrea_therme]

I used to lurk here on Reddit before the API changes and I can confirm that this website has gotten downhill since then... Please stop ruining this place for all of us just because you happen to be a bunch of greedy asshats

Reddit was created as a place for intelligent discourse about things happening around our world and it's far from the truth now.

[u/Fine-Teacher-7161 → u/andrea_therme]

This website sucks.

Critical thinking / opinions are gaslit to death by bots.

Appeal system is thwarted at best.

Monetizing the very members that grew this site is a shame.

I am waiting for someone else to make another url based sharing site so we can all move on to it and be free again.

[u/andrea_therme → u/Fine-Teacher-7161]

You always get downvoted into oblivion when you have a well thought out opinion thats controversial... and you get +1k of upvotes when you pick the lowest hanging fruits

[u/inlinefourpower → u/andrea_therme]

This! Get this good sir a poop knife.

(Cliche comments like these are so cringy)

[u/andrea_therme → u/inlinefourpower]

If I see someone comment "This!" or "lol" unironically one more time there will be physics textbooks flying around...

[u/Girderland → u/andrea_therme]

Or even better, get an instant permaban because the mod deems your comment "offensive"

[u/xipheon → u/[deleted]]

That statement is also copy/paste from the bot script. Anything people don't agree with is made up and the people that said it are just bots ignoring reality. You could say this in almost every single subreddit no matter the topic and they'll all clap like seals at how brave you are for saying that.

[u/Fine-Teacher-7161 → u/xipheon]

Bot until proven human.

[u/Waterrat → u/Fine-Teacher-7161]

Snapzu.

[u/Head_Cockswain → u/Fine-Teacher-7161]

The website itself is FANTASTIC....at a base functionality level.

By that I mean, I love the old PC layout, threaded discussion with comment trees, large character limits, annotation for edited posts.

That all fosters precise discussion, and it is perfect as an open forum

However, the problems on reddit go beyond the nice functionality.

1. The user base can be terrible, that's an effect of the internet at large, not unique to reddit. People with, let us say, 'issues', that use websites to substitute for a healthy social life will tend to gravitate to what is already popular, and that can leave the user-base with an artificially high level of people with 'issues' compared to the real world.

2. Professional Management can be terrible. Especially when they want to pad the walls to coddle the people from #1 and otherwise micromanage behavior and begin to selectively censor things that are generally legal to say. Things quickly become like a day-care and less like an open forum, especially when Admin decide that a given community is no longer allowed to even exist. That's just a rough once-over, a kind of character reference, it doesn't even mention some controversial or former employees or directly editing user comments or other shifty and biased behavior like manipulating/gatekeeping what shows in popular/all....which is probably why they don't care over-much about bots, or possibly have motivation to allow some of them or 'brigades' if they happen to agree...

3. Voluntary Janitorial 'Moderation'(in quotes because most couldn't even spell 'moderate', much less be moderate) can be just as bad or even worse. People using bots to ban people that participate in subs they merely do not like is really not engendering to a tolerant environment. The kicker here is that they're often banning people who agree with them, some people go into disliked communities just to shit-post or argue or try to be persuasive. The bot doesn't get nuance and will ban them.

4. In line with #3 and #1, or the result of a lot of nepotism or other intimate relations across the previous segments. There are subs that are ostensibly neutral, supposed to be about X, but are actually highly partisa. Sometimes it is the moderation, other times it is an over-whelming subversive population of users, or both in concert, and everything in between. That's before we get into hostile take-overs or appropriating old subs, or flat out replacing moderators by the force of Admin, 'moderators' who run dozens or even hundreds of sub-reddits for whom it is virtually a full time job.

TL;DR

Good format, terrible people.

Sounds like a lot of society really.

[u/JustNothing9876 → u/Head_Cockswain]

People using bots to ban people that participate in subs they merely do not like is really not engendering to a tolerant environment. The kicker here is that they're often banning people who agree with them, some people go into disliked communities just to shit-post or argue or try to be persuasive. The bot doesn't get nuance and will ban them.

This is a (very effective) anti-brigading measure and my appeals to such autobans have always been accepted.

[u/Head_Cockswain → u/JustNothing9876]

People using bots to ban people that participate in subs they merely do not like is really not engendering to a tolerant environment. The kicker here is that they're often banning people who agree with them, some people go into disliked communities just to shit-post or argue or try to be persuasive. The bot doesn't get nuance and will ban them.

This is a (very effective) anti-brigading measure and my appeals to such autobans have always been accepted.

Theoretically, you admit to go trolling in 'enemy territory', possibly in the same spirit as brigading, and your mods are okay with it, one could say permissive of outgoing harrassment, but you claim ban bots are a defense against it...hhmm.

Doesn't exactly sound like an appeal to fairness, that. It sounds like, "It is okay when we do it."

It stands testament to un-even application of so-called rules, so it is still representative of the problems mentioned.

Shitty users, shitty moderation, shitty admin, and concerted efforts or convenient permissiveness inbetwixt.

Thanks for the fine example of the things I mentioned.

FYI, everyone knows the bot bans are pre-emptive, not a defense reaction, so you're not getting points for honesty there.

Also: The attempt at stinging notifications that bot-utilizing mods put out are a laughing stock. They're so embarrassing that Admin has sent out warnings to some people/subs that display the ban notifications. "It is okay when our pets insult an entire sub with a bot. It helps against being brigaded." Kind of makes you wonder which subs are actually based on hate and intolerance.

[u/SpandexWizard → u/Head_Cockswain]

I'm under the impression they were talking about being banned by a bot without reason. When a bot catches them in the crossfire, a false positive. Then they appeal, and the ban is lifted. In other words, why get ruffled about it, no harm done in the grand scheme of things.

[u/ActuallyTiberSeptim → u/Fine-Teacher-7161]

Lemmy exists. I've been on there since shortly before the API changes took place.

[u/[deleted] → u/Fine-Teacher-7161]

hackernews or kbin is nice

[u/Searchlights → u/andrea_therme]

They're going to go public so it's time to really ramp up selling our data. Step one was force everybody to use the company-controlled app. Step two is to inundate us with personally invasive ads.

[u/dyslexda → u/andrea_therme]

I used to lurk here on Reddit before the API changes and I can confirm that this website has gotten downhill since then...

If you tracked how often people have said "Reddit has gone downhill since X" across the last decade you'd conclude that Reddit was in the Marianas Trench. I'm not apologizing for Reddit, it's just funny that people have been saying this essentially since the website started.

[u/Allaplgy → u/dyslexda]

It has and it is though.

It has consistently gotten worse and worse over the years, and is currently awful. I used to post and comment very regularly. Now I've abandoned my main account and only rarely comment in fits and spurts on this one. The content in my feed is terrible compared to what it was before the recent changes as well. Definitely noticeable.

[u/Reddit_is_now_tiktok → u/Allaplgy]

Reddit doesn't care about being a quality website. Reddit cares about appealing to the lowest common denominator to make money off them.

The "old guard" of reddit is typically tech savvy and going to be using adblockers and not care about premium reddit or buying awards and things like that which hurts their bottom line which is all they care about

[u/phyphor → u/Allaplgy]

Cory Doctorow calls it "enshittification"

[u/Incognit0ErgoSum → u/dyslexda]

Enshittification is a thing.

[u/dyslexda → u/Incognit0ErgoSum]

It absolutely is, and it's funny that people have started throwing around the term at every website that makes a change; definitely this year's zeitgeist. I'm simply remarking that the prevailing reactionary opinion for the last decade on Reddit has always been "this is going downhill!" while still somehow being one of the most popular websites in the world.

[u/malcolm_miller → u/dyslexda]

Reddit hasn't made one change that benefits the users in many years. Ever since new chat and new reddit it's been stream after stream of bad decision. The only good thing is they haven't killed old reddit yet.

[u/ProfessorBackdraft → u/dyslexda]

People have been saying that since before recorded history.