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cinabongo, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

From what I know having worked in adtech,

• they collect as much information as they can from the device such as location from GPS, interests from follows, likes dwell time on posts, and other information you knowingly or unknowingly provide. This includes scraping information from photos and videos you upload to the app. Eg, you upload a picture of an expensive bag with the caption “my new bag” - the bag brand can be determined and assessed algorithmically.
• the above extends to websites you visit with in-app browsers and the actions you take while on those pages
• deduce what they can’t eg where you live & work based where you spend time during the day vs night,your real life interests based on places you visit eg gym, fast food places, church etc. Also they apply complex algorithms to relatively accurately deduce anything you don’t directly provide. Eg if you disable accurate location, they can figure it out based on the ip address(es) you connect to the app from (geolocation algorithms) .
• and what they can’t deduce is bought from third parties. Those are companies normal people don’t know exist whose sole purpose is scraping and categorising information - sort of similar to credit agencies but different. In this case, they take what they know about you and send it to this third party which then returns eveything they have that’s related. Eg the app (threads) might send your email and username and get a response containing your previous home address (say scraped from some insecure government website)

With the above, even without knowing your name (this can easily be determined) , they are able to know enough about you to determine the kind of person you are, with whom you interact, where you go, your political affiliations, job, salary estimate etc and sell it to advertisers. This is usually sold as “audiences” but given the tools provided to advertisers, it’s easy to create hyper targeted ads and recommendations (remember Cambridge Analytica).

We voluntarily give up a lot more information than we realise.

And remember, the smartest people on the planet work at these companies, so the above is nothing in comparison to what behemoths like Facebook, Google, Tencent, etc are capable of.

Cevilia, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

There is a known strategy called EEE (Embrace, extend, and extinguish).

First, they embrace the open web. Millions of people who never would’ve joined the Fediverse (and, probably, don’t even know what the Fediverse is) flock to Threads and start to interact with us.

Then, they extend the open web, adding features to Threads that aren’t compatible with our servers. People on Threads don’t understand what’s wrong with our server (even though it’s Threads that’s the source of incompatibility).

Finally, they decide they’re “having trouble maintaining compatibility with third party servers” and start to break off from us, leaving us with no way to interact with our new friends. Unless, of course, we make a free Threads account…

Google Talk is perhaps the most relevant example of this. Here’s more details.

EnglishMobster, 10 months ago

It does not right now, but there is an open ticket to fix this: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/374

Rabbithole, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

The truth is most internet communities which found and advertise themselves as an alternative to Reddit die.

To be honest, there were damn good reasons why Voat, etc, died in a massive fire. The Reddit exoduses in question were from huge chunks of the userbase effectively being kicked out for being massive bastards/racists/bigots, etc. The communities that they spawned after leaving were absolutely horrific and nobody else on the internet wanted to go anywhere near them.

The current exodus is made up of actually normal people (at least, normal enough), and the reason we're here isn't just because we're all joined by hatred (weeeelllll... maybe a hatred of u/Spez in a lot of cases, ha!), but because we're genuinely looking for a better forum-space than what's been available recently until now.

Sure, there are similarities, we're still here because we find corporate control over the forum-space to be "oppressive" (just what an incel/racist would say, right?), but it's not because our views aren't tolerated there, it's just because we're really fucking tired of the cost of having somewhere to actually discuss things is that we're endlessly sold as a product, followed by our discussion area being destroyed by corporate greed. Over and over again.

The reasons why this place is getting busy is fundamentally different than the reason why the previous migrations created places like Voat or Parler, etc. We're already in a massively better position due to that alone.

Eventually, we need to get to the place where we’re creating unique meme formats

I agree with what you're saying in general, but I really hope that all of the interesting discussion here doesn't eventually get buried by memes like back on Reddit. Memes can be fun and all, but sorting a lot of otherwise really great niche-subs by top of all time back there was often a case of finding nothing of value at all because there were 50 pages of fucking memes at the top of the list. Personal preference, of course.

Beep22, 10 months ago

And there was me feeling all edgy at -1