The official app purportedly has a shit ton of interaction tracking. I can’t find the link anymore, but somebody on HN even claimed what they wanted to track was so invasive that he walked out of a job interview for Reddit.
What I can say for sure is that the new Reddit “shreddit” website is absolutely fucking full of tracking. I reverse engineered it for reasons, and every interaction with UI elements was reported back before the actual interaction was allowed to take place.
They definitely gain more value out of user data from interaction tracking than they do from their comments.
As a former web dev, I know it’s normal industry standard stuff, but it’s really hard to give Reddit the benefit of the doubt here.
Their tracking is completely ingrained in the webcomponent-based SPA itself, beyond what’s reasonable for anonymized analytics. Disabling cookies even broke loading content, despite being logged out.
The official app purportedly has a shit ton of interaction tracking. I can’t find the link anymore, but somebody on HN even claimed what they wanted to track was so invasive that he walked out of a job interview for Reddit.
What I can say for sure is that the new Reddit “shreddit” website is absolutely fucking full of tracking. I reverse engineered it for reasons, and every interaction with UI elements was reported back before the actual interaction was allowed to take place.
They definitely gain more value out of user data from interaction tracking than they do from their comments.
What about old.reddit; would that have tracking? If not it would explain why the new Reddit UI seems so slow on browser
Tracking clicks on links with JS is pretty normal. I always implemented that with Google analytics for my e-commerce sites.
It helps you track things like downloads of files, email links, exit links, etc.
As a former web dev, I know it’s normal industry standard stuff, but it’s really hard to give Reddit the benefit of the doubt here.
Their tracking is completely ingrained in the webcomponent-based SPA itself, beyond what’s reasonable for anonymized analytics. Disabling cookies even broke loading content, despite being logged out.