If you're rational and you want privacy, I would not use a social network. Certainly not as an identifiable user. Reddit is run well, but they are still a) a privately owned company where their main value is you, the user, and b) beholden to laws about e.g. gagged national security letters.

Also, privacy here is privacy from reddit and the government, not privacy from an unprivileged person. I think the distinction is valuable here.

Everything is a choice and every decision has trade-offs. Free (for users) social network? Then you're going to have to be okay with your data being harvested. They don't exist to solely to serve users they exist to generate revenue.

The issue isn't free vs. pay, this issue is free vs. no other realistic option.

It's not like you can pay facebook to respect your privacy.

> It's not like you can pay facebook to respect your privacy.

Arguably, this is a massive loss of revenue to Facebook as click rate goes down year over year. It's a tradeoff for them, too. I would certainly pay $10/month to not see all the shit they thrown in my timeline, to opt out of all the bullshit features I don't want (ads, "memories" which seem to pop up daily with no way to opt out, friend celebrations, annoying suggestions, sports scores, non-chronological timelines, etc etc). Instead, I'm forced to limit my likes to non-commercial entities and I use heavy user stylesheet customizations to remove all the other crap. Facebook just loses $10/month this way while being unable to make money (at least via serving ads; I'm sure my information is fair game to sell to ad networks).

Of course, if this were popular, the ads would accelerate in decreasing value. Which is probably why Facebook or other ad networks don't want to start this trend.

Many, many sites use metrics. Google does for example, so you shouldn't use Google either.

There is no free lunch.

It's really not. Fuck social networks.