How to disable personalized predication data on Stackoverflow
Stackoverflow is one of the most popular sites on the Internet. It has a global rank of 57 and a rank in the United States of 39 which means that it is more popular than Netflix, Craigslist, BBC or CNN according to Alexa.
Anyway, Stackoverflow is a community powered site that is similar to a forum but focused on programming and coding.
If you are a visitor of the site you can browse questions and answers about programming but if you join the site, you get to ask questions as well.
This can be useful if you are a programmer of course or beginning to learn. Since it covers all programming languages, chance is good that you will find like-minded users on the site that can help you out if you run into issues.
Stackoverflow uses personalized predictions to display contents to its registered users. What this means is that it takes what you have done in the past on the site into account when showing content to you.
If you happen to browse, ask and answer only Android topics for example, those will most likely be displayed to you more than say iOS or JavaScript contents.
Contents in this regards not only means topics created by users on the site but also related content such as job offerings (which may be closer to your location and more about Android than other programming languages).
So, once you start using the site most questions displayed on its frontpage will be about the topics you are interested in.
You can download your data from Stackoverflow at any time. This is the complete personalized prediction data set according to the site.
The data is provided as a json file which you can open in a text editor such as Notepad++ for example or specialized programs that support it.
Stackoverflow provides you with an option to disable personalized predictions for the account. If you do that, all personalized predictions are removed from the system within a day and future predictions will be blocked.
This can be useful if you want to erase all predictions on file if you receive old suggestions more than you receive suggestions about contents you are interested in. Say, you have been an active user answering Visual Basic questions in the past but moved on to iOS programming but do receive lots of Visual Basic recommendations still.
This may also be a privacy issue for some users who don't want that data to be saved by Stackoverflow.
Just hit the disable personalized predictions button on the site linked above and the feature is disabled for you.
You can enable predictions again at any point in time on the same page.
Please note that each site of the Stackoverflow network records its own set of personal prediction data. This mens that you will have to disable it on all sites that you use regularly if you don't want this data to be recorded.
The easiest way to do so is to append users/prediction-data/ to the domain name of each site you use and hit the "disable personalized predictions" button on each of them.
On Superuser, the address is http://superuser.com/users/prediction-data for example.
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.