He posted something saying that it wasn't meant to be released yet. He had sent it to some experts on August 6th and it made its way into the wild on August 8th. He posted what he said was an "updated" draft. It was there this morning but is no longer.
Conde Naste is a huge corporation, and if they want to let their purchase go down the toilet... well, I'm sorry, but I won't be picking up their slack.
I wouldn't donate either for those reasons, but one thing to keep in mind is that the codebase running reddit is open source: http://github.com/reddit/reddit
They pushed to the public Git in a month, but the donations users are making will go towards improving that codebase. It can be used to deploy your own (and hopefully more scalable) version of reddit.
I think reddit users would be hesitant to allow their beloved website to start selling data about them. One of the things that drives reddit is the anonymity, why would they want to give that up?
Also, I don't think the author understands the extent to which reddit ads are targeted. Most redittors I know have it whitelisted on adblock and actively click ads because they find them intriguing.
I agree that Reddit's community might balk at some of the ideas referenced in the article. In fact, I made mention of the Facebook privacy fiasco to highlight the issue. Also, I mentioned the opportunity to go to retailers instead of ad networks. I was thinking of it as a benefit. Imagine going to a retailer's Web site with products that you are interested in showcased on the homepage with discounts instead of random stuff that you are interested in. More like Get Glue (http://getglue.com/)
I actually signed up for a Reddit self service account in doing research for the article. While the Reddit system may do a lot to target the ads on its own, I found it incredibly rigid and lacking a lot of features that other services offer. The lack of features and the proprietary nature of the system preclude the ad service from reaching scale.
