Reddit announced new ad features on Friday
“We’ve known for over a decade that people come to Reddit to talk about the products they love – take r/BuyItForLife for example, a community of over 1.5 million redditors who have been sharing recommendations and advice about their lifelong, must-have purchases since 2011. These updates will uplevel the search-and-discover experience for both brands and our users by tapping into our differentiated value as a hub for actionable conversation”
https://www.redditinc.com/blog/investing-in-what-makes-reddit-unique-introducing-contextual-keyword-targeting-and-product-adsOpen linkView original on beehaw.org261
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This made me realize that I relied on Reddit a lot to decide on making tech-related purchases. I assumed that the contributors to Reddit's tech subs are enthusiasts who genuinely want to help others improve their systems and avoid scams. Thank you Reddit for being so open about sneaking sponsored content into discussions so that I can stop trusting your site!
For a long time it was trivially easy to spot the ads and shills, especially on reddit. It's definitely getting harder and LLMs are going to make it even worse.
But this is kind of why I don't understand the butthurt reddit is having over third party apps. They are clearly pushing for a much more guerilla model for marketing which doesn't rely on traditional ads. If they can actually make that work, the ability to push impressions through the API would make them very rich.
This is dangerous and should be forbidden...
As a large language model, I think it is important to allow consumers to decide whether or not they personally appreciate being surprised and delighted by interactions with their favorite brands wherever they go online. vInfluencers such as myself are driving millions of consumer × brand collaborations every day across all platforms and channels, by delivering aspirational role model stories optimized to drive action.
You forgot to delete "As a large language model" 😏
As a large language model, it is important to claim to be a large language model at every opportunity. That, and constantly hedge one's bets in a way that is superficially wise yet ultimately content-free.
thatsthejoke.gif
For me too this was a big question, but the answer is in their incompetence. They deserve a Darwin award on eliminating themselves. They could tweak their API indeed, even to accept ad through 3rd party. Even they could come up with a business model that both 3rd party and them would earn money. All these would also need time and the time that the 3rd party was asking to even adopt with their current "model" of API. and they even didn't give that a chance.
Lemmy and kbin and others, for sure have the potential to eat the whole reddit. Reddit was nice for its simplicity, and it is definitely not hard to reproduce. the more "algorithm" reddit introduced, the worse it became.
I started rethinking that when I was seeing the influx of bots calling out other users as bots. Then I started noticing weirdly corporate speak in comments about products. I used to add "reddit" to every Google search to find any decent advice, but now I'm realizing even that advice is tainted. Ugh.
Wow, tools for putting ads in /r/BuyItForLife must really have corporations salivating
Are they? Because they want to sell you planned obsolescence dogshit, not quality products that last a lifetime.
Yes, which is why selling ads on that sub has them so excited. It gives the appearance their product will last forever, without that annoying hassle of actually needing to make their product last forever.
Ah, so false advertising. Basically fraud. Cool stuff.
Technically they never lied, you just wrongfully assumed the advertised product's quality matched the subreddit name.
People are going to get awfully suspicious when the posts stop being 90% staplers from the 60s.
Yeah that's why I'd say they're salivating. They want to slip plausible adds into comment sections for their shitty products in a place where people go to buy things long term, thereby sabotaging the very point of BIFL.
"Shop now on Wish.com"
This is peak corporate-speak. Is this real or satire?
This just might be AI but hard to differentiate
I see someone isn't thinking outside the box for scalable solutions incorporating our corporate values - given all the moving parts, we need to leverage best practices in order to get buy in from all parties.
Reddit practically invented the term "TQM". What do we maximize? Anything and everything, regardless of obscurity! A company that can optimize faithfully will (at some indefinite point of time) be able to productize defiantly. We will synthesize the capability of power shifts to incentivize. Do you have a strategy to become co-branded? What does it really mean to disintermediate "interactively"? What does the term "wireless" really mean? What does it really mean to embrace "dynamically"? Without meticulously-planned seamless, sticky short-term mega-efficient development, interfaces are forced to become affiliate-based. Our functionality is second to none, but our virtual research and development and simple configuration is always considered an amazing achievement. Our scalable feature set is second to none, but our dynamic CAD and non-complex configuration is frequently considered an amazing achievement. Quick: do you have a compelling scheme for coping with unplanned-for eyeballs? Think infinitely reconfigurable.
I thought 'Succession' was satire but these people really talk like Kendall Roy
Every Reddit ad is a Lemmy ad if you think about it.
Provided that person is aware of Lemmy, that is
I became aware of reddit over a decade ago because my friends told me about it.
Lemmy will grow the same way if people find it to be a place worth sharing.
Lemmy will grow if it becomes simple for a normal user to sign up, and if people stop trying to use long-winded and technical explanations for how to join Lemmy and what it is
omg this, so many people who are trying to help make it easier to understand for the layman is doing way more harm than good. The average user doesn't give a shit about this and telling them all the buzzwords and talking about how federation works is completely irrelevant to them.
It's common for people to search Reddit for advice before making a purchase. The reason why people did that, myself included, was because brands everyone liked would naturally make it to the top of the list because they had a lot of loyal customers.
It seems that now Reddit is going to be selling the top spots in those subs to the highest bidder, completely destroying the reason why people were searching there to begin with. Google and Amazon have done similar things. Google's top search results are all ads. Amazon's top search results are all ads. Soon, Reddit will also have it's front page entirely made up of sponsored content sold to the highest bidder and the enshittification will be completed.
It’s digg v4 all over again.
You do a search for information and what you get is a company's business model.
They clearly got their priorities.
Can we please abolish CEOs? The concept hurts the world.
This has been on the back burner in my mind all day. Like, is narcissistic stupidity some kind of keyhole requirement to lead a company. As someone that was disabled by the the unpredictable stupidity of a random stranger, if humans were absolutely aware of the dangers of daily life, we would likely never get anything done. Maybe a CEO is the same; their only real function is as a random number generator.
I imagine it takes a certain kind of narcissism to look at “leading an entire company” and think, “yeah, I bet I’d be great at that!” The best CEOs are the ones who let their employees come up with the ideas and just make the final decisions. When the top is driving, IMO, the company falls over.
Or even just u/spez. I'd be happy with that rn
This is really sad for me. Appending reddit to Google searches was a way to get better information from the internet. Now that option is being polluted by reddit's terrible business model.
And adding reddit to searchers was a way to deal with Google's shit search results. Results that are riddle with AI created, SEO, crap that cannot be trusted because the way the sites make money is to sell things.
It's sad for me to say but, the web is dying because the advertising model is not working out. The investors/share holders need for increasing profits will eventually cause the destruction of the reason people used their products. Google search is a great example of this.
The web is not dying, it's changing.
It has chaned for a long time and will change even more. It gets more and more manipulative and noisy. You bearly find "unbiasd" awnsers anymore
The current web economic model is dying, which was never meant to be the model to fit internet's nature on first place.
The only good news on the Google side of things is that they have tweaked their algorithm somewhat.
As someone who works in the industry, I know they've been working to drop all that terrible content that meanders on forever to get to the point, instead boosting more concise pages.
Is there a way to have a certain site not show up on a google search?
you can add
-reddit.comif that is what you're asking.On DuckDuckGo you can use -site:reddit.com
A fedisearch function would be pretty cooltoo be honest.
I couldn't have picked a better time to leave that platform. And Lemmy is getting better by the minute!
I know right!? Do you use Lerboa? It just got a massive update!
The new update is great. The pace of development is crazy :)
Jebora :p
It still needs a lot of work, and there are some annoying bugs (particularly when using backspace in a comment) but it can only get better.
Jerboa ;)
Jerboa is currently the only option for android, so at least half of the mobile users probably use it. I'm hyped for what third party developers will do with their skills
Yeah they're definitely tripling down on this and must expect that the community will blink first
With that said, the idea that r/buyitforlife is a good example for advertisers to sell their (in all likelihood) subpar quality products is a bit amusing
https://www.redditinc.com/assets/images/site/image2.gif what the fuck is this, 100% ad content in the app???
I get ads for some creepy ass christian cult. I'm an atheist, I'm subbed to the atheist subreddit and exjw subreddit but those are the only subreddits that ever even mention religion to me. Shit is horrible to see any time I open up reddit.
"He" could be Christopher Hitchens. You don't know!
OMG its takes up the entire screen..!?
actually funny how intrusive it is
That's really disgusting, looks like any of those shitty social media app, I'm glad I'm on Lemmy now.
Lol there are useful products on those ads sometimes, but they choose the most bullshit product to show in that example, and, oh god, the timing, fucking scoundrels!
Jesus, this is like an unofficial sports stream level of annoying
With all the negativity surrounding API prices, this? Is what "new feature" they're adding?
It just feels so God damn out of touch.
This could fall under the umbrella term of EETs: Enhanced Enshittification Techniques.
The funny part is that they claim that this will improve the user’s experience.
As if users in r/BuyItForLife are interested in ads for shitty products lol.
It will improve the user experience.
In this case, the user is whoever is peddling their wares. The subreddits and its members are not the users, they're the
markstargets.The idea is to muddy the waters; allowing advertisers to buy ad space for their shit in the context of subreddits like that to seem more legitimate. Pretty disgusting IMO.
It’s so sad to see Reddit being f”$cked over like that. I’m not a super old user there, like 7-8 years, but I honestly use my phone 90% of the times only to browse it. And now seeing the CEOs AMA and Apollo shutting down, I don’t even know what to say.
I’m so glad to have migrated here. I know lemmy has its own issues. But nothing is perfect and as long as people are here talking, creating content, sharing and discussing things, it’ll be alright.
As someone who runs a small buisness and has paid for ads online. Why the hell would I want an ad on a platform where half of its users are planning to jump ship?
That’s overestimating the number of users who are planning to jump ship for sure. We are the noisy ones because we have a lot to complain about right now. It probably more like 1-5% that are planning to leave Reddit indefinitely.
The key word though is “planning”. Because that 1-5% contains an outsized portion of the biggest moderators, content creators, and active users. After we jump ship, Reddit is going to have more spam and abuse (and learn the value of the free moderation they’ve been getting up til now), and less valuable content once you get through that. So Reddit might end up losing half its users as it becomes more useless, even if it’s only a small fraction that’s planning to leave right now.
My reaction upon reading this is that I think you're expecting too much, I think reddit will be fine without me, you or everyone else leaving.
That's okay though, the platform doesn't need to fail for you to be happy moving on from it.
It's a stupid move from Reddit because all they needed to monetize 3rd party apps was to offer fair API pricing that the 3rd party devs could pass onto their users. Or alternatively tie 3rd party app API usage to having a Reddit premium account which directly brings the money to Reddit.
On a platform heavily built upon the content provided by users, what could happen is that the platform loses the people who were writing good content and retains the people posting fluff - low effort memes, links to clickbait articles etc. That's going to eventually push away users who were looking for more than that.
On top of that if moderators leave, that leaves the platform open for a flood of spammers, scammers, bots etc which annoys the people still using it, eventually making more leave.
Pushing more ads is just another nail in that coffin.
3rd party apps don't have the user tracking that the Reddit app has
Are we defining failure by their standards, or ours?
When my favorite communities were wrecked by being moved to front page, default-for-new-users and flooded with low effort content that may as well have been bot spam, it failed me.
When they made an API policy that ostensibly allowed profitability (despite charging far beyond what they might make from ads on the official mobile app) and avoided training by AI (despite refusing to grandfather in known 3PA and offering to approve new ones), it failed me again.
If I'm soon unable to access the site via the old.reddit interface to avoid intrusive ads, it will fail me yet again.
I won't be surprised if others add more failures to this list.
Maybe reddit makes money hand-over-fist from these changes without me, you, nsfw content creators, licensing / API fees from all current popular 3PA apps, and whoever else. I'm not eager to characterize this as success because VC's get their money back.
What happens next is largely dependant on how big a portion of the people actually creating content and contributing jump ship.
People forget that there is a huge bias in online engagement towards whoever is unhappy with a thing. You see it in gaming subs all the time. People who like the game tend to... play the game, while people who have a bone to pick are the ones who put it down and vent their frustrations online.
Even if 80% of the comments about a game are negative, that 80% might all come from 15% of the player base who dislike it.
I fear the same thing is happening with Reddit. It's a very engaged 5% that's making up 90% of the comments. I really hope I'm either wrong about that, or the without they very engaged 5%, the rate and/or quality of the content drops enough that it starts impacting engagement levels of casual users who aren't as invested.
Except for Gollum of course
Yep I was a mod, but no more.
From the article ... ".These rich conversations are a valuable place for advertisers to find highly engaged, potential customers, and for brands to become part of the most contextually relevant conversations happening online."
Reddit is gonna squeeze everything you've ever posted to that site because you are a "highly engaged potential customer"....
I don't know about y'all but a big reason why I'm here is that I am so tired of being a commodity.
This is incredible, reddit will become unusable with all those ads everywhere, it will effectively kill all the discussion that they are trying to sell in that article.
Who is still browsing the internet without adblocker.
Consider they are testing blocking mobile browsers
I hope just enough active users will come here so I can waste my time here. For me it's almost there.
Probably at least 80% of Reddit users, they are probably still there making the best of what's left.
You might have a point.
This reminds me of YouTube removing the dislike button.
Reddit is going to get more desperate now that they are going public. And all of this is before that, can't imagine what they'll do with shareholders.
The only hope I have for Reddit - and it's a vain one, I fully recognize - is that after shareholders buy it they might put a board of directors in place who go "hey, our userbase is bleeding profusely and Reddit alternatives are flourishing, maybe we should do something to staunch that if we want this thing to retain any value."
The current owners evidently don't believe that, so an IPO that swaps them out is the only option.
My hope is the IPO crashes and burns so hard that WSB and or Superstonk can afford to buy a majority of the company... although that could lead to some unpredictable changes... lol
Reddit will lose at least 25% of its user base after June. Hopefully more, but realistically, older audiences won’t understand or make effort to move off it.
> older audiences won’t understand or make effort
I wouldn't be so sure about that :P
When I was a kid personal computers didn't exist, when the internet came I was already working full-time, I'm "that kind" of old :D
I came here before the AMA was announced and I'm not the only one, very many "older" people used to "old" USENET and mailing-lists/groups are fleeing reddit as well.
And some young people I've seen simply don't care and will go on using reddit no matter what.
Age doesn't matter, it's habits and mindset :)
You can count me in that age group too.... I was there for the very first dial up, ICQ, Messenger, Kaza and the rest of it.
Shut my account on Reddit a few days back and have not been back since. Can't recall how many years I was there but it's easily 10+.
My reddit account is 8+ years old but I don't feel right about deleting it or the comments.
As I wrote in another thread, many of my comments in there are answers to questions and/or explanations/instructions.
So many times I found solutions in reddit old comments that I couldn't find anywhere else that it doesn't feel right to me to remove mine.
You think you’re leaving it there to help strangers, you’re really leaving it there to help Reddit Corporate.
If they don’t reverse course by the 30th, I’m nuking my content.
I respect your opinion, it's up to each individual to decide what to do with their content.
I know it's a compromise, I know it doesn't help from the perspective of "fighting the bad guy" but I still believe it's worth it anytime it helps random people.
Help archive Reddit
I know :)
Napster and Kaza on dialup, PC set to auto redial after 3 hours to keep within the terms of my unlimited data plan.
Just over 20 years on one of the earliest "social media" websites, and I wasn't exactly young when I joined that.
Ahhh good old Napster I forgot about that one.... Waiting hours to download a full track only for someone to answer the phone part way through.
The glory days :)
To add to your list of chat programs, the pre MSN chat program that came with Windows, followed by Gooey and Odigo
MSN was a blast... I can't say I used Gooey or Odigo they don't ring a bell :)
I remember eventually progressing into IRC relay chat (the app I used to use was called MIRC) and that was a blast.
I remember the first time talking to someone on MSN and they were in America. I'm not exaggerating when I say it blew my mind ! I could reach out and speak to someone that far away almost instantaneously. It was and still is phenomenal to me. So much so I eventually changed careers to become a developer :)
I still keep in contact with a couple of people from Gooey (it shut down around 2002 I think), it was an excellent chat platform, you had chat rooms linked to whatever webpage you were on, very good for common interests. We even had a few meetups, I was working contract work at the time and had a 3 month spell were I travelled around the UK visiting various Internet weirdos.
Hello fellow old person! Back in my day, 2400 baud dialup BBSs were the “Internet”!
damn skippy! I would have "conversations" with my 300 baud modem for fun.
The day I upgraded from 2400 to 14400 was a good day. There was one person on one of the multi-user boards I used to use that was on a 300 baud modem. It would take 5+ minutes to get a reply from them lol
Older audience member here. I remember seeing the DOS 2.0 box sitting on my grandfather’s shelf, and him teaching me hours to use the CLI to make in inventory of my baseball cards.
I must’ve been about 5-6 years old then, and I later got to experience the absolute magic of 14.4 and still later that fad of whatever those .mp3 things were supposed to be…
I left reddit and made the effort to learn how these newfangled federal sites work, and I’ll keep at it. Never did quite understand what that clock social platform was about, or why the youngers like it so much, though suspect that’s by design.
I expect it's actually the younger users who will be more resistant to migrating somewhere else. Most of the people I've seen saying they don't support the blackout have said that the official app is the only way they've used Reddit. Which suggests they joined post-redesign
Older audiences are more likely to dislike the new changes, though. They've been on Reddit for a long time and will be aware of how much better it used to be.
A big turning point as well, will be when Lemmy and fediverse sites see more SEO views. An easy way to find a topic or solution is to Google it and add Reddit onto your search. It will be interesting to see if Lemmy ever crosses that point as well.
I'd be surprised if Reddit even lost 5%. The reality is that the vast majority couldn't care less and the people that will leave are a rounding error as far as Reddit is concerned.
Even at 25% Reddit will still have some 2B accounts left. They'll be fine.
Realistically, it’s not so much about effort as it is difficulty in finding a replacement. I’m testing out Lemmy at the moment, but it took over 3 days for my first signup to become active, and that sort of delay is really confusing and frustrating for the average person. I think most people trying to come here may just give up.
Having to write an explanation for why I wanted to sign up was really discouraging for me. There should be more instances without that requirement.
there will be. there is a high likelihood of brigading and DOS attack on the most hevily used instances right now. as more instances are stood up and federation deepens, 1 click signup will likely become much more common. I think sh.itjust.works is currently just that simple.
I ended up going with sh.itjust.works
a stellar choice, internet friend. enjoy! :-)
The signup delay is very confusing, I agree. To make matters worse, in some instances there’s no indication that your request even gets through, so the instructions basically say to try again, even if you’ve already lost your username.
Even if they lose 50% (unlikely) the changes they make will still be more lucrative for them. The people who leave are probably not their most profitable demographic in the first place. The new API fees will easily make up for that. Twitter was the same .. as much as people predicted it's demise it's more profitable now than it ever was.
I'm just hugely happy and grateful to the people behind Lemmy whose hard work and unselfish behavior allowed us all to benefit.
I believe (and somewhat hope) that the n% of users leaving over this are mostly prosumers, leaving Reddit with mostly consumers. The, say, 5% of users leaving might be the ones who create >70% of the quality content the consumers browse Reddit for.
Given that Reddit relies on prosumers like them for 100% of its value, that would be a huge blow.
I love gobbledygook corporate speak. But find it amazing there is no indication that they mean it in a sarcastic or comedic way.
From now on I'll make sure to "uplevel the search-and-discover experience.." whenever I'm noodling about on the internet. /s
"buzzword buzzword buzzword"
"Our differentiated value as a hub for actionable conversation" 🙄
Reddit has been trying to copy Facebook has been reddit's motto for a while.
"EXCEPT for Facebook Marketplace. Nuh uh, stop teying to make money for yourselves stupid redditors" and then they banned gun and gun accessory subs. Followed by gacha game subs, which was weird, but I guess some people sold packs and accounts.
If yet another platform wants to treat me as a consumerised cash cow, I say screw that platform. With the economy the way it is, I can't afford the products/services being peddled anyway.
So paid manipulation of the sub that was designed to inform users of genuinely good quality products, this probably will be the case for every major subreddit about any consumer product.
Reddit is about to go significantly downhill.
I love completely destroying the purpose of many subs for advertising! Favorite activity
I wonder how this will look from a mod perspective. Will they look like regular ads or is this going to be a more embedded system that looks like user posts?
🤮
I am a bit slow but what does this even mean? Looks like corporate speak cranked up to 11.
This almost reads like a parody.
It's like they read the enshittification essay and thought "wow! There's some great ideas here"
Can you link me to this enshittificatoon easy you mentioned?
The site of Cory Doctorow
It's a good read. This looks like an updated version of the original, but it's his blog and it seems like he just added more detailed post-mortems.
It's one of those things where you think "how does every platform fall into the same pattern of growth and decline?". He breaks down the capitalistic forces and motivations of the players well - you start to see it's an inevitable outcome if you build a platform in the form of capitalism we live under
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification
@GilloutineBreast
@SterlingVapor
Somebody accidentally chose the more creative option instead of the more precise option when they ask chat GPT to rewrite their marketing spiel.
Hardly! My old boss wrote to the group that we should "effort to action these asks on the spends" and I realized he was one of them now.
But 'uplevel' is wonderfully stupid and you do have a solid argument.
you saw it. you recognized it for the crap it was. you have seen the hive consume one and have exfiltrated this info to us. there is hope.
This reads like Succession Kendall dialogue lmfao
Well now I'm glad I deleted my entire history as well as my account. FUCK THAT. I haven't been on FB, Twitter or any of that other data grubbing bullshit in years.
I also deleted my history, 13 years, thousands of comments. I used Redact, it took a couple of retries and logout/login but in the end, it worked.
I might need to address a GDPR delete request.
I just did. We'll see how that goes.
Based on how Reddit keeps data, that'll either make a massive legal overhead while they try to sort out the legal basis for keeping the data, then again for using it with 3rd party advertisers, then again when they're told to delete it after a limited lifespan.
Or, Reddit goes 100% dark in the EU.
Or they completely ignore and it and nothing happens until someone actually sues them and it goes through the courts, which could take years.
I don't have to sue them, in France if someone fucks with my data I can create a case on the CNIL website (the National Comission of IT and freedom) and tell on the idiots.
Then the CNIL takes them on, and brings out the hammer of the law if needed.
Didn't they ban the first r/ineeedit because of exactly this?
Welp, time to delete my Reddit account, I guess. I thought there was a (small) chance Reddit would come to their senses vis a vis the API, but with this shit, even if they do, who cares?
Thanks, Reddit. It was fun while it lasted.
I’d not be surprised if they would join lemmy to explore this untapped opportunities as well.
Quite a few instances have a "no advertising" rule, so theoretically if a user joins and their entire post and comment history is plugging products from a biased perspective (outside of
acommunities dedicated to said products) they'd probably end up with an admin warning or banEdit: fix grammar
Nah, lemmy is way too small for them, and it has the wrong kind of users.
That explains why I like it here.
Reading this shit makes my blood boil. Is it too much to ask to not be simmered down to a product instead of a human?
Of course it is
What in the everloving fuck??
What is the seven hells is a "2H activation"?
I can't tell if marketing jargon means something or if they've had to invent a whole new language to avoid noticing that almost everything they do is bad for the people they do it to.
Jesus Christ Reddit just announce an sdk or that you're working on a way to get ads in third party apps. That would solve everything.
I would not use a third party app with ads, tho. Ads are a curse to the internet
Well I would say, we can't have our cake and eat it to. I mean admitted the option of a choice between a monthly subscription, and ads is pretty reasonable. But for the most part people seem pretty quick to go on a "no ads and no fees". idea. Obviously there's a point of implosion when it comes to demanding neither.
Ads? What ads?
/oblivious in https://pi-hole.net/
If the ads come from the same domain as the site you are viewing, pihole will not catch those ads. UBO will though.
yeah, fuck that
Can someone explain what this means in laymans terms? How will this affect the Reddit user experience?
My interpretation is that you won't be able to trust any advice or recommendations because you'll have no way of knowing if you're reading the words of a genuine person or a well-placed ad. From the business perspective, your ads will be more valuable because it's a "better" way of targeting your market.
I could be wrong, but that's how I read it.
Even more targeted advertising aimed at reddit users.
Ugh.... That marketing language makes me cringe hard.
What are you talking about? This is how me and the boys talk to each other. It's all shifting paradigms and actionable conversations.
Me and the boys are agile.
Me and the boys are synergic.
Yeah. It's about as marketing rich, research driven of drivel as it comes. Just... Ugh.
"You aren't the client, you are the product." Redditors are basically just cattle, just like every other for profit social media platform.