I don’t visit Reddit much anymore, but isn’t that the way ads have been for awhile over there?
It is…but they need to highlight it to investors now.
Yes, they’re taking from the Apple playbook so people who don’t know will think they actually do things that don’t involve leather or sheep at Reddit HQ. It’s IPO shenanigans.
Removed by mod
It has improved?
Removed by mod
I’m liking these, uhh… “colourful” descriptions.
Well, maybe “liking” is a strong word but they’re amusing 😅
Just don’t ask how they got all that corgi cum…
They wish.
Pomeranian poo
The most important step in making Pembroke cheese.
I am going to be using this phrase going forward.
Do you have time to find a screenshot of the worst offending example?
It’s totally possible to hold a negative opinion of something and not bring up your unrelated distaste for Apple.
Yeah but where’s the fun in that?
It’s also totally possible to admit that Apple does what I described, frequently. Distaste is irrelevant.
When talking about advertising, though, Apple’s actions have been pretty amazing for the consumer.
So to bring up an unrelated negative thing they might do in a thread that has nothing to do with them or their business is kind of weird.
It’s like you can’t stop thinking about Apple.
It’s like you can’t stop thinking about Apple.
The advertising worked!
It used to be, they were called sponsored links, but the comment sections got filled with angry comments about the ads and people would downvote the shit out of them, then they removed comments, and after the redesign ads didn’t have threads/engagement but now they do.
One of my friends tried advertising that way and it went poorly, and the ads weren’t even for a real product just a test balloon for the concept.
Pepe also got very mad when your ad replaced the moose in the sidebar.
Ironically, it was spez who introduced sponsored links with comments then, so what’s old is new again! I wonder if this time will be different… (Not really, I know how this will end)
When I was still using Reddit, I used to report those ad posts for terrorism, inappropriate content or whatever term like that.
The difference is companies used to just run their own super cheap bots to spam fake “engagement” to the site. Now since the API is gone they have to pay Reddit directly for the privilege.
On “old reddit” the posts were highlighted so you could tell
I think with the new Facebook style feed it might not be.
Yes, but reddit wasn’t getting paid for it
I think the differentiation is in who’s placing the ad.
There were sponsored ads before where a company reached out to Reddit and bought advertisements and read it took the money for them and posted them. They were labeled as sponsored.
But since the beginning of Reddit, advertising firms have just posted nearly blatant ads without notifying anyone.
Sounds to me like reddit’s just removing he sponsored indicator from their sponsored ad sales.
I just go to freegamefindings
deleted by creator
Organic advertisements that look similar to user posts on reddit? How could they do such a thing?
Anyway, fellow lemmings, for no apparent reason, Today I Learned that Academy Award and Golden Globe nominated movie, “Barbie”, is now available on Blu-ray and select streaming services.
Images you can hear
That’s Brian Cummings for you
All I know is, they pay me every time I say it. Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
Fuck you! I’m eating!
I was about to tag Margot Robbie, but of course it’s you
The subreddit /r/hailcorporate has existed for ages pointing this out. Shills have been around since forever and buying upvotes is trivial.
[Authorized by the mods] I’ll be giving away 2 sets of these cool gamer keyboard and mouse with neon lights that I just happen to like and have no affiliation whatsoever with the company at all
45k upvotes #1 on r/all
Very natural
Honestly the fact that reddit has still not figured out how to profit off of organic ads blows my mind and helps highlight their leadership incompetency. Companies have been doing this for free on reddit for so long.
I think it comes down to the tens of millions of dollars that the reddit executives sold out to. It’s easy to not care when someone is throwing $100 million at you. Also: fuck spez.
Eh, no shame in self promotion lol
I doubt the movie companies would ever try patronizing to Lemmy. The select streaming services will be links from division by zero users to pirate streaming sites.
In early testing of the new format, Reddit found that free-form ads outperform all other ad types in average click through rate (CTR) by 28%, along with increased community engagement when comments are enabled
so they’re bragging how much more misleading the new format is, gotcha.
I bet the “community engagement comments” are just people warning others that it is an ad
Uhmmm based on my behavior before I left, the engagement is probably “click the three dots, hit report, select spam and block user”. That worked at least for a short while before they got rid of that feature…
I don’t believe that number, the average reddit clicks one of every 4 ads shown?
No way.
Edit: I misread the post to be 28% CTR, you can ignore my comment.
Careful, they didn’t claim to be getting 28% engagement from users… Just that this ad format performs 28% better than other ad types. We have no idea (from this article, at least) what the comparison actually means in real world usage.
In early testing of the new format, Reddit found that free-form ads outperform all other ad types in average click through rate (CTR) by 28%, along with increased community engagement when comments are enabled.
Ah, you are right, I misread that sentence as the CTR being 28%!
It’s just 28% more than the CTR of the other ad methods. It isn’t necessarily 4ish times. Let’s say before they were getting 100 clicks per ad with the old format. With the new format they’re getting 100*1.28=128 clicks.
Yes, I was wrong, thank you for correcting me!
They might not click it on purpose, but that’s beside the point.
What, are they gonna, pfft . . what, like . . make it up since there’s nobody watching? Like, oh yeah we’re saying way more people like ads just to, what, make more money?! As if! Pssh! Noooo. That’s . . that’s just crazy talk.
Advertising plateaued in terms of effectiveness a long time ago, so now it’s gotta be about fraud.
So if ads are just like user posts, why would companies pay for advertising when they can just have an intern, paid in “experience and exposure”, make regular posts and maintain any different aliases?
Ads get shown because they’re paid. Regular posts compete with all other posts, and user filters and subscriptions.
Eh, not too hard to fix. Make it so that paid ads will automatically get 10,000 up votes, that would do it.
Why are people still using Reddit ?
Why are people still using Reddit?
Looking at the first page of my latest comments on reddit, I have some from /r/Wichita, /r/dndmemes, /r/titanfall, /r/KSPMemes, /r/wendigoon, /r/HeyRiddleRiddle, /r/DungeonMeshi, /r/Mythbusters, /r/TheLastAirbender, /r/gurrenlagann, /r/astrophotography, /r/haibanerenmei, /r/yourlieinapril, and /r/LandOfTheLustrous. There are far more, but that’s just the first page.
A few of these have fediverse equivalents, most of them don’t. None of them ever see active discussion on this platform. Even the ones that do will often go weeks or months between posts. Contrast that with /r/Wichita, which let me know 6 hours in advance that a capsule returning astronauts from the space station was going to fly over us at 4:38 AM on March 12th. Being able to see that made using reddit that day absolutely worth it.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
Artificial ranking. Without an API it’s much less reliable for botnets to astroturf; now they’re said “if you can’t beat em, join em” and closed the API and everything is for sale: Even the honesty of the site.
This is the exact same thing Digg did when they released 4.0, which caused the huge Reddit migration almost 15 years ago.
the problem is companies have weaponised complacency, there’s too many people that don’t care and that’s why they keep getting away with it. do it enough times and people will begin to think it’s inevitable and just put up with it.
A core principle of enshittification
Yep, I’m a former Digg user who left at the v4 launch because of this exact thing - they made ads indistinguishable from normal user posts.
People are saying this isn’t that big a deal, that Reddit won’t just die after this. The thing is, Digg still exists but it’s a shadow if its former self and nobody cares about it. It’s present, but its presence isn’t relevant. This change is likely to push more of the users who submit quality content to Reddit away from it, degrading the site community even more than last year.
Lesson not learned, apparently.
Right, but weren’t there a bunch of other changes at the same time that other people didn’t like? This seems like more frog boiling.
Plus digg wasn’t as ingrained and established as Reddit is now.
Plus Reddit had some really clear things about it that people liked better.
And while there are some actually really good Reddit alternatives now, most don’t have a BIG draw for most people. And a bunch of people still complain about lack of content being the big problem (same with why millions of idiots are still using Twitter)
I mean, look how few of us actually moved over permanently after the Great Migration last July, and that pissed off way more people than this probably will (with mass protests and everything).
Digg still exists but it’s a shadow if its former self and nobody cares about it
As far as I’m concerned, so is Reddit. The only reason to go there anymore is for Q&A that get SEO spammed on Google. All the communities I was a part of either died after they changed the API (the only people left are the lurkers and low-effort posters) or had their mods replaced by boot lickers who immediately proceeded to not moderate the subs (which made them dead or full of spam).
But hey, now it sure looks like Reddit is alive and well! Just look at all those
ads,bots,AI replies, totally legit user posts!It wouldn’t surprise me if there was some internal discussion at Reddit of what happened to Digg, and in preparation for alienating large groups of users they intentionally put some things in place to artificially inflate user activity.
Prepare the instances!!!
Digg was also much smaller than reddit is today, with an even smaller amount of content contributors. Once the contributors moved to reddit, Digg was all but dead and everyone followed suit.
If the ads allow me to comment and say “your product sucks” then I don’t mind.
They delete those
There’s probably even a ‘sentiment’ tracking system to automatically remove negative comments at this point.
I still use it for some of the niche communities I can’t get here but I’m more than happy to drop it if these new ads somehow manage to get past uBlock
They probably will. The next evolution in ads is going to be serving them within other organic content, your browser can’t block them if it can’t tell the difference. Now you can just pay Reddit to astroturf for you.
Drop them, they’re literally QVC.
Haha that’s such a great point. I love your comment almost as much as plants love Brawndo. It’s what plants crave. You can get Brawndo at every major retailer by the way and President Camacho fully endorses Brawndo.
Go away! Baitin’!
I remember when blog network Federated Media pulled this and it didn’t work for them, it was a straight march into an acquisition.
How long before the new wave of reddit immigrants here lol
Realistically, this likely won’t piss off their userbase nearly as much as the API fiasco last summer. A significant amount of users stayed in light of a number of subs going dark, so I have a feeling an influx in ads won’t really grind too many gears (or they will but will just bitch and nothing more).
Reddit is much more mainstream these days, and your average Melvin is just used to ads at this point.
Well, I wasn’t pointing directly at this change, it’s just like they’re on a train to make reddit insufferable for profits.
Uh…ok.
“If your username was a username, how username would username username?”
They’re here.
Oh, woe 🙀 It’s bad enough that we’re stuck with me (ba-dum tssh, self-deprecating humour there :D ) but now we’re gonna get even worse critters from Reddit because it’s gonna be ones who stayed with it during the previous exodus. Bleh!
Pretty sure ads have to be identifiable as ads almost everywhere, against misinformation (because ads usually lie).
the platform’s most popular post types, the megathread, which is a sort of one-stop-shop for discussions about popular topics. Similar to megathreads, free-form ads are meant to help readers get the information they need quickly. The company says the new ad format would be a good way to do things like launch a product or introduce a brand to a new audience.
imagine seeing a new mega thread each time a brand releases a new flavor of deodorant or something
flavor of deodorant
Something isn’t right about that…
Edible deodorant of course.
I don’t know about the people still on Reddit, but I personally do not eat my deodorant.
That’s because you haven’t tried cool ranch yet
Your missing out. Old Spice is like a pumpkin pie.
I cannot wait to see this Reddit IPO fail, it will be the fucking most glorious thing when fuck face spez has to face the music.
Don’t worry, the rich always get golden parachutes.
The worst thing is when you open the sidebar. If you click too fast on a sidebar item it registers as a click on the first ad in your feed.
I report the ad as offensive every time this happens which is almost every time.
Why stay there? Make the shift permanent!
I used nails in the past and I never went around telling people how I keep hitting my thumb with the hammer 😭. 😂. I just learned to not put my thumb there and problem solved! So just take your thumb and bring it here! No ads here! I can’t believe they finally did put ads there.
I am mostly on Lemmy now. There are still one or two niche communities still only on Reddit that I frequent.
Thankfully this list keeps shrinking as time goes on 🙂
I still Google stuff like “can I use bananas in kombucha reddit” unfortunately reddit is where the actual Internet population had a voice. No more. Lemmy works differently but I’m going to start using it as a search term and hopefully soon we’ll be getting good results there too…or here I should say.
I haven’t been there in a long time but i remember ads being all over the damn place and they had a certain feel where i knew it wasn’t a regular post and if you looked closely it said promoted. So is this the same thing or are they straight up not even including the promoted tag anymore ?
It’s so annoying when your reading a comment and realize your reading an add god loved so wash feet add you are making me hate Jesus
But maybe if you keep reading you’ll find out it was actually leading into telling you about the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.
The site has so many ad posts and shilling mods that this is basically no change at all
All those moderators spent all those years fighting bot spam, and now the admins are deliberately opening the floodgates for the IPO.
I wish I could say I was shocked, but this was 100% foreseeable given their behavior since the third party app fiasco.
Subverting the will and attention autonomy of the user is a premium feature now.
