Pre-IPO Reddit lets ads be dressed up as promoted user posts
www.theregister.com
As FTC starts asking questions about that mega-deal with Google to train AI
  • agegamon@beehaw.org
    73·
    9 months ago

    What’s really happening here is that advertisers can use the Reddit Ads Manager to create normal user posts and then pay to make them appear prominently on the site and in the app as promoted posts, aka adverts.

    Look it’s not exactly revolutionary or new, google search has been littered with promoted ad results for years. But I still hate it. Fuck off, reddit. No respect intended. Icky. So glad I stopped using it.

    • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
      24·
      9 months ago

      I remember gaming and computer magazines from the 90s, sometimes the full page ads looked like a normal article or something that could have been part of the magazine content. So its really not new. This really upset me and if I remember such type of ads were banned in Germany (but can misremember). I hate ads that are not marked as such or can be sponsored to appear in front of everything else. It’s basically pay to win.

      Fuck Reddit.

  • senseamidmadness@beehaw.org
    58·
    9 months ago

    There’s never been a day where I regretted deleting my Reddit account and removing that site from my life. It’s only gotten worse since I left.

  • Alstjbin@beehaw.org
    43·
    9 months ago

    Generally speaking, having unmarked adds would be considered illegal in Dutch law, so there’s a fair chance the EU won’t let this fly either.

  • Pete Hahnloser@beehaw.org
    37·
    9 months ago

    Here’s the truly evil part:

    All free-form adverts are supposed to show some kind of sponsored label, though that doesn’t appear to be the case on the three posts included in this story. While Leica’s shows it, neither Philadelphia post includes a tag indicating it’s sponsored content. We understand that’s because the Philadelphia posts are no longer boosted by ad spending, so are back to just being normal user posts.

    Ad stays up in perpetuity, tag has a shelf life, after which it looks like a normal post. Can you sponsor a post for an hour like it’s a seedy motel room?

    Also: As these are regular posts with brief decoration, I’d assume uBO might have trouble filtering them out.

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
      24·
      9 months ago

      Sounds like a great way for Reddit to force anyone trying to train an AI to pay for an ad-free dataset: buy the clean one, or scrape an ad ridden one. You wouldn’t want risking your corporate AI to spew propaganda about your competitors, would you?

      Enshittification intensifies.

        • MaggiWuerze@feddit.de
          4·
          9 months ago

          And they can still report that as ad delivery when that post is requested, even when the tag is no longer paid for

        • noddy@beehaw.org
          2·
          9 months ago

          I don’t know what to do to get good search results anymore if this happens. Using site:reddit.com has been the only way recently to find opinions from actual people regarding some product I’m considering. Maybe I’ll just stop buying things and go live in a cave. Can’t trust any information online anymore.

  • readbeanicecream@lemm.eeEnglish
    35·
    9 months ago

    I am pretty much done with reddit and Google. My use of those two platforms have dropped to about 5% of my total online time.

    • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
      12·
      9 months ago

      I don’t use Google, maybe 3 times a year to see if the search results are better. I don’t use YouTube too much directly, instead using alternatives to watch YouTube content, like FreeTube. However I regret having an old and important Googlemail account…

      Leaving Reddit was a bit easier, but I miss some of the communities, it was rich and single account to handle everything. Since the day I snapped my fingers and logged off, I stayed logged off.

  • BCsven
    22·
    9 months ago

    Reddit user look ads will be the enshitification of reddit like how google search returns junk links making it unusable.

        • pineapplepizza@lemm.ee
          3·
          9 months ago

          My understanding is Reddit is further enshitifying would be a gerund?

          But I may be ignorant on the full use of the term.

          • DarkNightoftheSoul@mander.xyzEnglish
            2·
            9 months ago

            If I understand correctly, a gerund is the noun form of a verb- a verb turned into a noun. “A building is building” the first building is a noun, it is the thing being built. The second is a verb, the act of being built. Google tells me gerunds are supposed to end in -ing, but “reddit is an enshittifying” doesn’t quite sound right, so I used an adjective form. It’s very possible I don’t understand correctly.

    • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al
      3·
      9 months ago

      Compared to the Play Store, Search seems pretty good, because holy fuck, the Play Store is terrible!

  • IninewCrowEnglish
    7·
    9 months ago

    It’s the age old model of tech companies … which basically follows the old model of companies before the modern tech and digital age … once you heavily monetize any product or service, the product or service eventually becomes secondary to the main goal of making as much money as possible.

    Companies haven’t changed no matter how technological and modern they are … we still want to do the OOGA BOOGA thing of … “take thing, make money, who cares what thing does”