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- cross-posted to:
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“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”
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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” 😏
thatsthejoke.gif
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.
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’ve tweaked their API indeed, 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. The time that the 3rd party was asking to even adopt with their current “model” of API, 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”
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
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.
whooo, great /r/showerthought 👍
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.
uplevel the search-and-discover experience for both brands and our users by tapping into our differentiated value as a hub for actionable conversation
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.
I thought ‘Succession’ was satire but these people really talk like Kendall Roy
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
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
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.
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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.
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
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.
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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 ;)
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.
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
https://www.redditinc.com/assets/images/site/image2.gif what the fuck is this, 100% ad content in the app???
OMG its takes up the entire screen…!?
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!
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!
actually funny how intrusive it is
Jesus, this is like an unofficial sports stream level of annoying
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 waren. 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.
11 years here, you were there plenty long enough to mourn it.
With all the negativity surrounding API prices, this? Is what “new feature” they’re adding?
It just feels so God damn out of touch.
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
