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!
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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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.
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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
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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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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I couldn't have picked a better time to leave that platform. And Lemmy is getting better by the minute!
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.
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OMG its takes up the entire screen..!?
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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 ~~marks~~ targets.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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+.
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Hello fellow old person! Back in my day, 2400 baud dialup BBSs were the “Internet”!
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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
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.
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.
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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
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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.
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🤮
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