“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”
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every Reddit ad is a Lemmy ad if you think about it.
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
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.
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.
