I don’t visit Reddit much anymore, but isn’t that the way ads have been for awhile over there?
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.
It’s totally possible to hold a negative opinion of something and not bring up your unrelated distaste for Apple.
It’s also totally possible to admit that Apple does what I described, frequently. Distaste is irrelevant.
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)
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.
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.
All I know is, they pay me every time I say it. Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
Why is any one at all using FaceBook Inc.?
If you can answer that question the yours swallows the crumbles falling out the mouth.
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.
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!
