It’s all engagement for Reddit. They are probably laughing at how gullible people are.
They couldn’t make a profit when the engagement was generally happening in good faith. I doubt they’ll be able to convert this bad faith engagement into anything of value. It’s just a web app where you can change pixels, do they even have ads on there, let alone ones that won’t be blocked by all the users using ad blockers?
I mean, it is hard to tell what their goal was in even starting this. The results should have been very predictable. Maybe they were just trying anything they could think of out of desperation, or maybe the whole idea was to get a good idea of what people think of them and if there was a silent majority that didn’t care about the third party app drama but would engage sufficiently to drown out the spez hate at least a bit.
But this should have been predictable because even the very first r/place ended up dominated by automation tools, which are used by people looking for a custom experience rather than an official one.
I think the whole “any engagement = profit potential” is the mindset that got Reddit into this mess in the first place. Though maybe more on the angle of “the admins realized they needed to show evidence of that or even realize it for a successful IPO”.
Maybe. But if I was thinking about buying into their ipo I might be pretty skeptical of a social media site that’s actively antagonizing their users while it can barely turn a profit when 90% of their labor force are unpaid volunteers.
Engagement can be fleeting and I’m not sure their archive content is as valuable to LLMs as they think it is.
That’s cool to see. Honestly, I haven’t been to r/place at all, so I have no idea what’s happening there at all. I was only there last year for Technoblade.
Wow, in the article it says you can’t access it from old reddit. So the new “place” is to pull people back in and see how engaged people are without old reddit. I haven’t been on reddit once in the last month. I’d never use reddit without old reddit.
I’m still on reddit on the computer. The app and site both suck on mobile now, but RES is still kicking and until they kill it it’s still the best way to kill down time at work
And then you’ll move over to the official app as that becomes the best way to kill time…
I mean if Lemmy collapses yeah… Otherwise this is the best place to kill time on my phone. I don’t want to be bombarded with ads and I like having a simple UI, I’m not willing to lose those things if I can find a viable alternative, but I prefer not needing to find one of I can.
I respect that a lot of people are here out of protest, I’m just here because it’s the preferable user experience given my tastes.
Can’t wait for Boost for Lemmy
RIF RIP 😭
