I left a couple of months ago. Couldn’t be happier.
The writing is on the wall. The leader thinks the Genius-with-hair-transplants is a superstar, despite destroying a globally recognised brand. Inspired by this, Spez is trying to get Reddit ready for an IPO. This means, maximise profits by any means.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Reddit spokesperson Sierra Gamelgaard declined to provide further clarification when reached by Ars Technica for comment.
Meanwhile, Reddit’s policy update aligns with its outspoken goals to become profitable and its plans to eventually go public.
Other privacy policy changes announced Wednesday include allowing users to choose to see “fewer” ads regarding alcohol, dating, gambling, pregnancy and parenting, and weight loss.
However, clickbait and shock value posts are a strong deviation from what people tend to treasure most about Reddit: real human advice, discussions, and insight.
A support page says Reddit’s Contributor Program will avoid “fraud, spam, bad actors, and illegal activities” by putting users through Persona’s Know Your Customer screening.
Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.
The original article contains 785 words, the summary contains 125 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Who is still on reddit?
I love how everybody is so busy about mining your behavior for ad tracking data and then like 2/3 of the ads I actually see are utterly irrelevant gut doctor / toenail fungus / 17 Most Embarrassing Topless Celebrity Moments crap.
(I think the reality is that they’re mining that data to identify a small number of people susceptible to high-value scams - like getting addicted to an F2P mobile game and spending $1000s on it - and the rest of us just get generic infill)
Yea it feels like something has been rotten with the ads industry for a long while. I’ve read a few pieces here and there about how it could collapse and that it’s built almost entirely on dumb lies. But it’s still here.
I’m no economist, but my best guess is that it’s a little like war and the effort we put into it. Complete trashy waste almost all the time, except for when one person or country decides to put effort into it, because then you have to as well or run huge risks. We’d all be better off without ads, including brands/companies, but when one is doing it every company has to too.
Ads are meant to get brand recognition out there for most things. Then when you’re in a store you buy what you’ve heard of before. They wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t effective.
You’re putting too much faith in the talent and insight of marketing executives. Large companies throw tens of millions of dollars at their marketing department. They’ll spend the money on a diverse ad campaign that ticks boxes, not one that is actually effective. People don’t buy based on the commercial they saw last. People buy what’s shoved in their faces.
You’ve forgotten the second layer of advertising, convincing companies they need to buy ads
The most effective ads I’ve seen in my lifetime have been podcast ads. I don’t remember shit I see in mobile apps or on most corners of the internet. I could personally sell Blue Apron or Harry’s Razors for all I’ve heard about them on podcasts though. The smartest companies allow the podcasters to joke around in their ads too. My Brother, My Brother, and Me will say some borderline offensive but hilarious stuff in their ads and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t keep me listening to their ads and hearing about the products being advertised.
With very, very few exceptions, any time I see an ad I make a mental note to never buy that product. As such, most products I am familiar with(presumably because I saw an ad) I will not buy. The exception is pretty much just Hershey’s chocolate bars, I can’t live without them.
And by definition it’s still nothing but systematic brain washing. It’s actually very 1984, and I can’t understand how some people are ok with being manipulated into buying shit 24/7 and think that global perpetual invasive advertising is this perfectly normal thing that humanity has always had around…
Yea it feels like something has been rotten with the ads industry for a long while.
Advertising only has as much value to the advertiser as it can get in modified consumer behavior.
If I only have $100/month in truly discretionary income, all the advertising in the world is only fighting for that $100. Realistically, though, we’re not all susceptible to the same advertising influences, which is why ad personalization exists. But personalize it all you want and you’re still, at most, getting a few percent of my monthly budget to shift towards what you want me to buy.
That means that advertising is only really worth it for whales. The type of people who might buy hundreds of dollars of goods or services through clicking on ads on Instagram, who have that combination of a huge amount of discretionary income and are fickle enough that they might impulse buy big ticket items.
It literally just dawned on me that some people intentionally click on ads. That’s such an outlandish idea, it feels like fiction.
The reality is that the internet itself is at a tipping point. Advertising platforms know their service is basically worthless as most people use an adblocker, and most companies have idiotic marketing teams that don’t know how to properly sell their product/service in the first place. Companies are seeing less and less ROI on their marketing budget. Without ads, the internet goes bye-bye, or it turns into a subscription model for every website.
Or - as many of us hope for - we manage to make the economics of the fediverse work (don’t forget to support your instances, people) and the most valuable users move to blissful ad-free places like Lemmy and Mastodon.
Indeed, throw in open-source AI (thanks, weirdly, to Zuckerberg) and Wikipedia and you can start to see the contours of a post-advertising internet.
A problem I see is scalability. For example on Lemmy once an instances hits a high enough user count the costs far outweigh donations and moderation becomes a full time job. It’s ad-free for now but costs are going to keep increasing as the demand for storage and constant moderation increase with the userbase.
Advertising platforms know their service is basically worthless as most people use an adblocker
most people aren’t tech-savvy enough to do that
The simplest explanation is generally the right one. Online advertising is a scam. They manipulate the numbers to create the illusion of value. Scammers scamming scammers. Liars and thieves all the way down.
I have spent thousands of dollars trying to cure my toenail fungus in the last three months.
I guess I’m a toenail fungus whale?
I love how everybody is so busy about mining your behavior for ad tracking data and then like 2/3 of the ads I actually see are utterly irrelevant gut doctor / toenail fungus / 17 Most Embarrassing Topless Celebrity Moments crap.
Have you had yourself checked out for toenail fungus bro? Might be a thing.
Your data isn’t just being sold to advertisers. There are all kinds of companies that are willing to pay big bucks to get near real-time insights into consumer behaviour, prices, manufacturing and anything else that can be tracked somehow.
Edit: And there’s a near 0% chance that you’re not part of a dataset that’s being sold to someone, somewhere…
Glad I ripped that band aid off already. Only reason I go there is for buildapcsales now.
I tried really hard to get the !buildapcsales@lemmy.ml community going here, but I got hit by someone running a script that massively downvoted all my posts going back a month, and it was really disheartening so I stopped.
And let me guess…there are a bunch of Redditors on Reddit posting on Reddit about how awful Reddit is. And they are giving each other gold stars and slaps on the back for how great their Reddit posts are on Reddit on how bad Reddit is.
They actually just got rid of the stars, now you just tip people
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/16ryhv9/celebrating_great_content_is_as_good_as_gold/
There’s really a guy on there that’s shocked that he spent $300+ on coins that give you nothing and that they turned out to be useless. They also have the same regular users saying that they’ll finally quit this time, but they’re just lying to themselves and for karma. They financially incentivize the website to get worse and are surprised when it does.
It’s absolutely insane to me that anyone would have ever spent money on that shithole of a site, let alone $300 on worthless jerkoff tokens
That’s the problem with traditional local internet currencies: reddit doesn’t support them anymore and they become useless. If only these coins were crypto-blockchained nfts - if reddit decided to no longer support those, then they’d be just as useless, but much more bureaucratically documented.
