So I checked out reddit after a long time and was going through the top of r/videogames subreddit and I could clearly see a pattern in most of the posts there. Posts were mostly like “what game ______ for you?” or “what game _____ like this?” Now I could be wrong but it doesn’t feel ‘organic’ (if that’s correct way to put it). It’s like these are put up intentionally. Thoughts?
Reddit isn’t the only place this is happening.
Nice to know there are other monkeys on this planet that can open their fucking eyes.
Anyone notice the amount of memes used as free advertising? Disney has been doing it for a while, and crushed it with the mini Yoda in that shit TV show.
Fuck Disney.
I really liked mini Yoda. I don’t get why you hate Disney so much.
So much great content. Really is the golden age of television now that the companies like Disney and Netflix are all trying to compete with each other.
I always enjoying pirating their shows and movies.
They deleted the Expanded Universe as canon so they could bastardize what was left.
Nothing star wars related since disney bought out lucasarts has been worth spending any time on.
I cant wait for them to fuck up KOTOR like they did with the og battlefront.
When it’s obvious its so funny and then depressing. Hanging out in r/marvel is a good example.
Then there is other subs and online places like those r/AITHA and relationship advice places where mods or someone is generating content multiple times a day that people will call out as being made up but still engage with.
Its too bad culture jamming fizzled out because we could all really fuck with this stuff if we organized a bit. Its why I lover sub reddits like r/fighterandthekid and r/joerogan or r/opieandanthony because how they turned on the product they were trying to sell. It took a handful of random people producing legit funny content to steam roll the advertisers. A couple guys with free time can super fuck these companies if they organized. They have to get paid we don’t.
/r/AITA doesn’t even hide their karma farming bullshit. 95% of that dogshit is like “Hey guys, I kissed my boyfriend and made him a five course meal. Then I rubbed his feet and bought him 5 ps5s to let him know I love him. Today, he ruthlessly beat the shit out of me, hit me with his car, punched me in the throat and then shit on my face. I refused to be treated like this, so I left him. He’s now begging for me to come back, and I feel bad. AITA for leaving him over this?” And then karma flows like gold in El dorado.
I don’t know, I feel like advertisements CAN be entertaining content, much like how people for decades have only wanted to watch the Super Bowl for the commercials. The problem, and the reason I have ad blockers all over the place, is that they don’t design the commercials to be entertaining. They want to drill it in to you with endless repetition, or banner ads every 2 paragraphs on a news article.
It is these problems that cause me to want to block ads, not ads in general.
Im of the opinion we should reject all advertising and change the dynamic
If someone wants to sell me something they have to pay for my time.
Instead of paying Jake Paul $10,000,000 to sell me something. They just have to pay me the bandwidth or time their commercial just ate up of my free time.
I work all fucking day and barely get 6 hours before bed. 3 of those hours is running into ads fuck that.
I drive home and have to look at fifteen rusted ass giant metal billboards barely holding together instead of cool ass trees and birds.
I turn on the radio to get a song, 3 minute DJ giving me gossip about celebrities I should purchase from, 2 minute commercials and another song.
I turn on Spotify i pay for and get ad reads all podcast long along with the host sneakily promoting their new chewing tobacco or liquor.
I get home and kids are watching prime, with commercials. Shit doesn’t stop. It keeps encroaching into our free time. Its like an Edgar Alan Poe story but written by Edward Louis Bernays
I hate advertisements
I think there is a distinction of PUSH advertising where you see billboards everywhere, ads stuck into youtube videos, spam emails, whatever that is just sent out to the general public and see what sticks. Compare that with PULL advertising where a consumer goes out and looks for something. When I am shopping for a new TV or something that needs a bit of research, I have no problem being sold to.
It’s kinda like going out of your way to watch movie trailers. Or watching a lets’s play of a video game you are interested in. It can be a fun way to spend some time and they can be entertaining in their own right.
God, I fucking love paying 4 dollars a gallon for gas and having EXTREMELY HIGH VOLUME ads shoved down my throat like an erect cock.
Guess its time to start gettoblasting music at the pumps like I did when I was 19 again…
PSA YOU CAN PRESS ONE OF THE BUTTONS AROUND THE SCREEN TO MUTE THE ADS, USUALLY ITS 2ND FROM THE TOP ON THE RIGHT SIDE
FUCK ADVERTISEMENTS!
Why have us idiots been conditioned to PAY FOR A FUCKING SERVICE that has ads? Cable TV, satellite, xm radio isn’t as bad but the bitrate they use is criminal. And now streaming services offer higher priced subscriptions in order to bypass ads. Its madness!
The ads ins Spotify podcasts do suck, but if the pod is on YouTube, just use youtube revanced. DM me if you want a link to set it up.
More people need to wake the fuck up and realize time=money. You are letting corporations use you, and get nothing out of it except stupid jingles getting stuck in the far reaches of your brain.
If i want to voluntarily watch ads, I’ll look at ad compilatios on YouTube.
These damn kids these days… Back in my day, youtube used to not have ads! They have been conditioned to accept it, its crazy.
And hey man, be thankful for your 6 hrs, I get about 4 after I get home, before I have to sleep and wake up and do it again…
For sure that’s the case. This has been a strategy since at least the 70s
The original Star Wars would never have specifically created a character just to sell merchandise…
My favorite are the YouTube videos with the voice overs that go will narrate a guy skiing off like 3 jumps and the narration will be like
“Watch what happens when this guy goes off of this ramp, but then you’ll never believe what happens when he turns quickly and launches off of another jump again. That’s not all though, watch closely as he goes up in the air, flips around twice and rides away.”
Like, impressive that it is describing the video and all but the comment section is full of seemingly organic traffic that seems oblivious
Yeah baby Yoda was shit, but I think the first season of that show was very good. (After that I think they realized and cut budget and pushed baby Yoda though)
When I first joined lemmy, there were bean posts everywhere. People kept posting shitty puns about beans with pictures of beans, and people kept upvoting them. But it eventually died down.
Could these kinds of posts just be a fad on reddit right now?
It’s been going on for a long time before I left the place. I think it’s more survival of the fittest in action. Posts are not sorted just by upvotes but the number of comments is taken into account as well. Most sane subs have a rule against begging for for upvotes, so people pivoted to encouraging comments with this kind of posts. Easy way to get to the top of the sub.
I used to report the more blatant ones wiht “comment baiting is a form of vote manipulation”. Not that I was expecting mod action, but I felt a bit better afterwards.
The life cycle of a meme seems broken. They font just go to Facebook to die any more. Reddit reached a size where a meme can’t die. There’s enough people where a meme can get reposted a few days later and still hit the front page multiple times. Its new to enough people it gets a second or third round. We seen it naturally with Hosts and beans, but it died off once everyone got sick of the joke.
Bots copy and repost what gets upvotes. Seems something gets big a few times over untill enough people see it, then the bots add it to the good meme list and could hit make “new” at any time. The dead meme comes back at just the right moment to be new to some and retro to others, the cycle repeats.
The beans were great. As incoherent as they got it felt like someone was trying to post content so they got my upvotes. It can get pretty dead around here and I was glad for the change of pace. For a while there was nothing but AI prompt Sailor Moon art that was pretty entertaining too
Why are you using r/videogames as an example to make this claim?
There are at least two more subs that are wildly more popular and have much more activity and substantial posts and commenting.
- videogames - 293k subscribers
- Games - 3.3m subscribers
- gaming - 40m subscribers
I am subbed to both of those last two and didn’t even know the first one existed because it’s offshoot trash.
You can blame bots, but having also worked as a soul crushing social media manager for a few months, you make shit like this to get karma (or on other media, interactions.) Humans deserve some blame!
That said the greatest irony is a toooon of the votes and comments are also bots and/or shills. The weirdest thing I found success on with Twitter, for instance, was wishing people a good morning, using a company account. Weirdly drove profile traffic and follows. >.>
These are engagement farming posts. Both reddit and Twitter are full of them, because both sites are now offering money to accounts whose posts get lots of upvotes/comments.
It feels gross and inauthentic.
Something similar happened to Quora when they started offering to pay people just to produce questions, not good questions, not answers, just questions. Quora was already kinda tenuous and growing its tolerance for fascists, but that move dropped a cinder block on the enshittification gas pedal. Quota’s basically been completely unusable since then and it’s only gotten worse.
Edit: wrote Quota instead of Quora, but I like the typo’s energy, so I’m leaving it.
I don’t even know how much of a role the monetary aspect has. I feel like a lot of Reddit is naturally gross and inauthentic but also soulless and elitist in a way. People still post content because they want the Reddit karma and rehash the same prompts that gives the same predictable answers that seem to appease the crowd. Other times when things are reposted comments will act harshly and and redirect them to a post or wiki from years ago.
Reddit, to me, seems to lack genuine human interactions.
This would check out. Perhaps significantly more users left because of their bullshit than they want the public knowing. Could explain a lot actually.
Next question is whether they actually care or are just happy that the bots can now produce clicks without all that pesky moderation and interaction with actual humans.
Some of them read like content farming posts-get a bunch of people to talk about a given topic with a specific direction, then “write” an article that is basically “video games are crazy, aren’t they? Here’s some really crazy video game stories!
[five word intro] [full text of a Reddit comment] [repeat ad nauseam]”
Weren’t there at least rumors during the protests that reddit is actively looking for engagement posters? Ever since then discussions seem partly artificial (or maybe it just coincides with the rise of AI garbage).
Yup, I remember this. It wasn’t a rumor. Spez wanted to “drive more engagement” shortly after the exodus. He then downplayed it like it wasn’t a big deal but he clearly felt the sting. I don’t think anyone even put two and two together about that at the time. I sure as hell didn’t at first. Looking back, though…
