Someone posted this over on Reddit right when it happened and I apparently saved it. I’m cleaning out my bookmarks and came across it. I hought you’d like to see why it’s good news that we found Lemmy.
Edit: I took a screenshot in case it gets deleted.
I threw up in my mouth reading this. I don’t think any community would enjoy being described as “an environment of active discovery ripe for brands to show up and add value”.
If you’re like me and haven’t deleted old reddit comments because of the valuable information they can give other people, now may be the time to reconsider. Being able to advertise on discussions that have already happened is one of the sales pitches Reddit makes to prospective advertisers.
They mentioned Ally Financial as one of the success cases so I did a quick search for recent posts about Ally and sure enough the very first result from outside their own sub has this user contributing to the conversation:
https://www.reddit.com/user/robbiedavissie
Somebody posts a question about Ally and this 11 minute old account comes along pitching all of Ally Bank’s features. Then a week later they’re making 3 posts in a row advertising some other brand.
Super sketch.
There’s a ton of these accounts. They gather karma with scripts that randomly repost top 100 all time posts on big subs and then delete them so their account looks clean. Then they sell it to ad companies that post client sanctioned posts and comments and get paid based on user engagement with the brand.
Check out r/hailcorporate. A huge portion of Reddit is just guerrilla advertising.
They didn’t even do that though. It was an absolutely brand new 1 karma account that somehow mysteriously didn’t get automodded to hell. Account created 09:00:27 UTC, then Ally Bank comment at 09:11:37 UTC
Wow I guess they’re not even trying to hide it anymore.
They also do it by copying text from comments that are getting upvoted in the same thread and then reposting it higher in the thread so it gets random upvotes. Caught the copy-bots doing it a bunch of times, got tired of reporting them since the reddit admins obviously weren’t interested in combatting the problem even if local moderators were (and I suspect they were in fact helping it along because it aligns with their goals for Reddit).
At least they’re really not good at it? That was so obviously an AI or pre-written.
Who would talk like that? lol
The amount of buzzwords just to say “advertisers are a greater priority for us than our users” holy shit
The use of all the buzzwords actually works to show the advertisers in question that they understand what they’re doing and, in this case somewhat literally, that they “speak their language.”
Omg, I just posted, I also threw up a little reading this.
Not sure anyone wants “advertisers to be at the center” of any experience.
Come to !recommendations@lemmy.world so that people find content from Lemmy instead ads from Reddit
I’m so glad people like you are choosing to bootstrap the community’s they want to see instead of just hoping mods invested in there existing community’s decided to come over and working to try and connect with the people already on lemmy instead of just begging the people on reddit until the mods ban them for spamming
I wish there was an easy way to archive my old reddit comments. Anything older than 1000 comments seems impossible to access even though I made them.
deleted by creator
Same, we’re all prostitutes for Reddit in the end.
TBH, they’re already doing it a little here, but at least we’re not being sold to the highest bidder by Reddit. Here, they get ignored and/or downvoted.
Spez doesn’t get to profit from me anymore.