A quote that always stuck with me was: “‘Your ad here’ signs are proof that the ad spot doesn’t work well, otherwise someone would have put their ad there.”
Am I wrong in thinking this is sad as hell? Like seeing an old faded billboard with the same “your ad here!” text that’s been there for ages.
It’s really sad for me to see a social media platform like reddit crumble. I spent years there.
I spent more time at Reddit then I did in the K-12 education system. I have a lot of good memories and learned a lot from both, but I have no desire to return to either.
Sad, but I ain’t mad. This is the bed that Wish.com “Elon” made for Reddit
Great Value Elon!
Wait… Reddit has ads?
Ya. That is a large part (not the only reason) of why Huffman gambled and lost on killing 3rd party apps. People using Apollo, or any other app that wasn’t the trash official app, weren’t getting ads at all or were giving their ad dollars to a third party. By killing third party apps, that forces anyone who actually wants to use Reddit to use the official suck ass app or the garbage desktop site which also had alt options that used the API. When users are funneled into only using official Reddit products, that means they’re only consuming ads that Reddit makes a profit from.
I used Bacon Reader for almost ten years. It didn’t have ads for half a decade and when ads did come, it was a non intrusive banner ad at the bottom. The Reddit app is riddled with obstructive ads. So is the website unless using an ad blocker. Reddit when used the way the admins want, is just one ass blast of shitty ads.
Hats off, that’s both an argument for the use of third party apps and for eliminating third party apps at the same time…
Reddit gold ran the platform. Going for profit killed the API.
We should all club together and get some ads for the fediverse on there.
The best ad I saw for Reddit (back before the grand Digg migration) was one day, everyone agreed to stop posting direct links to articles and instead post the links to the Reddit discussions for said articles.
Suddenly, one day, the entire Digg feed was links to Reddit.
We should do the same thing (on say 8/1) to give time for the different federated instances to get accustomed to the higher traffic, more activity on the feed, and more people to welcome the future Reddit refuges, just like Redditors once welcomed us during the Digg 4.0 exodus.
It would be funny and I’d love to see it but you KNOW spez and his butthurt bootlicking simps are petty enough to block/ban any link that goes to any address that’s associated with a Lemmy instance AND instantly “permanently suspend” any account that participates.
Reddit admins even ejected their favorite agitator powermod, u/awkwardthepanda, for posting a John Oliver picture.
They are truly prepared to burn every bridge.
…
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe they should be FORCED to burn every bridge and annihilate themselves in the inferno.
Links could be shortened and wouldn’t show it points to Lemmy.
Streisand effect. It would just increase the Lemmy advertisement.
And give money to Reddit? Hell no. Let’s see how much time they take to refill those ad slots by themselves.
Honestly? If it’s a way to siphon users away from Reddit and towards Lemmy, we all need to look at this sort of thing as an investment. Sure, it gives Reddit some cash up front… but it also siphons away their primary value proposition to advertisers: the user base.
Running subreddit-specific ads pushing lemmy/fediverse-hosted alternative for a couple months will do WONDERS in the long term.
And yes, it’s distasteful to give Steve money, but at the same time, giving him a comparatively small amount of cash now will ultimately end up taking a far, FAR more significant amount of money away from him later, in the form of audience count he can offer to his advertisers.
I don’t know, I really don’t believe ads can do that much wonders. I mean, apparently they do because otherwise we wouldn’t have the whole internet plastered with them, but I personally don’t think I’ve ever actually clicked on an ad in my entire life.
I logged in to reddit on my computer the day after rif went dark, and there were noticeably fewer posts on the front page. I think only 8 or so posts were above 10k upvotes. I wouldn’t be surprised if advertisers are pulling their ads in response.
I’ve been wondering what is like over there, I hope it’s apocalyptic
Honestly? As another user noted, it’s just boring. Not nearly as much is getting posted, and the comments are reminiscent of the days when we’d scramble to write “FIRST” in the comment section. It doesn’t feel conversational, if that makes sense. Like people are talking at each other, not with them. Also lots of “lol nothing changed, why was everyone making such a big deal?” But then the front page is mostly politics, shitposting, and recycled ask reddit questions. Not a monumental change, but definitely lower in quality, imo.
Weird subs are dominating r/all. Bunch of guys shaving their heads, delivery drivers complaining, “am I hot” subs. Weird and boring, the soul is gone.
I wvisited to see what it’s like, but I didn’t log in. Pretty boring place, mostly links from like, CNN, The Guardian, etc. Different subs trending, often with very boring political opinion stuff and sports.
Advertisers may not notice a difference, sad to say. The people wso stayed are exactly the people they want.
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I always thought a scary amount of undetected “guerilla marketing” was invading Reddit. And I’m convinced bots were ginning up conversation in the comment sections of those Reddit posts. And bots were downvoting me when I cried manipulation. And all those voices I always hear were very against me.
And here I thought I was crazy.
Same, some of it was pretty obvious. Also a ton of bots spreading propaganda.
Oh look here’s Friendly_Box3916 with a 2 month old account and a hot take on a political issue.
It was posted on lemmy that an account used chatcbt. It posted one of the “I can’t write that” things, along with things clearly written by AI.
Yeah reddit corporate was working hard to shut down and discredit the protests. I had a bare minimum of three comments deleted. No notice or explanation, I just happened to realize they were suddenly gone.
Your post made me think ads had already invaded. So, I hate you.
That’s not going to happen on Lemmy. It is technically possible but it’s very highly unlikely.
It’s an unfortunate reality but that’s probably going to have to happen. Instances can’t be expected to grow and maintain on pure goodwill. Some might get by with donations but it’s pretty known that Mastodon servers that couldn’t support themselves on donations vanished. It’s a huge ask for someone to pay money, time and effort to run a server for perpetuity. Usually you can only ask for 2 out of the 3 lol.
We already saw the original lemmynsfw get overwhelmed and just want to shut it down and hand it to someone else because they were having to put in so much work.
Hopefully because Lemmy is opt in in every sense, instance owners can do an ad setup that isn’t intrusive or over bearing.
Otherwise it’s just the big instances that are donation covered that stay and grow and Lemmy just becomes centralized around 5 servers or something.
I guess there’s a limit to how many ads the He Gets Us people will buy.
Having tried to use Reddit advertising for business (a national company), it really wasn’t very good. They had very poor targeting and algorithms.
I have a family member that runs their company digital advertising strategy. Said the same thing… and that it was hard to track conversions. They ended up pulling their ads.
Yup. That was our experience too! My boss and I were both Redditors and we thought it would be cool.
Narrator: It wasn’t.
I work in the digital advertising industry…reddit is pushing hard to grow it’s advertising business and are being helped by major players in the industry.
I’ve been tracking it for a while, because I know it was foreshadowing the decline of reddit as I knew it
This is embarrassing.
What a weak revenue stream. Imagine being a business, investing in a subreddit, only for the subreddit to be inundated by bots.
Reddit is going the way of Twitter and it’s astounding to watch.
Reddit post reading limit, when?
When the surviving 3rd party app users hit their limit for API calls you will absolutely get this message and probably an option to upgrade for $$$ too.
The Narhwal dev said this is how he’s approaching it. You get so many calls with a subscription and then have to top off with more if you hit it. So Prepaid mobile plans are coming to your favorite 3rd party apps for a website that’s free! People are desperate to give Reddit money even after all this.
That was scary. Thought Lemmy had ads already!!
I’m fine with ads. It costs money to run servers and build out the platform.
I’m not fine with the absolutely sleezy way spez handled the api changes and the ridiculous price. Utterly disrespectful to the mods, third party app devs, and Reddit users.
I’d rather we all pay a few bucks to not have lemmy get infested with ads.
Problem is that such isn’t a stable source of income.
Though I guess Wikipedia makes it work. So I dunno.
I’m ok with ads if they’re not targeted or unethical/unpleasant
I’m ok with ads if they’re not targeted or unethical/unpleasant
I saw that on my few last days on Reddit. I was wondering about their rates b/c I was wondering what it would cost to take out an ad calling spez a complete twat.
I can confirm: the audience is not there
If you go to the URL in the ad and click on “get started,” you will see something interesting:
An 800 number.
What’s so interesting about the 800 number?
If enough people call it, it costs them money, for starters.
Strong “Hello fellow kids” vibe
Watching all this happen in realtime is surreal…
Pretty wild, isn’t it? This is what it felt like when Digg v4 came out.
