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.
One of the main reasons people come to Reddit is to be informed by discussions they’re interested in, creating an environment of active discovery ripe for brands to show up and add value. Contextual Keyword Targeting places advertisers at the center of this journey, and at the heart of active conversations taking place, giving them the option to select specific keywords to associate with their brand, or even align keywords with their creative ad copy for added relevance. With so much direct traffic to Reddit conversation threads originating from high intent organic searches or research sessions, Contextual Keyword Targeting unlocks value for advertisers during and after discussions unfold, since we know Reddit threads live on as valuable, searchable resources for our users.
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.
“Hey there Reddit fan!”
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.
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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.
Contextual Keyword Targeting unlocks value for advertisers during and after discussions unfold, since we know Reddit threads live on as valuable, searchable resources for our users.
The priority of advertisers experience, over user experience, should say it all
Looks like they don’t just put off their users, the also screw over their customers. Good job!
I threw up a little reading this. Gross.
I don’t think they’ll delete this. This is their future.
Bleh, you’re probably right.
Not regretting deleting my 10+ year old account one bit.
Same here, 10 years, over 600k comment karma, all power deleted.
Is there an easy way to delete or rewrite all my comments in bulk? I looked up something when ask this started, but the resources I found were too complicated
Power Delete Suite… but it only works from the comment lists on your profile on old.reddit, which are limited, so it may miss some.
There is a script that’s supposed to run through the comment IDs from the GDPR export, but I haven’t managed to run it successfully (yet).
I used Redact on android to delete all my reddit comments just before RIF shutdown
I thought we needed to rewrite them instead of deleting for some reason
If you delete comments, they still exist (but are hidden from the public) so reddit can still sell the content/conversation to 3rd parties, eg for training language models. If you edit the comments first, it makes the conversation nonsensical and reddits “product” is less valuable
Ok yes! How do I do this? I’m decently technically savvy, but the last time I looked this up, it was more than I was willing to mess with outside of paid hours
I used Nuke Reddit History (Google it)
I mean that was possible before but on a whole new level. It’s actually in Reddits interest to get rid of more sceptical mods who stick tightly to rules, because they’d delete an obvious ads thread.
I don’t want to hear from products. I want to talk about nothing with people.
Nothingness is pretty crazy if you think about it
It’s my favorite thing to think about.
As my uncle used to say, who just died the other day and who’s body is stuck in Mexico lol:
“There is no duality Baba!”
Sorry for your loss! He sounded like quite the interesting fellow.
I’m so glad I purged all my crap off that network. If you wrote about a brand, your content will be used to show that brand as an advertisement. Now your content will appear like an endorsement and Reddit will definitely laugh to the bank off your words.
Edit: I took a screenshot in case it gets deleted.
Well A) this is not going to get deleted cause B) it’s not that big relative to most advertising.
Previously you could target ads by subreddit or interest (which I’m assuming was subscribers of a subreddit when they were on an unrelated subreddit)
This allows for ads to be served based in keywords on keyword targeting. So a car company could serve ads on “transmission repair costs” or whatever.
The second changes looks like product ads, which is an ecom ad format that you see on Google (top row of products), insta, Pinterest, etc… basically it’s exactly what it sounds like. Products in an ad, you can swipe through them.
If you don’t like targeted ads you’re not going to like these, if you didn’t care before you probably won’t care now.
But isn’t this basically like the old days of TV “targeting.” Before we had all data the content was proxy for audience. Day time soap operas were called soap operas because the content was the perfect proxy to reach stay at home wives and sell cleaning products to them. Similar, sports or certain types of comedy shows, etc skew towards a certain audience. So you use the content as proxy for the audience to run your ads against. This contextual targeting seems like that, but a bit more algorithmic in how it detects what the relevant content is based on key words in the text.
Feel like the previous subreddit targeting was basically like tv (or at least buying spots on a channel) and the new way is like Google search or (allegedly old) gmail ad targeting
Yeah. That’s probably a bit more accurate. But I think the main difference is context or contextual targeting can be done without knowing any data about the user, browsing history, etc. I think that has to be the compromise for ad targeting if we want to push for more user privacy and less tracking.
They’re already targeting customers for years the way you’re saying, we all know what they’re saying here.
As part of our Product Ads beta testing, the brand saw substantial performance relative to internal metrics for Return on Ad Spend.
Yeah this is literally a general roll out announcement. It wasn’t available to everyone before. Generally most ad platforms test features with enterprise level clients before letting everyone have access.
I wonder if the “400,000 comments per day” and “2 questions per second” figures are still true (if they ever were).
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I don’t see the alarm. Key word targeting is used in other digital print forms. Doing ad targeting based on the content of the page is not a bad way to balance the need to increase value of the ad space you sell, while also avoiding the need to target a user specifically based on tracking. It’s no secret reddit makes money selling ads.
They’re purchasing the power to get into the conversation and don’t you feel used? Why are you here if you didn’t mind what Reddit did?
I’m here because they killed third party apps and api’s. But the thing is Reddit philosophically has been a for profit company. They make money on ads. In terms of the possible ways to advertise, this isn’t crazy invasive.
Lemmy and the fediverse are not inherently a for profit. So yes, the advertising doesn’t really apply as much.
I just expect the for profit services I use to behave like for profits. And the not for profit services I use to behave like not for profits.
I guess you don’t mind talking to bots and advertising scripts then, I find that strange but you do you.
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