Yes, they’re taking from the Apple playbook so people who don’t know will think they actually do things that don’t involve leather or sheep at Reddit HQ. It’s IPO shenanigans.

It is…but they need to highlight it to investors now.

On “old reddit” the posts were highlighted so you could tell

I think with the new Facebook style feed it might not be.

It used to be, they were called sponsored links, but the comment sections got filled with angry comments about the ads and people would downvote the shit out of them, then they removed comments, and after the redesign ads didn’t have threads/engagement but now they do.

One of my friends tried advertising that way and it went poorly, and the ads weren’t even for a real product just a test balloon for the concept.

Pepe also got very mad when your ad replaced the moose in the sidebar.

Ironically, it was spez who introduced sponsored links with comments then, so what’s old is new again! I wonder if this time will be different… (Not really, I know how this will end)

I think the differentiation is in who’s placing the ad.

There were sponsored ads before where a company reached out to Reddit and bought advertisements and read it took the money for them and posted them. They were labeled as sponsored.

But since the beginning of Reddit, advertising firms have just posted nearly blatant ads without notifying anyone.

Sounds to me like reddit’s just removing he sponsored indicator from their sponsored ad sales.

I just go to freegamefindings

.

The difference is companies used to just run their own super cheap bots to spam fake “engagement” to the site. Now since the API is gone they have to pay Reddit directly for the privilege.

Yes, but reddit wasn’t getting paid for it

I don’t believe that number, the average reddit clicks one of every 4 ads shown?

No way.

Edit: I misread the post to be 28% CTR, you can ignore my comment.

I bet the “community engagement comments” are just people warning others that it is an ad

Advertising plateaued in terms of effectiveness a long time ago, so now it’s gotta be about fraud.

Oh, woe 🙀 It’s bad enough that we’re stuck with me (ba-dum tssh, self-deprecating humour there :D ) but now we’re gonna get even worse critters from Reddit because it’s gonna be ones who stayed with it during the previous exodus. Bleh!

Realistically, this likely won’t piss off their userbase nearly as much as the API fiasco last summer. A significant amount of users stayed in light of a number of subs going dark, so I have a feeling an influx in ads won’t really grind too many gears (or they will but will just bitch and nothing more).

Reddit is much more mainstream these days, and your average Melvin is just used to ads at this point.

“If your username was a username, how username would username username?”

They’re here.

All I know is, they pay me every time I say it. Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.

I was about to tag Margot Robbie, but of course it’s you

<img alt="Coming Soon on own on DVD and Video" src="https://i.postimg.cc/Pf8TSmFq/image.png">

Eh, no shame in self promotion lol

The subreddit /r/hailcorporate has existed for ages pointing this out. Shills have been around since forever and buying upvotes is trivial.

I doubt the movie companies would ever try patronizing to Lemmy. The select streaming services will be links from division by zero users to pirate streaming sites.

the problem is companies have weaponised complacency, there’s too many people that don’t care and that’s why they keep getting away with it. do it enough times and people will begin to think it’s inevitable and just put up with it.

Yep, I’m a former Digg user who left at the v4 launch because of this exact thing - they made ads indistinguishable from normal user posts.

People are saying this isn’t that big a deal, that Reddit won’t just die after this. The thing is, Digg still exists but it’s a shadow if its former self and nobody cares about it. It’s present, but its presence isn’t relevant. This change is likely to push more of the users who submit quality content to Reddit away from it, degrading the site community even more than last year.

Lesson not learned, apparently.

Digg was also much smaller than reddit is today, with an even smaller amount of content contributors. Once the contributors moved to reddit, Digg was all but dead and everyone followed suit.

I replied to you you elsewhere in this thread, but they never claimed to be getting 28% CTR. They only claimed that this format performs 28% better than alternatives.

If a different ad format was getting 1% CTR, then a 28% improvement is still only a total 1.28% CTR.

I think maybe a re-read is in order. They’re claiming the new format outperforms the (presumably) old format by 28%, not that the CTR is 28%.

Improved by 28%, not at 28%.

That would be some awful idiocracy type of future and we’re not there… yet.

I mean, generally I’m all for shitting on reddit, but there’s also a third option: Reader’s not understanding what 28% better than other ad types means.

What’s more likely, someone at reddit fucked up an analysis, or these ads are 14x better than Google or 31x better than FB?

What’s most likely is that you misread or misinterpreted what was stated. It says the new format outperforms other types of ads by 28%, not that they get 28% CTR.

Yeah I remember this shit happening already, even mimicking the writing style of a typical Reddit title.

Definitely. Except companies just did it themselves.

Ads get shown because they’re paid. Regular posts compete with all other posts, and user filters and subscriptions.

Eh, not too hard to fix. Make it so that paid ads will automatically get 10,000 up votes, that would do it.

Why are people still using Reddit ?

Artificial ranking. Without an API it’s much less reliable for botnets to astroturf; now they’re said “if you can’t beat em, join em” and closed the API and everything is for sale: Even the honesty of the site.

They probably will. The next evolution in ads is going to be serving them within other organic content, your browser can’t block them if it can’t tell the difference. Now you can just pay Reddit to astroturf for you.

Drop them, they’re literally QVC.

I don’t know about the people still on Reddit, but I personally do not eat my deodorant.

flavor of deodorant

Something isn’t right about that…

Subverting the will and attention autonomy of the user is a premium feature now.

I bet these ads will be very well moderated

Purchased upvotes and downvotes that make criticism invisible

They delete those

But maybe if you keep reading you’ll find out it was actually leading into telling you about the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.

Why stay there? Make the shift permanent!

I used nails in the past and I never went around telling people how I keep hitting my thumb with the hammer 😭. 😂. I just learned to not put my thumb there and problem solved! So just take your thumb and bring it here! No ads here! I can’t believe they finally did put ads there.

Don’t worry, the rich always get golden parachutes.

I mean we’re all here because we don’t like Reddit, it’s very pertinent to us

Yeah the ads were always just a reddit post places on top of the page… I guess this is for new reddit?