Reddit has ads?
[insert meme template png here]
Ever since advertising became extremely intrusive, it’s been game over for them. I’d rather put effort into hiding the ads (Adblocker), switching browser if necessary (Chrome v3 bs) and switching platforms (Lemmy) then seeing them again.
Ads have become bad enough I have decided to be actively malicious towards them with AdNauseam, which clicks them all in the background for me. Advertisers pay as if someone clicked on the advert. Every. Single. Advert.
The only one that loses out is the advertiser. If anything the website profits from it.
Hmm, how would that work?
I assume if an ad is just trying to track what websites you visit often, this would not work 100% of the time, as they would still get your IP if a request went towards the advertiser, or am I misunderstanding how it works.
ads have lots and lots of additional tracking both through JavaScript and through redirect urls (especially if JavaScript is disabled), generally the advertiser (e.g. Starbucks) does not actually host their own ads and instead the ad platform (e.g. Google Ads) tells Starbucks that people have seen the ad on the publisher’s website (e.g. Washington Post) and charges them for it, then gives a cut to the publisher
all the parties involved - the advertiser, the platform, and the publisher - all have a de facto hostile relationship towards each other so they all want to track the interactions and views themselves, and messing with the ad interactions is a great way to do it. the publisher wants to represent that they have lots of highly engaged viewers so that they can change more for their content; the advertiser doesn’t want to pay for bot interactions because it doesn’t help their brand. the platform wants to make money and not get sued
Idc about ads as much as their duplicitous censoring, shadow banning and shadow deleting posts. You need to recheck your posts in a private tab periodically to see which ones have been censored to the outside world, as they try to dupe the users to believe its still up on their end. Scumbags. Its not a new thing either, but considering how heavy handed they’ve been, I suspect spez will be all too happy to devolve the platform further under this new ‘climate’ we’re all in. Never trust Reddit. I have faith in Lemmy to succeed it. Decentralized platforms are the only way forward for unimpeded free speech.
steal your food, then toss you table scraps
This would have only had a chance of working prior to adblockers becoming so rampant. They’re over a decade too late and now advertisers are just viewed as “the enemy”
I think lack of goodwill plays into this, too. A lot of smaller sites can get away with stuff like “OK guys, the servers aren’t free, so we need to run ads.” and then have people super thrilled with them if there’s an option to limit or disable ads for donors.
On reddit, I think the attitude would basically be “get fucked, spez!”
Yeah, but old browser extension has let me block all advertisers (and all of them are equally my most-hated) forever, so reddit is cordially invited to get fucked. And they can construe that as ‘encouraging violence’ all they like.
What a stupid idea. I want to block advertisers forever, not just for a year lol. And I can actually do that by installing an ad blocker.
… so they can learn what ads you’re willing to tolerate.
I am unironically starting to like twitter more than reddit
Abd I fucking hate twitter
So you’re starting to hate reddit more than X. Understandable. I think the social media companies are lost, they had their time.
twitter*
Twitter is fucking dead, X festers in its place.
Xitter* (pronounced shitter)
I love that my first post is to say that I don’t give a solitary airborne fuck about Reddit and their ads because I’m here instead. I hope they enjoy the enshittification all the way down their throats.
Welcome to a non-centralized and controlled website!
Too little, too late. I’m on Lemmy now :)
my ublock lets me block all the advertisers for more than a year on reddit
The best reddit control to block ads is too not use Reddit lol. The second best is ublock origin. I’ve been using method two since like 2013 and have zero issues or regrets.
I use rdx for the few subs I like following updates on
And Reddit ReVanced!
I use infinity+ revanced there never liked reddits own app.
Finally give the second most hated advertisers a chance for once!
The nerds lost the internet. It’s a fucking Kmart now.
The nerds lost the internet.
I mean, there wasn’t a shift in control or anything. This is just part of the business plan.
Reddit, like many B2C online services, intentionally operated at a loss for years in order to grow.
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Get capital.
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Spend capital providing a service that is as appealing as possible, even if you have to lose money to do it. This builds your userbase. This is especially important with services that experience network effect, like social media, since the value of the network rises with the square of the number of users. This is the “growth phase” of the company.
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At some point, either capital becomes unavailable, too expensive (e.g. in the interest rate hikes after COVID-19), or you saturate available markets. At that point, you shift into the “monetization phrase” – you have to generate a return using that userbase you built. Could be ads, charging for the service or some premium features, harvesting data, whatever. Because interest rates shot up after COVID-19, a lot of Internet service companies were forced to rapidly transition into their monetization phase at the same time. But point is, your concern isn’t growing the service as much as it is making a return then, and it’s virtually certain that in some way, the service will become less-desirable, since the service is shifting to having a priority on making a return above being desirable to draw new users. That transition from growth to monetization phase is what Cory Doctrow called “enshittification”, though some people around here kind of misuse the term to refer to any change that they don’t like.
Investors were not going to simply shovel money into Reddit forever with no return — they always did so expecting some kind of return, even if it took a long time to build to that return. I hoped that that changes when they moved into a monetization phase were changes that I could live with. In the end, they weren’t — I wasn’t willing to give up third party clients, if there was an alternative. But it’s possible that they could have come up with some sort of monetization that I was okay with.
If you don’t mean the transition from growth to monetization at Reddit, but the creation of Reddit at all…
The main predecessor to Reddit was, I suppose, Usenet. That was a federated system, and while it wasn’t grown with that kind of business model, it wasn’t free — but typically it was a service that was bundled into the bill when one got service from an ISP, along with email and sometimes a small amount of webhosting. Over time, ISPs that provided bundled Usenet service stopped providing it (since it increased their subscription fees and made their actual Internet service uncompetitive for people who didn’t use Usenet service), and because so many people used it to pirate large binaries, the costs of running a full-feed Usenet server increased. Users today that use Usenet typically pay a subscription to some commercial service. You can still get Usenet service now, if that’s what you want – but you’ll pay for it a la carte rather than having it bundled, and the last time I was trying to use it for actual discussion, it had real problems with spam.
Monitization doesn’t have to be so painful. You make it sound like it’s a very natural evolution. There’s some serious greed involved here. The shift from growth / investment doesn’t have to progress into such a squeeze for users. Reddit isn’t aiming to operate on margins. If the nerds were in charge the goal would be to cover development, costs, and upkeep while paying hard working people fair salaries. The goal is pure profit maximization now. The people behind these changes aren’t hiding much. Spez isn’t a well meaning genius trying to keep his coffee cup full while he codes. He’s a corporate shill piece of shit. I don’t buy these apologetics.
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I used my own content controls to block reddit for a year. Well, a bit longer so far.
Lemmy let’s me not think about advertisers.
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