I like how they try to sell the idea that tricking users is in fact a nice and innovative way to advertise
And that the "increased community engagement" isn't mainly comments of people complaining about being tricked into clicking on an ad.
If it's not already the law, it needs to be. It should be required that paid advertising be disclosed in all contexts.
Paid ads should not only need to be marked, but noticeably different in a timeline. Something obvious like a different post color.
Twitter fits ads in the middle of content and just puts a little tiny "Ad" in the upper corner (on mobile at least) and at a glance scrolling through you can't tell it's an ad, other than all of their ads now being for some shady mobile game that lies about how it looks or crypto in various forms. Those should be required to have a different color background than actual user posts, not just a size 8 font "Ad" in the corner of the post on a 3.5" screen.
In fact, let's make it impossible to implement well, let's take a page out of the NHTSA handbook and require the "Ad" text to be a specific real world size like they do with the car warning lights. Make them figure out what size it needs to be for various screen sizes and display DPI if they want to shove ads in the middle of content like it was user posts.
I think what YouTube does would be sufficient. There's a noticeably different video progress bar colour (yellow instead of red) and a large "Skip Ad in __" in the corner, plus the advertiser information on the side.
Reddit could do this by putting a "Paid advertisement" watermark in the corner or putting "Advert" where the upvote/downvote buttons are and colouring it some noticeable colour, like yellow, and I would be satisfied with that.
Pretty sure this is not legal in many countries. Adverts must be at the very least labeled as such, like Google does with a tiny almost unnoticeable label.
My first subreddit to get banned was one dedicated to pointing out obvious ad campaigns.
"How do you do, fellow redditors? Pray tell, of all the Dodge Ram variants, which one is your favorite, and what make it your choice as a discerning American patriot?"
And I bet it was banned before the infamous subreddit about underaged girls or even before bans of incel network
I honestly find it impressive how Reddit continues to find new ways to enshittify the platform
Who didn’t see that coming?
Obligatory fuck spez
I was curious about the "Philly cream cheese" campaign example they mentioned. I assume it's this post.
The top reply is trolling them, which is awesome. So much for increased engagement.
But even funnier is the next top reply, which seems sincere. But when you look at the user profile, almost all of u/sunshinedogger's comments in the last year are on sponsored posts. So even the positive engagement is manufactured?
Dang good catch on the second user, I wouldn't have noticed since I usually don't look at people's profiles.
It's kind of funny that reddit will become this chamber of advertisers making posts and fake users "engaging" while the real people all migrate to lemmy.
"Just like the megathread," an announcement reads, "free-form ads encourage multiple users to come together, get the information they need, and deep dive into the topic at hand." Reddit explained that the open-ended nature of these ads will give advertisers more freedom to explore creativity and, hopefully, to start conversations with users.
Enshittification to the extreme....
Reddit's new paid ads look exactly like user posts
So what's new?
I'll tell you what's new, pal. The McRib Megaburger, at McDonalds. It's nutritious and delicious at just $7.99 or $9.99 with fries and a drink of your choice as long as you don't want a milkshake or anything with actual sugar in it.
Wow. Everyone, ignore this guy, he's also an ad.
Instead, you should hop on over to your local Chevy Dealership and ask about test driving the all new 2025 Tahoe. Drive one home today for less than $2,000 down!
"28% more clicks" Yeah cuz ppl thought they were actual posts not ads lol
Yep, advertiser don't care how they got those clicks. They just want the numbers to go up so they feel like their "investment" is doing something. Tricking people into thinking it's user content, showing half naked girls for a dumb mobile gambling game, showing fake products... they don't care. Advertisers only have one thought: "Hurr Durr Numbers Go Brr"
This feels like something that would be illegal in the EU. I have no idea if it actually is.
It's illegal here in Germany. Ads need to be clearly recognizable as such.
You plant shit seeds, you get shit weeds.
If it's one thing I learned from the last BS they pulled during the protests last year, it's that their actions will have little impact on reddit user behavior. People will complain and express outrage, but the vast majority of users will just sit back and take it like good little AI trainers.
I for one will not be one of them. When they removed mods from communities that were in protest, that's enough for me to stay clear going forward. As much as I miss the content, it warms my soul every time I think about the ad revenue they're missing out on by my own personal decisions to not consume it.
One of the smarter ad analysts I knew likened ad spaces to ecosystems, where a bunch of companies come in with crap ads that aren't related to what people are actually in market for or are misleading, and act as polluters which turn people off from green pastures.
As an example, when mobile browsing was first getting off the ground CTR for mobile banner ads was 15%.
Reddit's metrics are about to go to shit.
Early results suggest the effort is working. According to numbers from Reddit, free-form ads got 28% more clicks than all other types of ads on the site and saw a jump in community engagement.
Yeah, because users get tricked into clicking and then immediately leave.
Recently went on Reddit and laughed hysterically at the amount of religious propaganda I saw in this format. Example:
-religious propaganda -gambling bullshit (including crypto/crypto adjacent bullshit) -military brainwashing/propaganda -alcohol ads
Just the worst fucking garbage bullshit.
Solution is simple, community should turn any suspiciously product focused thread into an advertisers nightmare of filth
Then the ads will just be the ones with the comment sections turned off
I remember it already being a thing 5 years ago with upvote/downvote buttons, karma and everything. I guess they just removed the abyssmally small grey text that said something like 'paid ad' in a corner?
So they seriously not remember what thousands of people left Digg and moved to their platform for???
Reddit had a fraction of the users Digg had at one point. Then Digg changed to a new UI no one liked and started putting adds that looked like posts into the main feed.
Clicking an image on Twitter and it actually being an external link was the last thing I ever did on that platform.
If the article is about how ads look, could they provide a useful picture?
So now they're just charging people for what they were already doing anyway.
Yep. Reddit puts very little effort into preventing vote manipulation and astroturfing because it all looks like user engagement but they almost certainly know how common it is.
This is just them monetizing the astroturfing as they try and wring every cent from people ahead of their IPO.
Just deleted my Reddit account. I haven't used it in over a year now anyway. I was waiting for something like this to make a statement.
That's weird; I've never seen any of those....
Oh yeah, that's because I haven't visited reddit in ~9 months.
I took ads out on Reddit years ago just to see if I could promote my music. It did less than zero and actively dragged me into a load of shit on various subs of interests I had. People there refused to talk to me, and told others not to.
Reddit is toxic. I avoid the site. Or better still maybe people should just spam it with irelevant shit
For anyone who is curious, Coca-Cola! Real cocaine in the lower 13 states and real cane sugar! Nothing blasts thirst like the delicious taste of a coca-cola fizzy drink!
Jesus reddit is run by such massive shitheads.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
