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What's really happening here is that advertisers can use the Reddit Ads Manager to create normal user posts and then pay to make them appear prominently on the site and in the app as promoted posts, aka adverts.
Look it's not exactly revolutionary or new, google search has been littered with promoted ad results for years. But I still hate it. Fuck off, reddit. No respect intended. Icky. So glad I stopped using it.
I remember gaming and computer magazines from the 90s, sometimes the full page ads looked like a normal article or something that could have been part of the magazine content. So its really not new. This really upset me and if I remember such type of ads were banned in Germany (but can misremember). I hate ads that are not marked as such or can be sponsored to appear in front of everything else. It's basically pay to win.
Fuck Reddit.
There's never been a day where I regretted deleting my Reddit account and removing that site from my life. It's only gotten worse since I left.
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Generally speaking, having unmarked adds would be considered illegal in Dutch law, so there's a fair chance the EU won't let this fly either.
Here's the truly evil part:
All free-form adverts are supposed to show some kind of sponsored label, though that doesn't appear to be the case on the three posts included in this story. While Leica's shows it, neither Philadelphia post includes a tag indicating it's sponsored content. We understand that's because the Philadelphia posts are no longer boosted by ad spending, so are back to just being normal user posts.
Ad stays up in perpetuity, tag has a shelf life, after which it looks like a normal post. Can you sponsor a post for an hour like it's a seedy motel room?
Also: As these are regular posts with brief decoration, I'd assume uBO might have trouble filtering them out.
Sounds like a great way for Reddit to force anyone trying to train an AI to pay for an ad-free dataset: buy the clean one, or scrape an ad ridden one. You wouldn't want risking your corporate AI to spew propaganda about your competitors, would you?
Enshittification intensifies.
Better yet, ads coming soon to web searches filtered with site:reddit.com ...
And they can still report that as ad delivery when that post is requested, even when the tag is no longer paid for
That user name is a true commitment to seasoning!
I don't know what to do to get good search results anymore if this happens. Using site:reddit.com has been the only way recently to find opinions from actual people regarding some product I'm considering. Maybe I'll just stop buying things and go live in a cave. Can't trust any information online anymore.
I am pretty much done with reddit and Google. My use of those two platforms have dropped to about 5% of my total online time.
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For me reddit is now for searching "xxxxx solution reddit"
I try not to even bother with this anymore, half the time the comments are deleted.
Even then the snippets you can find in the replies are more usefull than most forums ever were.
I don't use Google, maybe 3 times a year to see if the search results are better. I don't use YouTube too much directly, instead using alternatives to watch YouTube content, like FreeTube. However I regret having an old and important Googlemail account...
Leaving Reddit was a bit easier, but I miss some of the communities, it was rich and single account to handle everything. Since the day I snapped my fingers and logged off, I stayed logged off.
Reddit user look ads will be the enshitification of reddit like how google search returns junk links making it unusable.
I think we are well beyond the enshitificatiin of Reddit.
It hasn't even begun! Post IPO there'll be a big push for profitability which will be when it begins.
This a really long way of saying “we deceive people.”
It's the age old model of tech companies ... which basically follows the old model of companies before the modern tech and digital age .... once you heavily monetize any product or service, the product or service eventually becomes secondary to the main goal of making as much money as possible.
Companies haven't changed no matter how technological and modern they are ..... we still want to do the OOGA BOOGA thing of ... "take thing, make money, who cares what thing does"