The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators — who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful…
At the end of the day, Reddit is just a message board. The absolute hubris to think that one could seriously go public with a message board website… It’s baffling.
Honestly, Reddit missed the ship to IPO. They should have done it a decade ago if at all.
Without mods, Reddit will become overrun with bots, rendering the precious data Reddit so desparately tries to monetize practically useless.
I mod a small/mid size sub that is still blacked out. Should I leave it private or just let it get overrun with spam?
Shift the community to lemmy and write a pinned post on reddit about the change.
Request members to delete their reddit post.
That would have been a lot easier before the API change. Not sure if that’s an easy task anymore (pegging old content)
You don’t owe reddit anything.
Sell promoted posts directly, admins have made it abundantly clear they’re in it for money over community, get your cheddar too.
Oh, that’s harsh but fair
I’m a mod over on r/NoahGetTheBoat and I haven’t even opened reddit more than a couple times since Apollo died.
WE made the content. The community. No doubt the majority of level-headed folk would have accepted ad requirements in 3rd party apps. Hosting isn’t free, something needs to be monetized.
But that’s not what it’s about. It’s about locking down content from the new wave of AI models and charging for it. Charging for content we created freely to be shared.
Ads? No, I would not accept ads. What I would have accepted was a subscription payment. Hell, I went so far as to purchase Apollo lifetime ultimate.
I am more than willing to support things I use. I am not willing to deal with ads though. Especially when they sneak in like they are posts, and take up entire scroll widths.
I don’t get how people put up with that either. My wife said that we were being over dramatic about the 3rd Party Apps protests, but will agree that the ads are annoying. Hopefully she’ll convert over here before to long and get a taste for how a message board should be.
Stockholmed into thinking ads are acceptable. They’re not. No social contract says that you have to put up with ads, they’re simply unregulated in the USA and people have mostly given up.
Reddit ads are way too intrusive and irrelevant.
I am glad that this happened because Lemmy is very interesting platform.
I’ve barely been back to Reddit recently and with Apollo gone, I’ll only ever duck my head in when I really have to. I find it a lot easier to leave Reddit behind than Facebook. On FB I’m connected to real world relatives and friends who I just would lose contact with otherwise. On Reddit I converse with strangers and that’s easy to replace. Lemmy has already done it. Is there anything unique about the hobby forums on Reddit? No. They can be reassembled or restarted elsewhere. In some ways it’s probably good to dump the old structures and shake things up. Some subs were better managed and some really just coasted on their name.
For June 20 and 21, the most recent days for which Similarweb has estimates, the ads site got in the range of 7,500 to 9,000 visits, Carr explained, meaning that ad-buying traffic has continued to drop.
I’m glad Reddit is feeling something from this, however, at the same time. I kinda don’t care. It’s a shame it went the way that it did. But spez can’t take back his terrible attitude and decision making on what happened. Most people were sympathetic and wanting Reddit to be profitable and rooting for Reddit. However, spez just decided to come out swinging from nowhere hitting his allies in the face.
The only thing reddit can do is improve the first party app and mod tools. The rest is lost.
That being said I doubt the protests are reddits biggest priority. Even if reddit ipo’s perfectly and gets a injection of capitol (which might itself be difficult since investors don’t seem to care about userbase growth anymore) they are going to need to find ways to increase profits each year (like every other publicly traded tech company).
Advertising revenue is also limited given trend to cut “unnecessary expenses”.
Well we’re here basically figuring it out. Time to show them they aren’t needed anymore.
reddit is just a frame. it always was and will always be, despite the efforts of a few dumb cunts.
the content is the people. that’s the secret sauce. just provide people with a framework, and they’ll fill the empty space. try to monetize that, and you’re just a dick.
i have faith in defederisation. my autocorrect says that isn’t a word. let’s make it a word.
The thing is, they COULD’VE monetized it and still kept it alive. What they’re doing instead is killing the golden goose for a quick cash-out.
Edit: I hate your username. A lot of trauma associated with that failed tongue-twister.
Cant see reactions Fixed it!
However, Similarweb told Gizmodo traffic to the ads.reddit.com portal, where advertisers can buy ads and measure their impact, has dipped. Before the first blackout began, the ads site averaged about 14,900 visits per day. Beginning on June 13, though, the ads site averaged about 11,800 visits per day, a 20% decrease.
For June 20 and 21, the most recent days for which Similarweb has estimates, the ads site got in the range of 7,500 to 9,000 visits, Carr explained, meaning that ad-buying traffic has continued to drop.
This is the only metric that matters to Reddit, so it’s nice to see!
So they really are following Twitter’s example. Twitter’s lost 59% of ad revenue since Elon took over, now Reddit ad revenue is plummetting. It’s stunning how stupid companies can be.
Just noticed today that Twitter requires one to log-in to read posts. It’s like these two platforms are competing on which one can destroy their reputation first.
Imagine that once upon a time (5-15 years ago), I actually had addblocker disabled on reddit, because I considered it worth supporting. lol
Proof that people will gladly support a good product.
Same curve with Netflix. Pirating went down when they started. They themselves, but all the other Streamers as well have gone so greedy that the good product is no longer supported. Reputation ruined, war with customers ensues.
These guys aren’t happy with some support. They want all the support i.e. money. Feels like no tech corporation thinks about its products long term anymore. Just the most readily available cash grabs possible, even if it means possibly losing future revenue.
Well, as other people have said, it looks like they were preparing to sell Reddit, or take it public, or whatever, and they wanted to make it look as profitable and purchaseable as possible.
The end result is the same, but the reasoning is a bit different.
Anyhow, if that’s true, I dare say they’ve achieved the opposite result now.
So, shall we start calling this ‘the Reddit Effect?’ We haven’t had anything new to supplant the Streisand Effect for awhile, I feel like something like this is overdue
Might be the digg effect ;)
The beatings aren’t improving morale, you say? I guess we just need to increase the beatings then.
It is basically “if you refuse to work for free, then we won’t let you work for free. Ha, that’ll teach them”
This seems intentional at this point…
I literally made a reddit account a few days before the hullabaloo started, specifically to buy advertising on reddit.
- The ad interface is terrible. Most of my experience is with Google Ads, but in general, platforms try to be super-nice to their advertisers and give them a good experience. Not reddit. The same overall shittiness the infests the rest of the site is also in their ad portal.
- Most of the clicks were fairly poor quality (high bounce rate).
- Whatever I tried to configure to limit geographic reach to US+Canada either wasn’t set up right or was just ignored. I got plenty of clicks from all over world.
I stopped advertising on blackout day for moral reasons regardless, but it also seemed like it just overall wasn’t worth it in general. And, my observation of the ads I see as a user has been that they aren’t at all tuned to what I would be likely to want, or constructed so I’d be likely to click on them. Some platforms I have to consciously avoid clicking on ads or scroll past them deliberately when my natural tendency is to click on them. On reddit it’s just weird nonsense that I want to scroll past anyway.
In short, my brief experience with reddit ads made me conclude that it’s probably a waste of money anyway.
I would assume that almost all clicks are from people on the mobile app accidentally tapping ads while they try to scroll past them, because they’re in the main feed. So click quality being garbage doesn’t surprise me.
This was my experience. Almost every ad I clicked on was a mistake; either I thought it was a real post and wasn’t paying close attention, only to navigate away in disgust, or I clicked on it purely by accident. I had like 50k+ karma (to give you some idea of much I used reddit) and might have honestly clicked an ad once.
Reddit ad targeting is a joke and I dont even understand how. How can they not tell what my interests are when I’ve literally subbed to them? It’s the easiest targeting set up in the world and they still can’t make it work.
(1) Because the more irrelevant ads they show, the more accidental clicks they can collect, and the more ad revenue. There will be individual clients (e.g. Adobe) who probably have some measurable results, but my guess is that most of their advertisers show pretty good metrics in terms of “cost per click” etc, and aren’t paying close enough attention to realize that their real return on ad spend is extremely low.
(2) Reddit’s just as incapable / uncaring about writing good ad targeting as they are about constructing the rest of the site.
Pick one. Aaron Schwartz would be furious at the current state of reddit.
I came from days of dialup and gone through yahoo groups, Myspace, tons of geocity sites, ask jeevs, LiveJournal, and so on. Sites will only be an attraction tell something comes that offers more. With federation and decentralized systems coming up, the hold on people and corporations trying to use you as a commodity will only tarnish the shine that it once was. When companies hold a noose around your neck thinking there isn’t another option, telling you to go ahaid and jump, thinking no one will and when something comes by that makes the jump just a step down and you can take off the noose, there is nothing that they can hold onto anymore. They cannot say you have nowhere else to go. With the choice around in a federated system, you cannot be held hostage by a single entity. When people have the freedom of choice, the people win.
I’ve got a similar history and agree. Platforms may seem to big to fail, but they really aren’t. Sometimes growth is slow, but once a platform hits a critical mass it’ll explode. I’m new to Lemmy, but Reddit has done the platform a favor, it’s got some great ideas. And with wefwef it feels great to use already. Reddit just payed forward the favor digg did for them ;)
