Ahead of IPO, Reddit blends advertising into user posts
theregister.com
theregister.com
twitter.com##div[data-testid="cellInnerDiv"]:has(span:has-text(/^Ad$/))Almost everyone - I wonder if they move the "Ad" disclaimer to the left side when the UI is set to something like Arabic or Hebrew.
Reddit and twitter aren't search engines, but they're dealing with related issues: the incentive to deceive visitors of their sites in order juice ad effectiveness and boost profits.
[1] https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-goog...
In your feed, it is indistinguishable.
Because I have Mr Beast blocked, I kept on getting posts from BANG! Showbiz, because the video selection available to Twitter isn't particularly high quality.
[0]: An example: http://web.archive.org/web/20240302013005/https://twitter.co...
No I don't regularly smoke or otherwise imbibe weed and I definitely don't do stuff that would link me with a need for sex toys lol. And judging by the replies I see to those tweets it's happening to other users too.
I'm still only seeing this on some ads; not sure if it's a gradual rollout or A/B testing. Either way, I'm sure it won't be too long before it's all ads being served like this :(
And yes, this includes mobile.
Also another notable indicator of the coupled relationship between ad and video, being demonetized hurts the videos exposure.
This is an interesting perspective I hadn't thought of. I wonder if would be possible to use custom CSS to move that label to the left instead of the right? It wouldn't be a replacement for blocking ads outright, but it also feels like it might be something that would be harder for them to outright prevent.
With something like reddit when it starts taking place where it never was before, you're supposed to be convinced you are getting the same thing you have been getting all along, even though it's not always the case any more.
Reminds me a bit of how it was before Whole Foods went public. They were a local Texas healthy market with upscale tendencies and some of the products were outstandingly well-sourced and completely world-class. Especially the minority of imported goods, or most of them wouldn't have even been there. One day some of those fancy European lines began to be replaced systematically with lesser alternatives and newly emerging house brands. They already had a few stores by then, not just the first two in Houston and Austin. The replacement products were not shabby, they were above average but nowhere near world-class most of the time, and this action was scattered throughout the store.
Before too long I found out they were going to go public, that was an IPO I did make decent money on. Co-incidentally that was one I had to inform brokers about, not the other way around.
OTOH, my Whole Foods shopping has gradually dwindled since before the 21st century, to almost nothing by now, an average of zero trips per month.
The more subtle the deception, sometimes the more annoying it can be.
The minority group of original users only really impact things when the market is small.
Scale sucks in that way.
Granted, they were a lot less loud about the change than Digg, but they didn't suffer anything near the same amount of hate.
It took me a while to even understand why things changed. The appearance of shallower posts, like memes was severely boosted, while textual posts lost a lot of emphasis, to the point they became harder to interact with. The sorting of posts was changed so they would cycle faster, and people stopped having enough time to interact on the comments section. Deep threads got completely hidden...
There was no change large enough to make people pay attention. But the end result was the same.
I guess. Everything on the internet has changed in those 15 years though. It doesn't seem fair to attribute most of that to Reddit the product. There are still plenty of deep threads on Reddit if you know where to look.
So when everything becomes crap, it become acceptable? I guess Digg was simply ahead of its time before it can capture the market that would resonate with the low quality imageboard style of threads.
> There are still plenty of deep threads on Reddit if you know where to look.
The last time I read a chain deeper than maybe, 6 comments that I didn't regret was years ago.
But in all fairness, most of those deep deep threads are just two people trying to get the last word in. So it wasn't a high percentage even before the shift.
Yeah, it's worth pointing out that the website you're on has functionality that actively discourages deep threads for that reason.
Well, it was one factor. Digg had a lot of problems. The big rewrite went disastrously. It was one giant site with no real focus and one big comments section: it devolved into unmoderatable chaos. Sponsored posts probably weren't the straw that broke the camel's back.
It's funny in a way. We talk about how risk averse big companies are compared to smaller, more nimble startups. Yet those same big companies don't seem to be risk averse to making aggressive squeezing changes like these.
Use Lemmy which has a good number of FOSS clients already. If you miss the content from specific subreddits, there are instances that mirror the content. If you still really want to interact with people on Reddit, I am working on a bridge.
There are some subreddits I’d like to browse still but I definitely won’t be joining back into that dumpster fire.
I’ve been using Lemmy but it’s honestly aggravating to use in many ways.
The idea is that Lemmy instance admins can use this service alongside their Lemmy server to provide two things:
- "Login with Reddit", to make it easier for people to create an account on the Lemmy server. - A reddit-to-lemmy community map.
The idea is that when someone logs with Reddit OAuth, we can get their list of subreddits, and then auto-subscribe the user to the corresponding Lemmy communities, solving the onboarding issue and the content discovery in one go.
There is also a website, https://fediverser.network, where I'm crowdsourcing the data to make the mapping between subreddits to lemmy communities.
It’s a bummer too - I think my weekly screen time report had me using Apollo on average like 6 hours a day, I was very active in a couple small and fun communities, and the places with news relevant to me were all subbed and easily surfaced. Losing my primary tool was all it took to take me from a pretty engaged and active user to someone who stops by because a search result took me there.
The sad reality is a lot of reddit operated off the minority of power users. And those power users are either still on Reddit, went somewhere else entirely (maybe Discord), or are "retired". The network effect will take a while to overcome, if it's overcome at all.
So what I re-pose to you isn’t “Why isn’t Reddit selling just data or just ads” it’s “Why would their executives ever consider leaving money on the table?”
The world's economy has suffered a global, organized, and incredibly large dumping attack against a huge set of industries and social organizations.
The good news is that it seems to have stopped.
As far as consumers being OK with things. That is another major cause of our problems, selectable-outrage which I think is from a corrupt media. And a corrupt media… also run by MBAs trying to extract every possible resource, run as lean as possible with resources a media org has like reputation and goodwill, eliminating the costly things like difficult research-journalism in favor of Clickbait BS.
I think there’s about seven things wrong with our time. MBA-ification is only one.
The next two would be a corrupt media and a complexity-crisis that no one sees coming.
to be blunt, consumers are lazy and that is how the network effect goes from "household name" to "too big to fail". Like a frog boiling, by the time the user eventually leaves 10 more are jumping in.
Why would they leave money on the table after the bulk of their users proved to be docile in the face of so much recent enshittification?
What’s are the chances just before/after IPO, old.reddit.com shuts down?
I hope someone makes a forum on top of ATProto. Their tech stack is far more interesting to me compared to ActivityPub, but i just can't stomach the Twitter-style UI of Bluesky to switch to that from Reddit.
Since the API kerfluffle reddit's usefulness has dropped drastically.
Making ads look like user posts definitely kills the platform for me. They killed my platform and I killed my account.
Muxing ads. Who'd have thunk it?
But, I bet in the time since the API kerfuffle, they’ve gained users and engagement.
But I’m just a guy making noise. Maybe it’ll rocket to the moon and you can fire life.
The founders and bigwigs have cashed out. Ohanian made his fortune and exited years ago, the CEO just made $193m in compensation. Can't be much milk left in the cow.
Just because we cheer for something to fail like twitter doesn't mean it happens overnight. Even though it should and would be hilarious.
I’m sure that there’s a way to estimate the number of shares vested by employees and come up with an estimate sell-off volume for day 0-1
Back when I worked at a big public company where we had options and employee blackout dates, there would almost always be a dip in the stock price when the blackout was lifted
The big problem is I'm not sure that Reddit, the company, really understands it's business. Though I was expecting the protests of the last year to have gone much further than they did, I think Reddit's response could have been much better, and their response demonstrates their lack of a solid business plan. In particular, the importance of redditors and moderators to their business isn't reflected in their plans (AFAICT).
I think that may end up backfiring.
I feel like their IPO would be better priced closer to a 4.5B valuation rather than the 6.5B they seem to be targeting. There is some potential upside to it, as there might be some justification for a market cap of 10B. But there's a big wildcard in there: the Directed Share Program to redditors have no "cooling off" period, so there's likely going to be some volatility due to "get in, get out". But, the DSP shares have "one vote per share", which might contribute towards people holding them. But that's 8% of offered shares, and offered shares are around 20% of total valuation, so that may be a small enough percentage of shares with high volatility that it won't have a big impact.
The WallStreetBets crowd might have an impact, that will be fun to watch from afar. I'm not expecting anything there, but who knows.
I'm kind of expecting some backlash of the community to the extraction of value by Reddit the company, but I haven't really heard any noises along those lines. I could see their value dropping significantly over the next year because of this. There's a lot of fatigue over the techno-elite extracting value off "the little people's backs". And Lemmy is really well positioned for facilitating a mass exit from Reddit.
The recent news of advertisers making posts that look like regular user posts is, IMHO, leaning in a bad direction. In my mind, that is reminding me of one of the primary things I've seen in Facebook that has dropped my engagement to near-zero levels.
But, there are a lot of other tech companies watching Reddit and hoping for a good IPO leading the way for other similar IPOs. Maybe that will lead interest.
Over all, I'm expecting short term excitement, but longer term rough times for Reddit the company.
But, my investment plans have, in too many situations, been exactly the opposite of the market; I've bought just before the market drops and sold right before it goes up...
They’re selling influence. Mostly to kids. To the terminally online. The new Politically Religious.
The standard MO to ban all decent isn’t because the admins/mods actually disagree, it’s that it makes the echo chamber more uniform. They’re culling wrong think to sell things, sure, but more so ideas.
When you consider that “reputation” is a product that politicians, celebrities and companies can just purchase, I think it makes a lot of sense what Reddit can sell.
However, my FIL gave me some great advice 5-6 years ago: Take a little bit, and put it into things you like, to keep investing "fun". In my case I'm doing around 2% in "fun stocks". Personally, it's pretty hard to argue with since my first "fun stock" that I did that with was TSLA, and I got a 20x return on that. My new "fun" set have been other EV and energy stocks, largely, and have generally done quite poorly, a 2-3 of them are down 95+%, but that's over 2 years and my window was more like 5, so time will tell. A handful are up 30-50%. So, some of it depends on your definition of "fun". :-D
Which ever comes first.
Once the mods start getting missives about modding policy from whatever new board takes over post IPO, then things will start to disintegrate.
It’s a giant phpbb forum going public lol, yeah … I get the short position totally.
Both Reddit and Twitter are experiencing a capitalist assault because both threaten capitalist power. Twitter was neutralized when it was sold. Reddit is now being neutralized.
Shareholder influence will prevent Reddit from being a platform that can be used to speak truth to those strong enough to harm it.
This IPO is Reddit's graduation ceremony from a platform for speaking truth to power, to a platform for the exercise of power.
Don't know if that company is still around.
Why not both? Mirrors are another way of looking at backups
I know that we have, on many occasions, run ads on Reddit highlighting exactly that use-case.
I have adblockers and custom rules to block Twitter ads, YouTube comments, Reddit ads.
I can’t do any of these on mobile apps. It’s an entirely closed platform.
Imagine if the web was as closed as iOS and Android where apps dictate the experience you can have.
This makes me sad. We confused “bicycle for the mind” and built a “cage for the mind”
It reminds me of a recent twist to the EV space in North America where Ford, and then all other players, decided to switch their EVs to Tesla's NACS connector.
This interview recently is really grounding. Basically Ford's CEO went on a road trip and actually tried the EV road tripping experience with a non-Tesla (non-Tesla charging stations that is) and saw how dogshit it was. That started conversations to actually try and improve the situation for customers (thus the change to NACS).
Timestamp link to the interview: https://youtu.be/7vE0KXHZXCY?t=244
I'll just point out that dog food is food. It may not be healthy for a human in large amounts, but it can't be worse than eating fast food for a week or so.
I know an unreasonably large amount of people that claimed to try it. Most when they were children. I doubt that my bubble is unusual on this.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/tennis/comments/29k5i7/can_someone_...
FWIW, I’ve been a heavy Reddit user for over a decade, across web and various mobile clients. I’ve also been a full time iOS engineer since 2010, and their app would be a huge effort to recreate. It’s amateurish to suggest that any single dev could build it in a year, let alone a weekend. I’m NOT defending their business practices either. But their mobile app is fine.
And I don’t have any of those issues with the official client, other than the ad one. The performance is great, it’s very reliable, I have most notifications disabled except for a couple things I care about (and the notification settings are pretty fine-grained).
Maybe the customization stuff could be more extensive? But I don’t want 1000 settings for every tiny little thing. Regardless, it hardly seems like a complaint that people would get so worked up over.
Maybe the official client used to be much worse and I don’t remember, but increasingly I think people are just pissed about Reddit cutting off the alternative clients and hate being forced to change, so they moan and groan as if the official client is the worst app they’ve ever used. When really, it’s fine.
I filter them with uBlock.
Tells me that VCs are afraid of actual criticism, and 'no comment ad-posts' are their version of a safe space.... for critiques.
Right, that's the basis of my uBlock rule. :)
news.ycombinator.com##:xpath(//td[contains(@class,"subtext")]):not(:has-text(/\b(comment|comments|discuss)\b/i)):xpath(.. | ../following-sibling::tr[1] | ../preceding-sibling::tr[1]):style(display: none)There’s an element of luck, but also the names are part of the culture from the time they’re created. Multiple people often come up with very similar names for different things just because of what’s going in the world around them.
(Also the fact that YC runs HN isn't exactly hidden - the first hint is right there in the URL)
I think it would be something completely different if YC suddenly showed promoted posts from unrelated "partners" or just opened this up as an advertising opportunity to the general public.
All of the writing and discussion that exists on HN, which isn't a YC ad, is a "halo" to attract and retain readers to this forum (and see the YC logos and YC ads). That's their primary incentive: attract users, attract a specific culture of users. It's an incentive aligned with quality and pleasantness for us. The daily forum experience isn't the revenue source; to monetize that, YC would risk losing more (on their YC-halo boosting side) than they could expect to gain (from McDonald's ads, or whatever).
This is the diametric opposite of how most social media platforms think about users, and their business models around them. The Reddit IPO is a case study: they've willingly chased away countless millions of users with an abrasive, horrible forum experience, because they calculate they can extract more revenue from those that remain. Where HN is a "narrow, tall" revenue source surrounded by free stuff, Reddit is "wide and short": everyone and everything is the product.
Yes I do believe the politics of the organization are relevant to assessing the likelihood of this event.