Calling them “free-form ads,” Reddit said the new advertisements are its most native format ever, designed to look and feel like community content shared by real people.
The ads, meant to mimic the site’s megathreads, will enable advertisers to utilize a variety of formats in one post, including images, videos, and text.
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.
The next time you see an interesting post in your Reddit feed, take a closer look - because it might just be a paid advertisement.
First time I accidentally click on one of these I’m going to shit thst post up so hard.
Yeah, I figure it does two ways
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They get called out quickly and result in a bunch of shitposts or actively blasting the product
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They block posting which makes it obvious they’re ads and get little too no engagement anyhow
Reddit will program new mod bots to deal with organic responses the advertiser doesn’t consider constructive. That opens another revenue stream: charging advertisers for sub-specific bot tweaks.
The interesting question to me is, when does normie realize his sub has been co-opted to function as a focus group, and decide to look for a new forum.
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You could also just not do that
Just ditch Reddit. Seriously. Why bother?
Some nice communities are locked in that deepest level of hell & despair …
Gotta try to drag a few good people back from Tartarus…
Any ad that starts with TIL or DAE gets an immediate down vote, a cringe, and no further reading
Reddit has ads?
If it’s not already the law, it needs to be. It should be required that paid advertising be disclosed in all contexts.
In another article they post a photo of an example from reddit and it does say promoted next to the post title. So there’s something there because there is an FTC law saying ads must be disclosed. Obviously they want to obfuscate that it’s an ad as much as possible though so who knows how that’ll change.
Like so:
Annoying and all that, but something pretty common in most social media sites I see nowadays. I quickly learn to filter anything with that label out as junk.
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.
That’s already the case in at least the Netherlands.
At this point if you removed all lies in the united states all youd have left is a chimp in a business suit with a flag lapel pin.
That’s not a nice thing to say about Trump.
That comparison isn’t nice to the chimp!
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.
In my country TV ads are explicitly marked with text in one corner
In my country, paper press as to identify when something looks like an article, but it’s an ad.
In the US, most TV commercials are so obviously TV commercials that they don’t label them. Some TV stations do have bumpers they air when the TV show goes to break and comes back from break.
I stopped watching local news when they started having the anchors pitch to ads like they were just another news item.
“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…
Years ago you used to be able to comment in ad threads. And most people were just calling the ad out on its bullshit. So they stopped allowing comment replies in those threads.
This will somehow be different?
Yeah, I remember those fun times. See an ad post, look up their scandals on Wikipedia, post about those scandals in the comments…
There’s no way this will work unless they lock down those posts. If they want something that looks like organic engagement with comments that don’t ruin the brand, it can’t work anything like the rest of Reddit. They’ll have to have corporate moderators who remove any post that is even slightly challenging to the brand, because otherwise those will be the ones getting upvotes.
to start conversations with users.
Sounds like great fun for trolls.
Hahaha, what’s your problem, come on, let’s just dive into the topic of how delicious Snickers™ bars are and what a great value they are too!
I’m just here to talk about rampart
I hear Snickers is making smaller candies at the normal price.
But still packed with peanuts! Snickers™ really satisfies!
Hey, you seem like you’re having a hard time. You’re not you when you’re hungry. Have a Snickers.
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.
Apparently click fraud is fine on reddit 🤷♂️
“It’s monetizable!”
Whatever it takes before their IPO. It’s disgusting
Have they still not done their IPO yet??
Shit or get off the pot.
They’re in the middle of trying to get their users to create accounts with E-Trade, their Directed Share Program (DSP) administrator. They’ll start selling shares to their users as part of their DSP late next week. After that is the IPO.
The moderation effort required to clean up these ads must be massive.
I am sure that in the first iteration they did not remove the “Report” function, but those suckers learn fast
“we could just lie to people” is an advertising tactic somebody always comes up with. It’s a Rubicon that absolutely shreds customer goodwill, though.
Assuming, of course, it isn’t already shredded.
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?
I used to downvote them. Now I just nothing them.
Report them as malicious content 👍
I used to post nasty things when they allowed that. Then I used to downvote them. Then the ad blocker I used blocked them so I never saw them. Then I stopped posting on Reddit.
I assume the downvote doesn’t really count. It just looks to you as if it did.
This was a thing like 10 years ago too, iirc. Ads had threads and you could post in them and up/down vote them. That… didn’t go well. For advertisers, that is.
Who didn’t see that coming?
Obligatory fuck spez
Fuck spez
Fuck spez!
Fuck spez!!
Fuck spez!!!
Fuck spez!! !!
Fuck using his Reddit username and letting him hide behind it.
Fuck Spez, AKA Steve Huffman.
Fuck Spez!!
I hope a side effect of the AI training on reddit comments is that text output is littered with Fuck Spez
It would be amazing 👍👍
Palpatine voice: Good. Goooood. Let the stupid flow through you.
15 years on Reddit before leaving. It was the only social media platform where I actually felt leadership personally hated its users.
That’s weird; I’ve never seen any of those…
Oh yeah, that’s because I haven’t visited reddit in ~9 months.
That’s illegal in Germany though, right? AFAIK all ads must be disclosed as such.
They’re tagged as “promoted”
Having seen previous lawsuits in this area, I doubt that’s good enough. Like, it’s still clearly designed to be deceptive.
Oh, certainly. And I’m sure that the tag is designed to be difficult to differentiate from other tags and to go unnoticed.
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.
But not before commenting, “fuck spez!”
Which counts as engagement.
And doesn’t bother Steve Huffman because you’re using his Reddit username, and by doing that you’re talking about Reddit, effectively promoting it. Stop using “spez” and start making it so Steve Huffman has trouble giving his real name to a real hotel, restaurant, etc. because they say “oh, that asshole?”.
Sounds terrible, glad I’m on Lemmy!
