Reddit Falls Short of Ad Growth Targets Ahead of Likely 2024 IPO

return2ozma@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 1184 points –
Reddit Falls Short of Ad Growth Targets Ahead of Likely 2024 IPO
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Reddit who?

If I can't browse my way, I simply don't use the site.

If reddit pops up in a search result on my browser, wellll best believe I have multiple adblockers making sure their ads don't load.

And every time a Reddit results show up, I'm immediately reminded why I don't want to go there by an error telling me that I can't use the site without logging in.

Fortunately, just changing the link to old.reddit.com still works even through VPN, but fuck this behavior. I do that only for questions I really need an answer and couldn't find anywhere else, and most of the time the replies are shit anyway.

Hate any results from Twitter as well.

Log in, log in, tell us who you are!

Fuck you. I never made an account when it wasn't run by a thin-skinned narcissistic man-child, and I'm not about to start now.

God, I hate infantile, "quirky" messages. Same shit with discord, but at least discord is useful.

It's probably more to do with using a VPN than not being logged in. If I'm searching for something on a search engine and Reddit comes up in the results with potentially useful information, then I'll go there (the only time I go there now). I don't use a VPN and I'm never logged in, and I've never seen that page come up.

Which makes sense, because those greedy bastards are trying to hyper-monetize the content. And pesky VPNs make it difficult for them to harvest useful visitors info and/or throw tons of partially targeted ads on the poor user's screen.

Still good info on how to avoid it for the people who do encounter that annoying error page. So thanks for comparing that tidbit of knowledge.

Fwiw I use ProtonVPN and I've never seen that message before; I browse mostly on mobile, but do on the full-site too (lemmy's nsfw communities are a barren wasteland for what I'm looking for). Both logged in and not.

I guess it may be a combination. I use Mullvad VPN + Mullvad browser. Maybe they only show it if the can't fingerprint you enough? I.e by a combination of IP, and your browser + extensions + tracking cookies fingerprint?

Yup, it's a VPN. If I turn it off, it works properly even in the same browser (Mullvad). But I refuse to cave in, so if they every start checking for VPNs even in the old Reddit, or disable it altogehter (which I'm sure will be soon, since you can also use it to bypass "Log in to see NSFW content"), I'm out for good, and will finally block Reddit at my Kagi.

If you use Firefox, get the Redirector extension and add a rule that automatically redirects reddit.com/* to old.reddit.com/$1.

Right?

In-between comments are ads.

Under every post is a recommendation for other subreddits where the last update was 2-3 weeks ago.

Subreddits with clear bait clog up the front page, and no filters to remove them.

Top comments are jokes and memes.

It's a real shit experience on Reddit right now.

They really leaned hard into the fraud strategy, hoping to IPO in 2023 and run with the money.

It got to the point where the entire front page was just bots reposting the greatest hits, with the comments section literally being bots reposting comments from the first time it was posted. There were entire comment chains of bots just having reposted conversations with each other.

The release of LLM APIs was the last straw, now even the conservatives are jumping ship because it was just a bunch of fascist liars lying to each other. And if there is one thing conservatives hate, it’s being around other conservatives.

Some of those issues went over here pretty quick too.

I feel we have a lot of the faux intellectual crowd who thought 5-10 years ago they were better than other for using reddit.

Nonsense. Most of us thought that at least 10 years ago. Reddit didn’t start going downhill hard until the 2016 US primaries, when /r/conspiracy went from semi-interesting headcannon to full on Trump worship over the span of a week. Then we realized what we were in for but it was like watching a car crash into a dumpster fire.

Watching meme subreddit the_donald go from a fun playground to a serious army of defenders was my wakeup call

Dude the Donald was hilarious until it wasn't anymore so much great shit posting

The death knell of the site was when they quarantined TD and all the crazies started migrating into the other places of reddit. After it became a cult TD pulled people onto the site who had no other reason to be there. All the people long term redditors were trying to avoid by not using facebook were now all over the site