Reddit's new paid ads look exactly like user posts
zdnet.com
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.
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In a few years my computer will be able to run an acceptable but obviously not chatGPT4 level AI that will among other things pre filter this crap from my feed as part of normal ad blocking. Buckle up bitches.
AI filtering of Reddit isn't the way. The way is leaving the platform. This is beginning to remind me of the 'decrapify Windows' YT videos that offer 20-step multi-application guides for getting a tolerable experience, instead of explaining how to install Mac/Linux. Time spent on a rotten foundation is wasted.
I think a lot of the Internet is going to end up shitted up with this kind of nonsense. While leaving Reddit certainly tackles one issue, having a way to filter out the rest of this shit would be useful.
But in order for it to work you need HI. Human Intelligence can help you leave the platform today!
So the future is AI ad creators versus AI ad blockers, with all of us caught in the middle. Yay?!
Future is the internet populated by bots while humans try to go analog.
I'm entertained, I need a book in this universe.
That book? It's an advertisement...
Fortunately, at least in my experience, the adblockers usually win. Even if a company changes something to avoid an adblocker or force someone to turn off their adblocker (Hi, Twitch!), it's usually fixed within just a few hours at most.
It'll always be that way. For a user to see your ad you have to let them download your ad, and at that point it becomes like forcing a prisoner to write their own ransom note without your supervision and then letting them drop it in the mailbox themselves.