Ripples Through Reddit as Advertisers Weather Moderators Strike

embecile@kbin.social to Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 14 points – Ripples Through Reddit as Advertisers Weather Moderators Strike
adweek.com

Reddit is redirecting some impressions away from existing communities, and some advertisers are pausing campaigns.

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Whatever happens, Reddit is not the same place as it used to be before June 12.

I would say it's sad, but it really is for the best (at least for me). kbin and Mastodon (haven't tried Lemmy) seem to be super promising and fill that same need for me. So far, I'm feeling incredibly at-home on the fediverse

Dabaghi notes this pause will be shorter than more prolonged advertiser boycotts on Twitter and Meta. Still, Reddit has been working on its relationships with advertisers, and any accumulated goodwill could be diminished if the precarious situation continues.

Let's hope the mods of the larger subs stay the course

1k subs thus far have committed to staying dark indefinitely. Hopefully this news spurs more to join on.

According to Reddark, 6.6k subreddits (out of over 8k) are still dark. We'll have to see what the numbers look like in 16 hours or so once America wakes up and gets off work.

I suspect a lot of subs will come back online just so they can publicly coordinate and announce their permanent shutdowns or migrations to somewhere else. If Reddit doesn't relent by June 30 (or maybe even if they do), I think we'll see a lot of communities permanently go dark.

I sure hope so. I just saw /r/technology is open again, no word about the next steps. If this is all that is going to happen then nothing will change much.

Just because you find that life's not fair, it
Doesn't mean that you just have to grin and bear it
If you always take it on the chin and wear it
Nothing will change
Even if you're little you can do a lot, you
Mustn't let a little thing like "little" stop you
If you sit around and let them get on top, you
Might as well be saying you think that it's okay
And that's not right
And if it's not right, you have to put it right

My 8 year old has been non-stop singing the Matilda the Musical soundtrack since we saw it in theatres months ago and this verse of "Naughty" just perfectly encapsulates how I feel about the reddit situation (among others)

Did r/technology ever go dark? Maybe I’m confusing it with another sub, but I thought that one was modded by an actual Reddit admin/employee and wasn’t participating?

Yeah, I recall some subs I'm in explicitly said they'd blackout for two days, then reopen and ask users what they want to do, which is an extremely reasonable approach.

I plan to check in tomorrow for exactly that reason and everyone else here should, too. If the people who agree with the blackout don't go back tomorrow to announce their support for an indefinite blackout, it shifts the ratio of remaining people in favour of ending the blackout.

And even for those who don't intend to return to reddit, the blackout is a good thing because it will drive further people to sites like this. We need content creators. I don't think we've hit critical mass yet. And the front page feels very dominated by news about reddit, which does not have long term potential. This site cannot be just a place to complain about reddit.

Why would that be needed though? They can put info on their private front page, and the mods can coordinate behind the scenes.

I'm a mod of a group of related subreddits that are all part of the same fandom community. We've been polling our members each step of the way so we can represent their interests and not just shut down because the mods wanted to. Our subs voted to stay dark for a week, and on the 19th we will reopen, but Restricted, so we can poll again to see what our next steps, as a community, are. We won't just pull the plug on our communities without their consent, and while we're dark we're researching alternative platforms to rehome on if that's needed.

The whole "we've been polling our members" thing feels a little sanctimonious to me. You're the moderators, make a call. If the users don't like it they can do the same thing they could do any other time they disagreed with moderators, make a new subreddit and moderate it themselves.

Edited to add, even if you want to poll them there's no need to open in the meantime. Link to a stawpoll on your locked page. Direct people to discord, or here, to engage. By engaging on Reddit all you're doing is proving spez right that this will blow over.

It's not sanctimonious. We care what our members think and feel. We have the open support of the author we're the fandom for, even saying he'd follow us to a new platform if the community decided to go to one. There's nothing sanctimonious about caring about a community and letting the collective decide what to do. We don't "own" the community, we caretake it. We don't exercise power without the fans being behind it.

This article has some strange framing to me.

Currently, these protests are impacting a small percentage of Reddit’s more than 100,000 active communities.

This completely ignores that the 8000+ subreddits that went dark account for a VAST majority of content and traffic on the site.

it's in "adweek". A publication about advertising. They only care about content as a thing to monetize.

Adweek is the advertising industry journal, and has been around for decades.

If they cover it, it's a real thing in the ad industry.

Honestly I think it's weird that they don't know how reddit works. Surely advertising experts need to know how the platform they're advertising works? Otherwise reddit can shill whatever bullshit they want at the advertiser's expense.

I am extremely interested in what Reddit themselves are communicating towards the advertisers.

"Don't worry only 8000 out of our 100.000+ communities are unavailable, it will be fine"

Or something a bit more...honest.

That's because whoever wrote the article doesn't really know how Reddit works

I mean.. my wife who very sparingly uses reddit, and when she does it's either to look at animal videos or boobs, asked me what happened to reddit as her feed was almost completely blank...

This definitely affected a very large chunk of users.

The article also completely whitewashes the conflict with "Moderators are protesting a new Reddit policy, starting July 1, charging third-party apps to use its API. Some of these apps, which help moderators manage and grow their communities, have said they will have to shut down because these charges make running their businesses prohibitively expensive."

How dare those freeloading third-party app businesses think they are entitled to Reddit providing an API for free? /s

I said this elsewhere, but almost all of the articles (Verge excepted) miss the larger points. Someone coming in cold with no sense of the context here could easily walk away with the idea that Reddit is behaving reasonably (e.g., why shouldn't they charge for API usage? they're a company trying to make money!) and users and mods are completely out of control. These articles rarely address the concerning accessibility issues being created by the API changes. They rarely address the price to be charged is vastly larger than the price that it costs to provide API access/recoup losses from inability to advertise to 3P users. They don't address the fact that the changes were announced with barely any lead time to allow 3P apps to make necessary changes on their end to avoid insane fees. They don't cover the damage to mod tools or the fact that the moderators are working for free and occasionally working at a loss (due to purchasing their own servers, for example). They also don't address the fact that Steve Huffman pointedly lied about Christian Selig threatening to blackmail Reddit, that he doubled down on this in his AMA, and that if you sift through his c&p statements, he doesn't actually answer questions or provide any kind of information or reassurance. It's all very annoying.

inability to advertise to 3P users

And this isn't even strictly true. Reddit could have given 3P apps the option to pay a reasonable price for the API, or they had to serve Reddit's ads to avoid paying the fee, it would be a fair compromise.

It sounds to me like Reddit can't profit from ads, even if the 3P apps served them. If that's true, Reddit is doomed, and investors will see that as they approach the IPO.

I am still of firm believe that the subreddits and moderators should do what they feel is the best course for them as a community.

If they are okay or accepting of what is gonna come, come 30th of June than I fully respect that.

I deleted my 6+ years account today (edited comments before deleting) and was on the platform itself for 10+ years.

I am doing this because Reddit crossed a boundary I set for myself in regards of the way they are communicating and being ran.

They are very much a company with an autocratic leadership, they don't care about the userbase and any conversation about changes impacting the community are falling on tone deaf ears.

The fact that they are showing their hand and sharing their plans of "Increasing monitezation until profits arrive" is for me the last straw.

For me it shows one thing;

The changes implemented may not impact you directly now, or tomorrow, or next year but they will be knocking on your door eventually. At that point I hope there are still people who will speak up with you otherwise you have no "choice" but to open and comply.

Campaigns have notched slightly lower impression delivery and consequently, slightly higher CPMs, over the days of the blackout, Johnson said. If the performance weakness continues for a week or two, the agency would start recommending decreasing spend with Reddit or directing it to other platforms. The moderator blackout is supposed to end Wednesday.

Damn. Too bad the mods settled on a two-day blackout. Shoulda gone for a week to start…

I think it's good that they went for a seemingly small period, at least at first. This is a great way to convince the users to join the protest, which is the fuel of it, as asking so many people to forget about Reddit for longer easily could result in more people ignoring the actual boycott because of the scale of the change to their internet habits.

Having many services welcoming redditors is a great help, of course, but it's much easier to convince a large number of people to keep the protest going now that many have found alternatives they like - perhaps some won't migrate completely, but they may use Reddit less as a result. The amount of these people could have been significantly lower had the people had to consider going off Reddit for a similarly significant longer period of time.

The 48 hours of boycott may seem like a small step, but this step is a stepping stone to huge impacts later on, as we're already seeing by the attention the whole situation is picking up.

We're far from the credits roll in this movie.

After June 30, the mods who rely on 3rd party apps have a hard choice, since the in-house Reddit apps blow. And mods are unpaid, so why put up with shitty treatment?

Checking on ModCoord - there are a bunch of the big subs in it for the long haul. https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinite\_blackout\_next\_steps\_polling\_your/

Hopped onto reddit just now only to comment on that post that my little sub is staying dark indefinitely.

That is the only way this works. I’m glad to see the big ones aren’t capitulating!

Right now the blackout is just a gesture. The crunch will come after June 30th, if they really go through with it.

Even if people do go back after the 30th, killing off Apollo, RIF, Bacon etc. will drastically cut traffic to Reddit. I use the desktop version maybe once a week and it’s barely for 10 minutes. All of my traffic went through Apollo. Good luck with your ad rates when your traffic plummet.

Reddit no longer cares about traffic that does not result in ad impressions. That potentially millions of 3rd party app users may leave has nothing but good consequences in their eyes (less resources spent on free users), and if even 1% of those convert to their 1st party apps or website that's a net gain for them.

The blackout is meant to show these users are not freeloaders but are part of the backbone of the content and interaction within these communities. Having ad networks take notice is a good thing for the protest, but if it will be a flash in the pan it won't cause any meaningful change.

I think many people were caught in the hype that they couldn't get this perspective. Two days was never going to mean anything in the short term, and reddit had everyone backed into a powerless position from the very start of the API. Consequences to HQ from here on will be hard to quantify and drawn out, but imho they're still squarely on the path of enshitification.

That potentially millions of 3rd party app users may leave has nothing but good consequences in their eyes (less resources spent on free users), and if even 1% of those convert to their 1st party apps or website that's a net gain for them

But the problem is those people are potential content creators. They are arguably more advanced users, and therefore more likely to create content. And that content drives engagement, which drives ads.