Marketers are about to infiltrate your favorite subreddits - The Verge

stoic_bikes_bells@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.world – 181 points –
Marketers are about to infiltrate your favorite subreddits.
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About to? They’ve been there for a while now

My immediate thought. Companies have been uaing reddit to fabricate positive organic user content for years now.

but now you can get notifications when people are talking about your company

Good thing we don't have anyone infiltrating our favorite communities on Lemmy to market a movie, like the Golden Globe winning, Oscar nominated sensation of summer 2023, "Barbie", now available on Blu-ray and select streaming services!

(Watch the Oscars on Sunday please.)

I haven't been paying attention. I can't believe it's so soon. Are you nominated for anything, movie superstar Margot Robbie?

Technically, yes, for "Best Picture", which is very much a team effort.

But no to "Best Actress". 😢

Hey wait a minute, something doesn't smell right here!

Contrary to my lovely wife's Chanel's New Eau De Parfumâ„¢, which smells diving - almost as good as her Calvin Klein deep euphoriaâ„¢.

Anyways, color me impressed, Oscar Nominated Producer Margot Robbie!

Which is easy with my wife's new Splatâ„¢, 100% vegan hair dye, made with baobab extract and formulated with quinoa!

Ok that's all the Margot Robbie sponsored products a 10 second google search shows me ;)

This post entertains me almost as much as Raid: Shadow Legends, which I play all the time on my... um, consoles? PC? Mobile? Gaming device! I always play it on my gaming device which I definitely use to play Raid: Shadow Legends without interruptions. All day.

For what it's worth, I've watched Barbie while I still haven't seen Oppenheimer, or even the first part of Dune, so there's that. Make what you will of it. I actually liked it.

All we get on Lemmy is the dumbest tier of Russian shills pretending to be communists to help Republicans, which is a really surreal thing to type out.

On some level, I kind of long for a more innocent time when the most malevolent force was just some Sony viral marketing pushing "PlayStation exclusive" posts to the front page ahead of a game launch.

which is a really surreal thing to type out.

well i've never seen any proof its true. maybe that's why it seems untrue.

It is headed the way of quora. Where almost every response is a marketing post. Those who stayed on reddit aren't bothered by this anyways.

Subreddits like r/BuyItForLife is very vulnerable to this

They specifically used r/buyitforlife as an example of how to market on Reddit. Thing is that the trustworthiness came from users and this will dilute the trust in that sub rendering it useless. I hate what they have become.

Trust will take some time to degrade though, and in the meantime they can cash in that genuine goodwill for customers to their shitty products. They don't care about destroying the community, so the community must protect itself or become useless and cease to exist.

Even without marketing it wasn't great. Someone recommended a product I had personal experience with. I The product had fallen apart after 3 years.

The users suggest products with a good name brand despite not having actually used the product for any length of time.

Their posts are all, "I just bought X and love it so it must get 'buy it for life' quality."

How do we stop

the enshittification

of everything?

It's cliche but it all starts with you. Don't tolerate it to begin with. Have a moral compass that understands that infinite growth is inherently flawed and there's nothing wrong with something remaining niche. Remember in all your interactions every day that it is always a person first and what they represent second.

Build alternate platforms and products whose goal isn't profit. Aka, FOSS!

And then overthrow capitalism, but that one is a bit more ambitious.

Once they went public this was bound to happen (more).

For just $3.99 you can shit post anything you want!

I was active in another platform for a specific older car. It was 5-6 of us who mostly spent time answering questions from people trying to keep their car running. Lots of detailed specific responses. Then the advertisers started to be offered user accounts that allowed them to spam post the whole platform. One in particular would post ads, they look like posts from a user though, every couple days, for a scanner that doesn't work for our cars. So I started calling these posts out as you can comment on them. I told the admin they can tell the marketers to fuck off or I am gone. No one to answer questions, no one is going to show up to ask them. They rather have advertiser pay them $30/mo to spam it than have it function. On lemmy, I mod this community now.

“Top 5 shitpost tips Reddit doesn’t want YOU to know about “ #shittips

I absolutely hate the way reddit has become, but let's be honest, it was gamed since way back. Them going public imo has not much bearing on this

marketers have been trolling discussion on that platform very actively for years

Of course they want to grow the free mods out there and replace them with marketing shills. It's nothing new, just better tools to probably make it less obvious.

I look forward to the AIs trained primarily on marketing posts.

Well, I would like to think that this will get some more Redditors to become Lemmings, but I don't have high hopes. Unfortunately, there hasn't been a significant migration during the APIcalypse, so I don't see that happening now.

Is there anything we can do to speed up adoption of Lemmy? Like everyone else, I don’t love what’s going on over there, but all my communities are still highly active on it.

Honestly you want the exact opposite.

Marketers go where the audience is. It's a rot that can never be fully removed.

Use it often. Post content. Comment more frequently. Recommend it to friends.

Make this place enjoyable for people even if you don't personally share all their values and beliefs?

Lemmy is way too much of a echo chamber to appeal to most people