Ahead of IPO, Reddit blends advertising into user posts as FTC starts asking questions about that mega-deal with Google to train AI

Blaze@dormi.zone to Reddit@lemmy.world – 269 points –
Pre-IPO Reddit lets ads be dressed up as promoted user posts
theregister.com
28

Quit Reddit! Join Lemmy

Yes, absolutely... But everyone reading this is already on the fediverse lmao

No don't let redditors come here

Plenty of redditors are here, reddit did originally start with a good crowd. I myself moved during the great fuckery of 2023. However i believe that a lot of the low-effort redditors (or however you would describe them) you are reffing to would find lemmy just that extra step too difficult/inconvenient to get into and wont take it up.

I don't understand this sentiment. Don't you want Lemmy to grow and overtake the big platforms? If there's specific people or instances you don't like, you could block them. I see no reason to gatekeep Lemmy. I say this as an ex-redditer.

Come for the spite toward Reddit, stay for the lack of content and somehow even worse community!

Ok this part made me snarf:

When comments are enabled on free-form ads, there's an increase in community engagement, Reddit claimed, without indicating whether that increase was positive or not.

I remember a long time ago, like maybe a decade or more, the regular we-can-see-they're-ads ads on Reddit could have comments enabled if the ad buyer wanted. I remember jumping in on a few of them and they actually weren't bad, at least in the ones I went into (a biased sample to be sure). If the ads weren't obnoxious or misleading I could see it going not too badly.

At some point adblock got good enough that I stopped seeing ads on Reddit any more, though, so I don't know when they stopped that practice.

Advertisers stopped enabling it around the time it became mostly "MeUndies", "HeGetsUs" and "kraft" ads.

A long time ago the only ads on reddit were for communities inside itself.

I remember reddit was the only exception in my block rules.

Yeah I never understood that. Was it just to drive engagement? Were the moderators paying for those?

Would they accept money advertising Lemmy? 🤣

Ahead of the Reddit IPO, I'm finally done purging most of my Reddit posting history and subtly modifying the rest to poison whatever AI is trained on it.

I have no doubt Reddit didn't really delete any of the posts I deleted, but I am hoping the poisoned information will find its way verbatim to an AI's training set.

They were kinda already doing that before I left

With all this money they'll raise from the IPO, maybe Reddit will finally be profitable! It's definitely not a way for investors to unload their turds on the public.

The social media monster pointed to companies already trialing free-form ads, which include Just Eat Takeaway, Kraft Heinz, and Leica, all of which found the format capable of "driving upper funnel results."

Actually, I'd really like to see a screenshot of these Leica ads if anyone comes across one.