Twitter does this. Ads are the exact same format as posts, with the exception of a subtle 'Ads' label in the upper right. Of course everyone reads from left to right, so you can't really skim your feed without having your mind hijacked by at least the ad headline.
Even more insidious on Twitter: actual user posts (videos specifically) being promoted into your feed, with no ad label. However, the actual ad (which is not particularly well disclosed) is the pre-roll ad on the video - the user post is just the vehicle to do so. [0]
In your feed, it is indistinguishable.
Because I have Mr Beast blocked, I kept on getting posts from BANG! Showbiz, because the video selection available to Twitter isn't particularly high quality.
Tabloids like the National Enquirer were known for this but it was originated much earlier by far.
With something like reddit when it starts taking place where it never was before, you're supposed to be convinced you are getting the same thing you have been getting all along, even though it's not always the case any more.
Reminds me a bit of how it was before Whole Foods went public. They were a local Texas healthy market with upscale tendencies and some of the products were outstandingly well-sourced and completely world-class. Especially the minority of imported goods, or most of them wouldn't have even been there. One day some of those fancy European lines began to be replaced systematically with lesser alternatives and newly emerging house brands. They already had a few stores by then, not just the first two in Houston and Austin. The replacement products were not shabby, they were above average but nowhere near world-class most of the time, and this action was scattered throughout the store.
Before too long I found out they were going to go public, that was an IPO I did make decent money on. Co-incidentally that was one I had to inform brokers about, not the other way around.
OTOH, my Whole Foods shopping has gradually dwindled since before the 21st century, to almost nothing by now, an average of zero trips per month.
The more subtle the deception, sometimes the more annoying it can be.
There's a great timeline[1] showing how Google transitioned from the 'don't be evil' company to what it is today. Page and Brin at Stanford[2] laid into the fundamental problem of mixed motives that advertising-funded search engines have (see "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives").
Reddit and twitter aren't search engines, but they're dealing with related issues: the incentive to deceive visitors of their sites in order juice ad effectiveness and boost profits.
This is me. I blocked so many that nowadays all I get are fake marijuana ads and sex toy ads.
No I don't regularly smoke or otherwise imbibe weed and I definitely don't do stuff that would link me with a need for sex toys lol. And judging by the replies I see to those tweets it's happening to other users too.
Sometimes I wonder if targeted ads are just a giant hoodwinking by big tech over retail businesses. I constantly get youtube ads in languages I don't speak, for tampons or bras (I'm a man), or of musicians in genres I don't listen to. These all seem like extreme table-stakes targeting that can often be inferred from the singular video I'm watching alone, not even including my watch history.
I literally click "allow all" to tracking cookies everywhere. I also get completely inappropriate ads e.g. in languages I don't speak, for services to sell cars (I don't own a car) etc.
They're now making it so you can't block the account that posted the ad, instead you can just say "I don't like this ad" - which still results in the same ad being shown regardless.
I'm still only seeing this on some ads; not sure if it's a gradual rollout or A/B testing. Either way, I'm sure it won't be too long before it's all ads being served like this :(
Text seems like a much more difficult medium to bring ads in such that it feels ‘right’ while still being noticed. YouTube is effectively analogous to burying the ad Indicator late in the reading cycle by not indicating to you which video is going to have an ad when you read the thumbnail.
From my perspective since the ad cannot be skipped the ad is not separate from the video runtime experience behind the thumbnail - except in your reception of it.
Also another notable indicator of the coupled relationship between ad and video, being demonetized hurts the videos exposure.
> Of course everyone reads from left to right, so you can't really skim your feed without having your mind hijacked by at least the ad headline
This is an interesting perspective I hadn't thought of. I wonder if would be possible to use custom CSS to move that label to the left instead of the right? It wouldn't be a replacement for blocking ads outright, but it also feels like it might be something that would be harder for them to outright prevent.
Well, it was one factor. Digg had a lot of problems. The big rewrite went disastrously. It was one giant site with no real focus and one big comments section: it devolved into unmoderatable chaos. Sponsored posts probably weren't the straw that broke the camel's back.
The exodus started with a change to comment threading that made the comment section a place for reactions rather than a place for conversation/analysis.
What are you referring to? I’ve been a redditor since I was a digg refugee, and I can’t remember any meaningful change to the commenting system since then. Maybe some different sorting mechanisms with different defaults, but that’s about it.
I bet you noticed a change on the comments themselves.
It took me a while to even understand why things changed. The appearance of shallower posts, like memes was severely boosted, while textual posts lost a lot of emphasis, to the point they became harder to interact with. The sorting of posts was changed so they would cycle faster, and people stopped having enough time to interact on the comments section. Deep threads got completely hidden...
There was no change large enough to make people pay attention. But the end result was the same.
> I bet you noticed a change on the comments themselves.
I guess. Everything on the internet has changed in those 15 years though. It doesn't seem fair to attribute most of that to Reddit the product. There are still plenty of deep threads on Reddit if you know where to look.
> It doesn't seem fair to attribute most of that to Reddit the product.
So when everything becomes crap, it become acceptable? I guess Digg was simply ahead of its time before it can capture the market that would resonate with the low quality imageboard style of threads.
> There are still plenty of deep threads on Reddit if you know where to look.
The last time I read a chain deeper than maybe, 6 comments that I didn't regret was years ago.
But in all fairness, most of those deep deep threads are just two people trying to get the last word in. So it wasn't a high percentage even before the shift.
> But in all fairness, most of those deep deep threads are just two people trying to get the last word in. So it wasn't a high percentage even before the shift.
Yeah, it's worth pointing out that the website you're on has functionality that actively discourages deep threads for that reason.
Like every other search engine, social media platform, etc. ever. Remember when ads on Google were highlighted with a big yellow block? Now they look exactly like regular search results, just with "sponsored" in small text at the top. And my guess is they went with "sponsored" instead of "ad" or some such because for some subset of the population it's probably not even clear that sponsored=paid advertisement.
The infinite growth problem / enshittification of modern capitalism. We will endlessly try to squeeze more blood out of a rock until it crumbles entirely.
It's funny in a way. We talk about how risk averse big companies are compared to smaller, more nimble startups. Yet those same big companies don't seem to be risk averse to making aggressive squeezing changes like these.
According to TFA it appears that the old ads used to only link externally, or to a post made by a real user. Now the ads are posts themselves that self-link to Reddit.
Use Lemmy which has a good number of FOSS clients already. If you miss the content from specific subreddits, there are instances that mirror the content. If you still really want to interact with people on Reddit, I am working on a bridge.
Not yet, but once the bridges are set up, you will be able to find the content on the Fediverse (it's stored in the mirrors) and you'll be able to reach the people no matter where they are.
I've tried on several occasions, but I just haven't found those niches yet on Lemmy (I use it through kBin). It's kinda there but also still kinda empty one you go outside the more general feeds.
The sad reality is a lot of reddit operated off the minority of power users. And those power users are either still on Reddit, went somewhere else entirely (maybe Discord), or are "retired". The network effect will take a while to overcome, if it's overcome at all.
That’s still like a 10 year lag time. If the process to find those answers involves anything beyond typing in the query followed by “fediverse” or whatever on google, it’s not going to happen.
This is a separate issue. I'm not saying "don't ever visit Reddit again", I'm saying "You should be able to follow and interact with the subreddits through Lemmy".
Apollo was the only way I used Reddit - the browser experience is meh, and I’m almost always using Old Reddit when I go there on desktop or mobile because it’s just easier to get what I’m looking for. Once Old gets the axe I’m sure I’ll be there even less than I am now.
It’s a bummer too - I think my weekly screen time report had me using Apollo on average like 6 hours a day, I was very active in a couple small and fun communities, and the places with news relevant to me were all subbed and easily surfaced. Losing my primary tool was all it took to take me from a pretty engaged and active user to someone who stops by because a search result took me there.
The idea is that Lemmy instance admins can use this service alongside their Lemmy server to provide two things:
- "Login with Reddit", to make it easier for people to create an account on the Lemmy server.
- A reddit-to-lemmy community map.
The idea is that when someone logs with Reddit OAuth, we can get their list of subreddits, and then auto-subscribe the user to the corresponding Lemmy communities, solving the onboarding issue and the content discovery in one go.
There is also a website, https://fediverser.network, where I'm crowdsourcing the data to make the mapping between subreddits to lemmy communities.
With all the data that’s being put up for sale by Reddit to AI companies, why do they still focus on ads? They could focus on a better user experience (unlike the @*^% move last year to cut off almost all third party apps and strangle the rest to death slowly). The value of gathering more content from users in order to freely sell it to companies should be a lot higher than tweaking ad placement and styling. Seems like u/spez (Reddit’s CEO) ran out of decent and ok ideas a long time ago and has been acting out of spite time and again.
I’m a firm believer that the MBAifcation of the world is one of the great evils of our time. That extracting every last option, selling everything possible, exploiting your environment, running as lean as possible with no concern for difficult times… is a lot of what is going wrong.
So what I re-pose to you isn’t “Why isn’t Reddit selling just data or just ads” it’s “Why would their executives ever consider leaving money on the table?”
With competition users, there can be new sites and users can show these companies with their clicks. I get what you’re saying but consumers are apparently ok with it to an extent. It’s not an evil like labor camps and bread lines. :)
>but consumers are apparently ok with it to an extent
to be blunt, consumers are lazy and that is how the network effect goes from "household name" to "too big to fail". Like a frog boiling, by the time the user eventually leaves 10 more are jumping in.
I agree. Breadlines are bad. But this isn’t a capitalism vs communism/socialism thing. I’m not saying MBAs are the alternative to breadlines. I’m saying that given the rate we are going they are another cause.
As far as consumers being OK with things. That is another major cause of our problems, selectable-outrage which I think is from a corrupt media. And a corrupt media… also run by MBAs trying to extract every possible resource, run as lean as possible with resources a media org has like reputation and goodwill, eliminating the costly things like difficult research-journalism in favor of Clickbait BS.
I think there’s about seven things wrong with our time. MBA-ification is only one.
The next two would be a corrupt media and a complexity-crisis that no one sees coming.
I feel like we need to do a PSA campaign for unaware users that old.reddit.com exists. Sorta like the remember to check your tire pressure. Feel bad for folks that use the new ui unwittingly
Honestly, since i set Kagi to rewrite my searches to old.reddit, i have forgotten new reddit exists lol.
I hope someone makes a forum on top of ATProto. Their tech stack is far more interesting to me compared to ActivityPub, but i just can't stomach the Twitter-style UI of Bluesky to switch to that from Reddit.
They likely know many users feel this way even if they're not the majority, which means old will probably go dark after the IPO (and after a bunch of people bought into their "direct share program")
Especially the extra-lazy comment loading, which seems to only be getting worse with time. Threads that go too deep now require navigating to a new page, and comments frequently have "1 more reply" that either never loads or doesn't actually exist.
Reddit thinks they’re going to sell data but their system is extremely easy to scrape (including post API changes) and all the relevant players procured that data a long time ago.
Buying shares at the IPO hoping for an immediate profit means that you are betting that the underwriter has underpriced the shares. That seems unlikely.
That’s common practice. Most of the time, the shares are sold before the IPO to financial institutions at the list price to guarantee a certain volume of sale and liquidity for the IPOing company. Those institutions expect a first day pop, so it’s common for the list price to be below the expected market price. It also looks better for the company if the stock goes up on day one. None of that maximizes cash to the company, but there are other considerations (and actors) in play.
Everyone’s take? My inexpert opinion is that current stakeholders want their exit and the IPO isn’t for the users to really buy or promote. Reddit has enough mainstream recognition for casual investors who don’t use Reddit to try and make some money on the fresh IPO. But then it just becomes a tulip as reality sets in. There’s definitely a chance to make money in greater fool scenarios but also much greater risk.
But I’m just a guy making noise. Maybe it’ll rocket to the moon and you can fire life.
Honestly? Reddit is a corpse being propped up like in Weekend at Bernie's in a hope to keep the party going long enough for them to dump enough shares on the secondary market.
The founders and bigwigs have cashed out. Ohanian made his fortune and exited years ago, the CEO just made $193m in compensation. Can't be much milk left in the cow.
I really hope that is the case. The site sucks. It's got decent product reviews and porn though. That doesn't make it a good investment to me but we'll see.
Just because we cheer for something to fail like twitter doesn't mean it happens overnight. Even though it should and would be hilarious.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the bulk of the existing stakeholders are severely limited in what they can sell over the first, what, 3-6 months, beyond the shares that are part of the IPO.
I believe you’re right but my hypothetical is that it won’t have some Robinhoodesque IPO but that it falls in an inevitable but unpredictable short to medium interval. Long enough for me to want more gains if i invest but short enough for me to lose everything because I can’t time it right. Stoachastic if you will. A proper microtubule disassembly that leaves me with my little worthless tubules. Tulipules?
AFIAK, preferred shares (the ones investors buy) typically aren't subject to a lockup once they convert to common stock. They usually don't dump right away since they don't want to tank the market unless the company is actually dogshit and they're pawning it off on a bigger fool.
Rumors are they aren't anywhere close to profitability, seeing their SEC filings will be interesting, especially if they disclose who they sell data to...
No need for rumours, their S-1 is available. And no, they are not profitable. They spent something like $800M on staff last year, which is insane to me.
It's a pump and dump, the site will just get worse and worse for the user base as they attempt to squeeze whatever cash flow they can from it post IPO.
Well then you should circle that date 6-mo after IPO (or the end of any non-IPO blackout period) as days with mass sell-offs regardless of the stock price
You act like that isn’t cooked into the optimizations of the market. It is, or everyone could follow your get-rich-quick scheme. Go ahead, try us a few time, see how it goes.
But is that actually baked in to the price? (I’m legitimately asking, not being argumentative)
Back when I worked at a big public company where we had options and employee blackout dates, there would almost always be a dip in the stock price when the blackout was lifted
The "baked into the price" also includes the price of options. I would not be surprised to find that the price premium of options dated around the 6 month window would negate the gain from the drop.
They have a legion of mods working for them for free and still aren't profitable. Whatever you may feel about the denizens of WSB, they all see reddit as nothing more than a shorting opportunity.
Once the mods start getting missives about modding policy from whatever new board takes over post IPO, then things will start to disintegrate.
Normally they'd fall into irrelevance as Digg did, but their last desperate cry is an IPO. Weird times. Either way they're now absolutely hostile towards casual commenters, posters, and viewers. Their data dumps up until maybe 2023 will be valid and interesting only for some limited time.
Easiest IPO that will be shorted as soon as the VCs and other employees can dump their stock on the public markets either dumping a small percentage such as 20% on IPO day or they will do it after the lock up period or both.
It's generous of Reddit to make that offer. The last time I recall having such an opportunity was VALinux back in 1999. However, despite having a 4 letter username and "cake day" in 2008, and regular, solid contributions, I just barely didn't qualify. Karma whores easily do qualify, so that's a bit hard to swallow. But my wife does do a LOT of interaction there and did qualify, so I'm trying to figure out exactly what to do. My thoughts so far:
The big problem is I'm not sure that Reddit, the company, really understands it's business. Though I was expecting the protests of the last year to have gone much further than they did, I think Reddit's response could have been much better, and their response demonstrates their lack of a solid business plan. In particular, the importance of redditors and moderators to their business isn't reflected in their plans (AFAICT).
I think that may end up backfiring.
I feel like their IPO would be better priced closer to a 4.5B valuation rather than the 6.5B they seem to be targeting. There is some potential upside to it, as there might be some justification for a market cap of 10B. But there's a big wildcard in there: the Directed Share Program to redditors have no "cooling off" period, so there's likely going to be some volatility due to "get in, get out". But, the DSP shares have "one vote per share", which might contribute towards people holding them. But that's 8% of offered shares, and offered shares are around 20% of total valuation, so that may be a small enough percentage of shares with high volatility that it won't have a big impact.
The WallStreetBets crowd might have an impact, that will be fun to watch from afar. I'm not expecting anything there, but who knows.
I'm kind of expecting some backlash of the community to the extraction of value by Reddit the company, but I haven't really heard any noises along those lines. I could see their value dropping significantly over the next year because of this. There's a lot of fatigue over the techno-elite extracting value off "the little people's backs". And Lemmy is really well positioned for facilitating a mass exit from Reddit.
The recent news of advertisers making posts that look like regular user posts is, IMHO, leaning in a bad direction. In my mind, that is reminding me of one of the primary things I've seen in Facebook that has dropped my engagement to near-zero levels.
But, there are a lot of other tech companies watching Reddit and hoping for a good IPO leading the way for other similar IPOs. Maybe that will lead interest.
Over all, I'm expecting short term excitement, but longer term rough times for Reddit the company.
But, my investment plans have, in too many situations, been exactly the opposite of the market; I've bought just before the market drops and sold right before it goes up...
Thanks for the quality comment. I basically just buy and hold VTSAX and call it good, rather than worrying about individual companies. I'm mostly just curious if there'll be enough of a 'pop' with the stock to make buying some shares worth it.
That is generally a very good strategy. I have a lot (~50%) of my investments in Target Retirement Plans, though I have put them out about 5 years from my real retirement date, just to keep them a bit more high-return longer since I feel like I can handle that risk.
However, my FIL gave me some great advice 5-6 years ago: Take a little bit, and put it into things you like, to keep investing "fun". In my case I'm doing around 2% in "fun stocks". Personally, it's pretty hard to argue with since my first "fun stock" that I did that with was TSLA, and I got a 20x return on that. My new "fun" set have been other EV and energy stocks, largely, and have generally done quite poorly, a 2-3 of them are down 95+%, but that's over 2 years and my window was more like 5, so time will tell. A handful are up 30-50%. So, some of it depends on your definition of "fun". :-D
Everyone seems to make this mistake that read its core business is social. And that means they sell data.
They’re selling influence. Mostly to kids. To the terminally online. The new Politically Religious.
The standard MO to ban all decent isn’t because the admins/mods actually disagree, it’s that it makes the echo chamber more uniform. They’re culling wrong think to sell things, sure, but more so ideas.
When you consider that “reputation” is a product that politicians, celebrities and companies can just purchase, I think it makes a lot of sense what Reddit can sell.
I'm going to disagree with you that Reddit is selling influence. I think they're selling eyeballs and user-created data. Both of which highly depend on Reddit's reputation with it's users, and that is what I think Reddit is going to have problems with.
The users of Reddit are some of the most anti ads on the planet. I have done a lot of advertising and Reddit performs so poorly that it is not worth it. Having ads blend in won't make a difference.
The real scary thing about the Reddit IPO is that we are headed into the age of the "strongman" leader and both Reddit and Twitter have been the preeminent voice of those against strongmen and tyranny. It was Reddit that gave those in Hong Kong, Ukraine, and Gaza a voice and promoted solidarity for them.
Both Reddit and Twitter are experiencing a capitalist assault because both threaten capitalist power. Twitter was neutralized when it was sold. Reddit is now being neutralized.
Shareholder influence will prevent Reddit from being a platform that can be used to speak truth to those strong enough to harm it.
This IPO is Reddit's graduation ceremony from a platform for speaking truth to power, to a platform for the exercise of power.
Looking at history of big default sub-reddits. That seems more accidental than truly being against strongman or establishment... The capture has been clear for years...
To be fair to Reddit, Reddit ads are consistently the best ads I’ve seen. I think Reddit formats the ad and makes it with the company to uphold the Reddit vibe and many times the ad also says something witty in the context of the subreddit I’m browsing (my guess is ads are limited to subreddits). The worst ads are twitter and YouTube, just a chore that I would much rather have skipped.
It always seems like the current owners and top managers of Reddit don't use it. If they were, things could be much better for the community and probably the business. Again, the official Reddit app seems done by your high school cousin in a mobile development course.
It reminds me of a recent twist to the EV space in North America where Ford, and then all other players, decided to switch their EVs to Tesla's NACS connector.
This interview recently is really grounding. Basically Ford's CEO went on a road trip and actually tried the EV road tripping experience with a non-Tesla (non-Tesla charging stations that is) and saw how dogshit it was. That started conversations to actually try and improve the situation for customers (thus the change to NACS).
Despite the jargon use of the term, I don't think dog food CEOs actually eat their dog food, because it is for dogs. Similarly Reddit is for Redditors.
Somebody already posted that the (it was only one) CEO actually did.
I'll just point out that dog food is food. It may not be healthy for a human in large amounts, but it can't be worse than eating fast food for a week or so.
I know an unreasonably large amount of people that claimed to try it. Most when they were children. I doubt that my bubble is unusual on this.
Nah, this isn’t a matter of people wanting the site to be good but not knowing what to do. They know that they’re making the experience worse, and they don’t care because it makes them slightly more money. We’re well past the point where people are doing “build the thing you’d want to use”.
Sorry, don't agree. In business, like in sports, there are forced and unforced errors [1]. Reddit commited many unforced errors. Have you used their ads system? I tried and did since it was created. It seems done by my other cousin younger than the one developing the Reddit app in the garage.
I always hear these complaints about the Reddit app and I honestly don’t know what people are talking about. Sure, there’s a few UX things that could be improved, like almost every app. But I’m a heavy user with multiple accounts and I rarely have issues. My main issue is some stuff around the video player UX but it’s pretty minor. What are people so worked up about?
FWIW, I’ve been a heavy Reddit user for over a decade, across web and various mobile clients. I’ve also been a full time iOS engineer since 2010, and their app would be a huge effort to recreate. It’s amateurish to suggest that any single dev could build it in a year, let alone a weekend. I’m NOT defending their business practices either. But their mobile app is fine.
Did you try any other apps? The official Reddit app didn't even come close to their usability. As far as saying that no single dev could build it in a year - well I don't know how long it would've taken for the latest codebases, but to my knowledge RIF and Apollo (perhaps the most popular unofficial apps for Android and Apple, respectively) were developed by single people, and they were widely praised for being far more usable than the official app.
Yes, I used a bunch of them over the years. And yeah, they were fine, but that doesn’t answer my question about what exactly is wrong with the official Reddit client to garner so much hate.
They were widely considered to be significantly better. The official app had less features, was often annoying to use, and just didn't even work all the time. At least for RIF, I liked: better performance, more reliable (official app would just decide not to load ANY media sometimes), no notification spam, higher density information, more customizable, better separation between ads and posts (and a small purchase to get rid of them entirely), the list goes on. It was pretty obvious once you used them for a day or two.
They were “widely considered” to be better, but again, almost never with any specifics. Just knee jerk hate.
And I don’t have any of those issues with the official client, other than the ad one. The performance is great, it’s very reliable, I have most notifications disabled except for a couple things I care about (and the notification settings are pretty fine-grained).
Maybe the customization stuff could be more extensive? But I don’t want 1000 settings for every tiny little thing. Regardless, it hardly seems like a complaint that people would get so worked up over.
Maybe the official client used to be much worse and I don’t remember, but increasingly I think people are just pissed about Reddit cutting off the alternative clients and hate being forced to change, so they moan and groan as if the official client is the worst app they’ve ever used. When really, it’s fine.
It sounds like you don't have a problem with it. Maybe you never encountered the issues, or maybe you just have a higher tolerance for them. I did give specifics, and if you cared to look they're well documented - it's hardly knee jerk hate. Over 1.5 million people were annoyed enough by them to buy Apollo alone. And for the record, these complaints were present from far before Reddit decided to get so stingy with their API.
HN has ads-that-look-like-posts too. They're mostly job postings for Y Combinator startups—a perk of that incubator being getting privileged positions on HN's front page.
Not sure about onesignal, but I’m pretty sure BuildZoom long predates the zoom video conferencing tool being a household name.
There’s an element of luck, but also the names are part of the culture from the time they’re created. Multiple people often come up with very similar names for different things just because of what’s going in the world around them.
At least they are predictable and closely related to to the community. I can sort of understand that a startup accelerator that runs a discussion board on the side would want to post job postings for their own startups on their own discussion board.
(Also the fact that YC runs HN isn't exactly hidden - the first hint is right there in the URL)
I think it would be something completely different if YC suddenly showed promoted posts from unrelated "partners" or just opened this up as an advertising opportunity to the general public.
I agree. I think this is one of the key reasons HN succeeds as it does: the narrow, delimited incentives on the part of YC.
All of the writing and discussion that exists on HN, which isn't a YC ad, is a "halo" to attract and retain readers to this forum (and see the YC logos and YC ads). That's their primary incentive: attract users, attract a specific culture of users. It's an incentive aligned with quality and pleasantness for us. The daily forum experience isn't the revenue source; to monetize that, YC would risk losing more (on their YC-halo boosting side) than they could expect to gain (from McDonald's ads, or whatever).
This is the diametric opposite of how most social media platforms think about users, and their business models around them. The Reddit IPO is a case study: they've willingly chased away countless millions of users with an abrasive, horrible forum experience, because they calculate they can extract more revenue from those that remain. Where HN is a "narrow, tall" revenue source surrounded by free stuff, Reddit is "wide and short": everyone and everything is the product.
If anyone wants a legitimate business opportunity that’s admittedly notoriously difficult to monetize, consider starting a Reddit for porn. Once they’re public, all it takes is some bad PR (“I was sex trafficked on reddit” or “Reddit profited off a video of the abuse I was a victim of while underage”) for them to throw in the towel on the adult content that comprises half or more of their site. at which point there will be an overnight exodus seeking a similar platform. Reddit is a spineless and liberal company and will cave to pressure. Just my theory on a likely future event.
My use of the word liberal is not related to my use of the word spineless. There’s an “and” there and those are two unrelated adjectives. Doesn’t read well, though.
Yes I do believe the politics of the organization are relevant to assessing the likelihood of this event.
Interesting idea to advertise on Reddit front page. I suppose there’s value in edgelords, bots generating GPT ATH stories, and political shills. Good luck to them!
