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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
Readit News
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.
[0]: An example: http://web.archive.org/web/20240302013005/https://twitter.co...
Almost everyone - I wonder if they move the "Ad" disclaimer to the left side when the UI is set to something like Arabic or Hebrew.
https://www.awise.us/images/2024-twitter-ad.jpg
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.
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.
[1] https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-goog...
[2] http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
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.
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 :(
And yes, this includes mobile.
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.
The minority group of original users only really impact things when the market is small.
Scale sucks in that way.
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.
Granted, they were a lot less loud about the change than Digg, but they didn't suffer anything near the same amount of hate.
https://revanced.app/
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.
There are some subreddits I’d like to browse still but I definitely won’t be joining back into that dumpster fire.
I’ve been using Lemmy but it’s honestly aggravating to use in many ways.
https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader
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?”
The world's economy has suffered a global, organized, and incredibly large dumping attack against a huge set of industries and social organizations.
The good news is that it seems to have stopped.
Dead Comment
Why would they leave money on the table after the bulk of their users proved to be docile in the face of so much recent enshittification?
What’s are the chances just before/after IPO, old.reddit.com shuts down?
Deleted Comment
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.
https://github.com/teddit-net/teddit
Since the API kerfluffle reddit's usefulness has dropped drastically.
Making ads look like user posts definitely kills the platform for me. They killed my platform and I killed my account.
Muxing ads. Who'd have thunk it?
But, I bet in the time since the API kerfuffle, they’ve gained users and engagement.