Why pay for ads when you can pay for vote manipulation and viral marketing through organic posts? The cost / user engagement ratio has to be much better, right?
Reddit as a monolith is pretty good at catching that. Sure it'll miss one or two every now and then, but I don't see it being inundated by organic marketing anytime soon.
Also, as I understand it, they have been working on catching this stuff behind the scenes and they seem to be doing okay.
Reddit has an incentive to ignore and deny astroturfing. Go to a subreddit, look at account activity, and it is obvious they don't have it under control, at all.
But Reddit was built on fake activity, so what is new.
It's very obvious that advertisers discovered reddit for viral marketing some time ago. In the last few years the number of highly upvoted posts on /r/all that include logos and company names increased dramatically.
It's common to find top posts titled along the lines of "My SO and I recreated our first date at <fastfood joint>" or "The store where I work wanted to burn these clothes but I saved them: <link to image with cloths from a specific designer>".
Sometimes top comments were obviously made by advertisers where someone asks for a better alternative of a product depicted in the post and another one answers only 1 minute later with high praise for another product.
I don't believe that every mention of a product is directly advertising but I noticed a steep increase of users mentioning products directly by name and model number over the time.
Advertisers haven’t been ready for reddit for awhile.
Who wants their content associated with hate groups ? Trolls ? Adult content ? Moderators who are mistreated by staff. Staff that modifies other peoples comments ? And once they are ready maybe reddit won’t be what people want anymore .
Also, the fact that social media advertisers can do the ads cheaper . Why pay for something you can do for much less?
I guess reddit has a PR agency trying to push them so that advertisers will take the bait.
> Who wants their content associated with hate groups ? Trolls ? Adult content ? Moderators who are mistreated by staff. Staff that modifies other peoples comments ?
That's like the typical advertising experience with a print newspaper.
(This is somewhat satirical, I'm not suggesting that it's a sustainable long term situation.)
> Those concerns range from worries that ads will appear on controversial “subreddits,” or topic-based message forums, to fears of campaigns being flayed alive by Redditors on anti-advertising subreddits like HailCorporate.
Let's be honest, the problem is that the vast majority of marketers are really dumb and terrible at their jobs — they only want to do things that have already been "proven to work", even though by far the highest ROI goes to those who go first.
That's not to say there isn't a lot of fucked up stuff happening on Reddit, but that isn't the real issue here.
How many marketers do you know? I'm glad to see you edited "99% of marketers" to "vast majority of marketers," but that still reeks of a generalization based on personal opinion and not fact.
I've talked with hundreds or thousands. But the underlying idea comes from Seth Godin, who I'm sure has talked with at least an order of magnitude more. He has lots of posts on this theme, e.g.:
It's trivially easy to test the idea, just going on Bumble Networking (most people are marketers) and offer some new product or service that is obviously a no brainer. It doesn't matter if the thing you're selling doesn't actually exist, as long as it would be clearly beneficial. And just keep track of how much interest you actually get, versus people who just want to "make an instagram" or whatever.
I don't see what first-mover advantage has to do with Reddit as a marketing channel. Plenty of companies are already advertising there, and there are plenty of reasons why others aren't doing the same besides being "really dumb and terrible at their jobs.
> take the most critical, bullying group of individuals on the internet and throw them into one community; that is Reddit,” said Tuff.
Hah! This guy must not use the web often. Also, for a guy who eventually hopes to sell ads on the Reddit platform, he's not doing a great job of putting lipstick on the pig.
HN is more critical but less bullying. It rarely tolerates open crude abuse, but has a huge blind spot around "intellectual" bullying such as ""scientific"" racism.
HN has a problem with the libertarian hellscape ideology of laws being an impediment to wealth. I would argue this oppressive ideology is far more violent than the dross that's skimmed off Reddit.
Additionally, HN is far, far less intelligent than its users would have you believe, but that circles back to the edgelord libertarianism again.
Oppression is violence [1]. The willful disregard of laws enacted by a democratically elected legislature (from Uber's disregard of Taxi Medallions, airbnb's disregard of occupancy laws, to 2008-era banking scandals) of the upper class (successful entrepreneurs) is oppression against the lower classes.
Usually, this is taken care of through the courts, wherein the judicial system punishes people for crimes -- again, an act of violence. However, in the absence of punishment or a judiciary aligned with the interests of oppressors, the oppressed are morally justified in enacting punishment and responding to violence in kind.
[1] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1967.
Being against socialism is not violence. The idea that the taxi medallion system was anything but a cartel is very crude. I'm not even sure what kind of person writes these comments that are in stark disagreement to the founding principles of the USA. Authoritarian governments are the exact violence the USA was founded to get away from.
Critical, maybe, but I don't see rampant racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. all over this site like I do on reddit. People are also generally a lot more snarky and sarcastic on reddit than they are here, which could be perceived as 'bullying' if you're just looking to have fun discussions.
But of course with reddit, it's 100% up to you to make it good. Find the right communities, ditch the wrong ones, and you're going to have a great time.
> I don't see rampant racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. all over this site
"All over," no--it's mostly, though not always, contained to the topics at hand. Most times that Sheryl Sandberg or Ellen Pao or any group that would maybe like to encourage people who are not dudes to learn to code and maybe get a job come up, this has historically bubbled up. Similarly, topics that do not revolve around white (and occasionally South and/or East Asian) men usually come with a sidebar of pseudoscience-cloaked racism or the blurfing of "equality of opportunity" with its implications of inferiority.
It has certainly improved since 'dang and 'sctb took the reins. And you can't be an overt meme-turd here and get away with it. But adjusting one's pince-nez and well-actuallying into sexism and racism isn't really better, and on that HN has a ways to go.
Would disagree. HN is critical in the sense that people actually debate a significant amount of the time instead of replying with memes. Calling spades what they are isn't, in my opinion, equivalent to being needlessly critical.
As for bullying, I think we can all agree that vote-brigading, doxxing, trolling, and racist speech are far more prevalent on reddit than HN. /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/the_donald, /r/roastme, /r/murderedbywords being some good examples, not to mention incels and redpillers.
Yes. If advertisers aren't ready for the whole spectrum of what humanity has to offer, they aren't ready for life and should probably stay at home, lock their doors, bar their windows, and cease all contact with the outside world.
Also what Tuff said applies more readily to various chans, less to reddit, which usually has more civilized discussions - A natural by-product of trying to piss off preferably less than 50% of the userbase with each post.
In the physical world you don't have to put ads directly next to the KKK, but if there's still some sort of demonstration passing your ad nobody is going to blame you for it there either.
Also the notion that the same people who use a website are going to blame an advertiser for advertising next to content that is the norm there, is just weird.
He makes the same mistake everybody else does: reddit is not one place. /r/news is not /r/dogs, is not /r/the_donald, is not /r/randomActsOfChristmas is not /r/kotlin.
And yes their blindside is a persistent market failure, that I sadly cannot take advantage of.
I don't think mainstream advertising that appeals to the general public will ever be successful on Reddit. Niche advertising, such as recruiting and product placement in subs like /r/sysadmin, or fanduel in /r/nfl, will have mild success - but not enough to make Reddit profitable. Ironically I think imgur will have more success then Reddit in the long run.
This is the end of Reddit. They can’t monetize the web version of their site because their users are sophisticated enough to use ad blockers. If they load up their mobile app with ads, people will just use a 3rd party Reddit app. So they’ll have to ban 3rd party apps which will betray all the users who got into Reddit because it was an open platform.
Selling upvotes without marking posts as 'promoted' is an option if they badly need a way to sustain. But I'm pretty sure most of the userbase (including me) would leave if this was made public.
> their users are sophisticated enough to use ad blockers
Do you have a source for that? I don't find it impossible to believe, but that's a pretty bold claim. I'm sure a lot of people use ad blockers, but how does that number compare to total user volume? And how does it break down (engaged users, infrequent visitors, etc.)?
I think it's important to note, as mentioned in the article, just how much more mainstream Reddit is becoming. And along with that, less tech-savvy users less likely to use adblockers. I'd love to see some numbers on this too!
> They can’t monetize the web version of their site because their users are sophisticated enough to use ad blockers.
I think you've over generalizing a bit - I think we've gotten to the point where reddit is fairly "mainstream." My bet is there are plenty of reddit users out there not using ad blockers.
There was a time when playing multi-player FPS games against other people on the internet was a "fringe activity" probably mostly enjoyed by a very small subset of the population. Now 40 year old I-bankers blow off steam playing Halo. I think reddit has just about gotten to that level.
Relatively sophisticated. No matter how mainstream Reddit becomes, the average user is always going to be more tech savy than the average reader at cnn.com, for example. Therefore, because ad blockers are a problem for traditional publications, they’re certainly a problem for Reddit.
I tried advertising on Reddit earlier this year. I picked a few subreddits, whipped out my credit card, picked a few key phrases, and figured I was ready to go.
The advertising UI left a lot to be desired. I was hoping to run multiple versions of the same ad to test CTR, no dice. I could set up multiple ads, wait for them each to be approved, then manually make changes through molasses, possibly with additional approvals after each one.
I've used Google Ads, Bing, and some of those "curated" networks before. All of them felt like they wanted to help me succeed (so I'd give them more money). Using the Reddit system felt like a fight I was losing the whole time.
(at the time they were segregating advertisers into the like 10K+ spenders, and others. we were in the others category)
This feels like an impossible game. Reddit's advertising UI will never have as many features as Google's. Just compare how many engineers each company has.
Once you've got my money, and have seen a few of my ads, never require approval again unless I've been bad.
That will never fly, for the sole reason that reddit is small enough and young enough that they could be run over by somebody willing to drop 10 grand. Googles spam filter is probably the best.
Every bit of UI, except the two main ones[1], leave a lot to be desired. Their moderation tools are still atrocious, despite promising for years to improve things.
[1] The list of submissions for any particular subreddit, and the subreddits therein. As far as I'm concerned, they absolutely nailed it, and should be wary of messing with a good thing.
I've been saying for a couple of years now that Reddit is on a clear downward spiral. Do you believe me yet?
The right approach is federation with small, user-operated instances that all talk to each other GNUSocial/Mastodon style. That's the only way to make sustainable social networks that work in the interests of their users. Capitalism-driven social networks do not work.
The right approach is federation with small, user-operated instances that all talk to each other GNUSocial/Mastodon style. That's the only way to make sustainable social networks that work in the interests of their users.
It's not yet known if this model is viable, or sustainable. I certainly hope so, but time will tell.
But it can die of two ways - rampant schisms, or total disinterest.
Federation without scarcity or central control means that networks can splinter into tiny, insular subgroups.
And anyone can always stand up a new instance - if they can be bothered to. Running and moderating a forum or a subreddit is hard, and not everyone is willing to do it (either by refusing to start a new instance, or by administrating one poorly.)
>Federation without scarcity or central control means that networks can splinter into tiny, insular subgroups.
Sometimes rifts can happen but the network never entirely fractures - at least this hasn't happened on the GNUSocial/Mastodon/etc network yet. By default everyone federates with everyone else, and there are enough instances that scisms are rare and isolated, and don't break the network.
>And anyone can always stand up a new instance - if they can be bothered to. Running and moderating a forum or a subreddit is hard, and not everyone is willing to do it (either by refusing to start a new instance, or by administrating one poorly.)
Not everyone needs to, though. You just need to find someone who is running an instance whose values are aligned with yours. There are several hundred Mastodon instances to choose from, it's easy to find such a place.
The 500lb gorilla in the room that no one is talking about when it comes to Reddit ads is this. Go to Reddit right now and hit the "All" button and just see how much hardcore pornography pops up immediately. I'm not making some sort of moral judgement here at all, but that can and does scare off tons of big brands.
I just opened up an incognito window and hit /r/all. In the first two pages, I saw nothing NSFW except a joke about a hotel survey which mentions a hooker that would certainly pass on network television.
I'm a huge fan of Reddit, it's basically where I got my info about everything in my life. It's like an up to date, curated version of the mess that some news site are. Plus conversations is highly interesting most of the time. Of course, you have to follow the good one, and read what you want to read.
The site already has ads. Sidebar ads, banner ads, ads that look like regular submissions to the site. Not to mention the more natural advertising that /r/hailcorporate likes to freak out about a lot.
Any brand that only sells things that work as advertised and isn't backed by a tone-deaf marketing department should be able to hold up against any "brand-safety concerns". If they could also accept that no one wants to be tracked and that they should trust the people they're working with to report semi-accurate impression numbers instead of trying to use user machines as arbiters, maybe they could pull off some in-line advertising. While I've never seen a unicorn, I can't prove they don't exist. Good luck Reddit.
I don't mind the promoted Triplebyte ad I see at the top of my reddit landing page. I'm subscribed to r/git and r/programming; I suspect it's coming from my r/programming subscription. My ad-blocker is enabled for reddit, but the Triplebyte promoted ad still gets through. I guess it's not really an ad but a promoted topic. It even has the upvote/downvote buttons. It's been there for probably the last month.
(I work at Triplebyte.) Thanks, that's great to hear! It works for us too -- we can easily measure that we've created a lot of great career opportunities for engineers who came to us via the r/programming promoted post.
Reddit tries way too hard to funnel people into their app, which I assume gives them more options for uncontrollable ad spam.
Dark patterns that constantly advertise apps really need to go.
On mobile I prefer the desktop Reddit site due to high link density and the fact that, frankly, browsers are BETTER because of trivial pinch/zoom/scroll, opening in new tabs, etc.
Instead, Every Single Time I visit Reddit I have to deal with a stupid loading animation, then a massive message covering half my phone screen giving me only two options (App or Mobile Site), just so the page will load to the point where I can use the Request Desktop Site command. The experience sucks now, and if they make it worse I will simply stop using Reddit instead of hopping on board.
> To ensure those whitelisted subreddits stay safe, Reddit monitors the posts published to them using language analysis technology. If it finds posts that violate its quality standards, it turns off ads for that subreddit.
That's surprisingly honorable. I worry that, if Reddit is faced with more financial struggles in the future, this would be among the first things to change. Imagine if, instead of programmatically terminating advertisements and having a human check the content for moderation, they programmatically removed the content instead of the ads.
90 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadIt might have a better return on investment than ads.
Also, as I understand it, they have been working on catching this stuff behind the scenes and they seem to be doing okay.
But Reddit was built on fake activity, so what is new.
Because it already is
It's common to find top posts titled along the lines of "My SO and I recreated our first date at <fastfood joint>" or "The store where I work wanted to burn these clothes but I saved them: <link to image with cloths from a specific designer>".
Sometimes top comments were obviously made by advertisers where someone asks for a better alternative of a product depicted in the post and another one answers only 1 minute later with high praise for another product.
I don't believe that every mention of a product is directly advertising but I noticed a steep increase of users mentioning products directly by name and model number over the time.
I'm wondering if I'll be able to pick my nose and dig in my ass in the future without offending someone...
Who wants their content associated with hate groups ? Trolls ? Adult content ? Moderators who are mistreated by staff. Staff that modifies other peoples comments ? And once they are ready maybe reddit won’t be what people want anymore .
Also, the fact that social media advertisers can do the ads cheaper . Why pay for something you can do for much less?
I guess reddit has a PR agency trying to push them so that advertisers will take the bait.
That's like the typical advertising experience with a print newspaper.
(This is somewhat satirical, I'm not suggesting that it's a sustainable long term situation.)
Let's be honest, the problem is that the vast majority of marketers are really dumb and terrible at their jobs — they only want to do things that have already been "proven to work", even though by far the highest ROI goes to those who go first.
That's not to say there isn't a lot of fucked up stuff happening on Reddit, but that isn't the real issue here.
I've talked with hundreds or thousands. But the underlying idea comes from Seth Godin, who I'm sure has talked with at least an order of magnitude more. He has lots of posts on this theme, e.g.:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/07/the-importan...
It's trivially easy to test the idea, just going on Bumble Networking (most people are marketers) and offer some new product or service that is obviously a no brainer. It doesn't matter if the thing you're selling doesn't actually exist, as long as it would be clearly beneficial. And just keep track of how much interest you actually get, versus people who just want to "make an instagram" or whatever.
Hah! This guy must not use the web often. Also, for a guy who eventually hopes to sell ads on the Reddit platform, he's not doing a great job of putting lipstick on the pig.
Additionally, HN is far, far less intelligent than its users would have you believe, but that circles back to the edgelord libertarianism again.
Usually, this is taken care of through the courts, wherein the judicial system punishes people for crimes -- again, an act of violence. However, in the absence of punishment or a judiciary aligned with the interests of oppressors, the oppressed are morally justified in enacting punishment and responding to violence in kind.
[1] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1967.
You might want to ask a black person or an Indian for their perspective on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawes_Rolls
But of course with reddit, it's 100% up to you to make it good. Find the right communities, ditch the wrong ones, and you're going to have a great time.
"All over," no--it's mostly, though not always, contained to the topics at hand. Most times that Sheryl Sandberg or Ellen Pao or any group that would maybe like to encourage people who are not dudes to learn to code and maybe get a job come up, this has historically bubbled up. Similarly, topics that do not revolve around white (and occasionally South and/or East Asian) men usually come with a sidebar of pseudoscience-cloaked racism or the blurfing of "equality of opportunity" with its implications of inferiority.
It has certainly improved since 'dang and 'sctb took the reins. And you can't be an overt meme-turd here and get away with it. But adjusting one's pince-nez and well-actuallying into sexism and racism isn't really better, and on that HN has a ways to go.
As for bullying, I think we can all agree that vote-brigading, doxxing, trolling, and racist speech are far more prevalent on reddit than HN. /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/the_donald, /r/roastme, /r/murderedbywords being some good examples, not to mention incels and redpillers.
Also what Tuff said applies more readily to various chans, less to reddit, which usually has more civilized discussions - A natural by-product of trying to piss off preferably less than 50% of the userbase with each post.
In the physical world you don't have to put ads directly next to the KKK, but if there's still some sort of demonstration passing your ad nobody is going to blame you for it there either.
Also the notion that the same people who use a website are going to blame an advertiser for advertising next to content that is the norm there, is just weird.
And yes their blindside is a persistent market failure, that I sadly cannot take advantage of.
Mainstream advertising doesn't appeal to the general public. People tolerate it because they don't know they can turn it off.
If web browsers shipped with ad-blocking turned on by default then most people would never turn it off.
People have been proclaiming the end of Reddit since before Digg's downfall.
Do you have a source for that? I don't find it impossible to believe, but that's a pretty bold claim. I'm sure a lot of people use ad blockers, but how does that number compare to total user volume? And how does it break down (engaged users, infrequent visitors, etc.)?
I think you've over generalizing a bit - I think we've gotten to the point where reddit is fairly "mainstream." My bet is there are plenty of reddit users out there not using ad blockers.
There was a time when playing multi-player FPS games against other people on the internet was a "fringe activity" probably mostly enjoyed by a very small subset of the population. Now 40 year old I-bankers blow off steam playing Halo. I think reddit has just about gotten to that level.
Then the_donald will rebel and create kekcoin.
Or I just pay for Reddit Gold, which removes ads (among other features).
If you take a look at /r/popular it's mostly nonsense. The majority of reddit are looking at cute animals and memes about tv, movies, and video games.
The advertising UI left a lot to be desired. I was hoping to run multiple versions of the same ad to test CTR, no dice. I could set up multiple ads, wait for them each to be approved, then manually make changes through molasses, possibly with additional approvals after each one.
I've used Google Ads, Bing, and some of those "curated" networks before. All of them felt like they wanted to help me succeed (so I'd give them more money). Using the Reddit system felt like a fight I was losing the whole time.
(at the time they were segregating advertisers into the like 10K+ spenders, and others. we were in the others category)
I'd settle for:
- Let me run multiple versions of an ad, run more of the one that has the best CTR.
- Once you've got my money, and have seen a few of my ads, never require approval again unless I've been bad.
- Label all graphs clearly.
- Give me an estimate of how many ads will show at various bids.
That will never fly, for the sole reason that reddit is small enough and young enough that they could be run over by somebody willing to drop 10 grand. Googles spam filter is probably the best.
Every bit of UI, except the two main ones[1], leave a lot to be desired. Their moderation tools are still atrocious, despite promising for years to improve things.
[1] The list of submissions for any particular subreddit, and the subreddits therein. As far as I'm concerned, they absolutely nailed it, and should be wary of messing with a good thing.
Lol.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The right approach is federation with small, user-operated instances that all talk to each other GNUSocial/Mastodon style. That's the only way to make sustainable social networks that work in the interests of their users. Capitalism-driven social networks do not work.
People have been saying that for years, and yet Reddit is still here. (With that said, I do agree with the rest of your comment)
It's not yet known if this model is viable, or sustainable. I certainly hope so, but time will tell.
Federation without scarcity or central control means that networks can splinter into tiny, insular subgroups.
And anyone can always stand up a new instance - if they can be bothered to. Running and moderating a forum or a subreddit is hard, and not everyone is willing to do it (either by refusing to start a new instance, or by administrating one poorly.)
Sometimes rifts can happen but the network never entirely fractures - at least this hasn't happened on the GNUSocial/Mastodon/etc network yet. By default everyone federates with everyone else, and there are enough instances that scisms are rare and isolated, and don't break the network.
>And anyone can always stand up a new instance - if they can be bothered to. Running and moderating a forum or a subreddit is hard, and not everyone is willing to do it (either by refusing to start a new instance, or by administrating one poorly.)
Not everyone needs to, though. You just need to find someone who is running an instance whose values are aligned with yours. There are several hundred Mastodon instances to choose from, it's easy to find such a place.
Dark patterns that constantly advertise apps really need to go.
On mobile I prefer the desktop Reddit site due to high link density and the fact that, frankly, browsers are BETTER because of trivial pinch/zoom/scroll, opening in new tabs, etc.
Instead, Every Single Time I visit Reddit I have to deal with a stupid loading animation, then a massive message covering half my phone screen giving me only two options (App or Mobile Site), just so the page will load to the point where I can use the Request Desktop Site command. The experience sucks now, and if they make it worse I will simply stop using Reddit instead of hopping on board.
The day reddit starts shutting out 3rd party apps is the day I stop using reddit.
That's surprisingly honorable. I worry that, if Reddit is faced with more financial struggles in the future, this would be among the first things to change. Imagine if, instead of programmatically terminating advertisements and having a human check the content for moderation, they programmatically removed the content instead of the ads.