Calling them “free-form ads,” Reddit said the new advertisements are its most native format ever, designed to look and feel like community content shared by real people.
The ads, meant to mimic the site’s megathreads, will enable advertisers to utilize a variety of formats in one post, including images, videos, and text.
According to numbers from Reddit, free-form ads got 28% more clicks than all other types of ads on the site and saw a jump in community engagement.
The next time you see an interesting post in your Reddit feed, take a closer look - because it might just be a paid advertisement.
This isn’t new, a few years ago I was looking at their ad program and they had inline post ads that you were taught to post like a user
If it’s not already the law, it needs to be. It should be required that paid advertising be disclosed in all contexts.
That’s already the case in at least the Netherlands.
Paid ads should not only need to be marked, but noticeably different in a timeline. Something obvious like a different post color.
Twitter fits ads in the middle of content and just puts a little tiny “Ad” in the upper corner (on mobile at least) and at a glance scrolling through you can’t tell it’s an ad, other than all of their ads now being for some shady mobile game that lies about how it looks or crypto in various forms. Those should be required to have a different color background than actual user posts, not just a size 8 font “Ad” in the corner of the post on a 3.5" screen.
In fact, let’s make it impossible to implement well, let’s take a page out of the NHTSA handbook and require the “Ad” text to be a specific real world size like they do with the car warning lights. Make them figure out what size it needs to be for various screen sizes and display DPI if they want to shove ads in the middle of content like it was user posts.
I think what YouTube does would be sufficient. There’s a noticeably different video progress bar colour (yellow instead of red) and a large “Skip Ad in __” in the corner, plus the advertiser information on the side.
Reddit could do this by putting a “Paid advertisement” watermark in the corner or putting “Advert” where the upvote/downvote buttons are and colouring it some noticeable colour, like yellow, and I would be satisfied with that.
Pretty sure this is not legal in many countries. Adverts must be at the very least labeled as such, like Google does with a tiny almost unnoticeable label.
In my country TV ads are explicitly marked with text in one corner
In my country, paper press as to identify when something looks like an article, but it’s an ad.
In the US, most TV commercials are so obviously TV commercials that they don’t label them. Some TV stations do have bumpers they air when the TV show goes to break and comes back from break.
I stopped watching local news when they started having the anchors pitch to ads like they were just another news item.
At this point if you removed all lies in the united states all youd have left is a chimp in a business suit with a flag lapel pin.
That’s not a nice thing to say about Trump.
That comparison isn’t nice to the chimp!
In another article they post a photo of an example from reddit and it does say promoted next to the post title. So there’s something there because there is an FTC law saying ads must be disclosed. Obviously they want to obfuscate that it’s an ad as much as possible though so who knows how that’ll change.
Like so:
Annoying and all that, but something pretty common in most social media sites I see nowadays. I quickly learn to filter anything with that label out as junk.
This feels like something that would be illegal in the EU. I have no idea if it actually is.
It’s illegal here in Germany. Ads need to be clearly recognizable as such.
So they will serve different frontend for different people based on location?
Honestly, I expect them to just remain in violation, unless they get sued or reprimanded by one of our user protection organisations.
But yeah, they can serve different frontends or just with different configuration for different user groups. They probably do that already, e.g. to display a cookie banner for users in the EU.
Yup. Just moving between German and French websites can be a pain in the ass. Default filters in shops, prices with or without taxes displayed first for professional things, different menus etc. They can be different in the most subtle ways, which is way worse imo.
Don’t get me started on websites who think they know better than you which website you’d like to visit. Stop redirecting me based on my IP or language settings! OK now I’m just venting sorry
Sounds like you need EXPRESS® VPN™! Use code LEMMY at checkout for 10% off!
(/s, but I hope that was obvious)
It’s an European law, thankfully.
Any ad that starts with TIL or DAE gets an immediate down vote, a cringe, and no further reading
Fuck Spez!!
I hope a side effect of the AI training on reddit comments is that text output is littered with Fuck Spez
It would be amazing 👍👍
Ads are not the only reason, but if you’re still on reddit, you clearly missed the point why reddit became popular.
Palpatine voice: Good. Goooood. Let the stupid flow through you.
Welcome to 5 years ago? This has been around for years…
OP lives under a rock
This is what killed Digg in 2010.
That’s weird; I’ve never seen any of those…
Oh yeah, that’s because I haven’t visited reddit in ~9 months.
Sounds terrible, glad I’m on Lemmy!
Just deleted my Reddit account. I haven’t used it in over a year now anyway. I was waiting for something like this to make a statement.
It’s been like one of those long running soap operas.
For at least the last 5 years “today’s” front page is nearly indistinguishable from “yesterday’s”.
You can disappear for 6 months and come back and it’s exactly the same. You’ve missed nothing.
Orange man bad, fascism bad, phobia bad, sexism bad, racism bad, bosses suck, inflation sucks, boomers suck, ooh a celebrity! Celebrity dead so sad.
That’s a lot like Lemmy though.
That’s most of the internet now. I mean, yay, we’re calling bad stuff bad. I do it, too, and I’m also addicted to orange man news like all you other rubber-neckers, but yawn it’s all getting a bit repetitious and homogenized. Unfortunately, as we get bored, the more these nutty politicians do crazy shit for the media to report on, all to keep our attention. It feels like a death spiral.
Gross.
First time I accidentally click on one of these I’m going to shit thst post up so hard.
Just ditch Reddit. Seriously. Why bother?
Some nice communities are locked in that deepest level of hell & despair …
Gotta try to drag a few good people back from Tartarus…
You could also just not do that
Yeah, I figure it does two ways
-
They get called out quickly and result in a bunch of shitposts or actively blasting the product
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They block posting which makes it obvious they’re ads and get little too no engagement anyhow
Reddit will program new mod bots to deal with organic responses the advertiser doesn’t consider constructive. That opens another revenue stream: charging advertisers for sub-specific bot tweaks.
The interesting question to me is, when does normie realize his sub has been co-opted to function as a focus group, and decide to look for a new forum.
-
In a few years my computer will be able to run an acceptable but obviously not chatGPT4 level AI that will among other things pre filter this crap from my feed as part of normal ad blocking. Buckle up bitches.
AI filtering of Reddit isn’t the way. The way is leaving the platform. This is beginning to remind me of the ‘decrapify Windows’ YT videos that offer 20-step multi-application guides for getting a tolerable experience, instead of explaining how to install Mac/Linux. Time spent on a rotten foundation is wasted.
I think a lot of the Internet is going to end up shitted up with this kind of nonsense. While leaving Reddit certainly tackles one issue, having a way to filter out the rest of this shit would be useful.
But in order for it to work you need HI. Human Intelligence can help you leave the platform today!
So the future is AI ad creators versus AI ad blockers, with all of us caught in the middle. Yay?!
Fortunately, at least in my experience, the adblockers usually win. Even if a company changes something to avoid an adblocker or force someone to turn off their adblocker (Hi, Twitch!), it’s usually fixed within just a few hours at most.
It’ll always be that way. For a user to see your ad you have to let them download your ad, and at that point it becomes like forcing a prisoner to write their own ransom note without your supervision and then letting them drop it in the mailbox themselves.
Future is the internet populated by bots while humans try to go analog.
I’m entertained, I need a book in this universe.
That book? It’s an advertisement…
I remember it already being a thing 5 years ago with upvote/downvote buttons, karma and everything. I guess they just removed the abyssmally small grey text that said something like ‘paid ad’ in a corner?
I used to downvote them. Now I just nothing them.
I assume the downvote doesn’t really count. It just looks to you as if it did.
I used to post nasty things when they allowed that. Then I used to downvote them. Then the ad blocker I used blocked them so I never saw them. Then I stopped posting on Reddit.
Report them as malicious content 👍
This was a thing like 10 years ago too, iirc. Ads had threads and you could post in them and up/down vote them. That… didn’t go well. For advertisers, that is.
