Reddit, AI spam bots explore new ways to show ads in your feed
#For sale: Ads that look like legit Reddit user posts
“We highly recommend only mentioning the brand name of your product since mentioning links in posts makes the post more likely to be reported as spam and hidden. We find that humans don’t usually type out full URLs in natural conversation and plus, most Internet users are happy to do a quick Google Search,” ReplyGuy’s website reads.
The only remaining use for reddit for me is basically being a Stack Overflow for non-technology stuff (want to find the best bidet, there’s probably a review post on reddit that someone put together).
Now that comments might be well-hidden marketing attempts, there’s legit no trusting that information anymore.
Way to go, Reddit. In a few months, I’ll no longer have any reason to look at a post from 2024 or later.
Same, plus porn. I haven’t run across active communities on lemmy that cater to what I’m looking for, but reddit still going strong in that regard.
Other than that, I haven’t visited in months.
When reddit bans porn, it will truly be over
I gave up even on that a long time ago. Every subreddit was overrun by softcore pics from women with onlyfans.
Definitely not every…
Jesus Christ it’s like how you know that skull fucking grandma would be awful, but actually seeing it happen is a whole different level of fucked up.
brands can tap into the rich, high-intent product conversations
What the hell is a high-intent product conversation?
Via context clues I think this means conversations that have a high likelyhood of buying something.
Like a thread asking for a phone recommendation is likely going to end in a sale. But it’s written by a PR drone and thus doesn’t look like English.
High chance of product purchase.
People talking about topics the marketing-droids feel is likely to result in the sale of a product, i.e., “What is the best X to buy?”
Yeah, I’m done with it.
After getting a sitewide ban for ‘report abuse’, for reporting literal rule breaking posts (blatant, not even questionable), and the appeal not even being responded to for almost a year now, yeah I’m done with it too. Can’t even make a new account, it gets insta-banned, you’d think I did something truly awful, but nope.
I’m still waiting for the day when actual ads across the internet drown in AI-generated advertisements pointing to no real product or service. Perhaps that’ll make attention industry collapse?
If you’re looking for a side project idea, here’s one.
This is a similar idea to culture jamming, people would put subversive books in libraries and book stores, change labels on products in supermarkets, etc. It’s not a bad way to draw attention to something people are already accustomed to seeing.
“With Dynamic Product Ads, brands can tap into the rich, high-intent product conversations that people come to Reddit for," Reddit EVP of Business Marketing and Growth Jim Squires said in a statement.
Gross.
What research is telling them that people come to Reddit to talk to corporations about products? Where was the survey? And what the fuck is a “high-intent product conversation”? These people are making shit up.
Yeah, that’s marketing for you.
I remember seeing threads like “What was the best purchase that you made for under 100” or some variation every once in a while. I’m sure those got corpo eyes real interested if they weren’t advertising in them already.
So they started by making polls and surveys not obvious? That makes sense. If people know that a survey is a survey, especially on a site like Reddit, the users will tell each other and attempt to fuck with the results
also remember the ineeeedit sub? they initially nuked it due to companies using it to secretly sell products then reddit realized they themselves can do it.
See Also: r/thisiswhyimbroke
Oh look, another what “bought for life” thread.
Jfc people came to Reddit because up until now they were getting replies from real people with that have no financial interest in the outcome. This completely subverts everything people valued about Reddit. This fucking guy.
If people who are still on Reddit don’t leave over this, I don’t know what will make them leave.
Nothing. Social media (and social-ish media like Reddit) have a strong, strong hold on people. Facebook is still an incredibly popular site. People don’t abandon social media sites until they literally have to, like in the instance of MySpace, vine. A company definitely contributes to that by tanking their own UI and making people leave, which in turn causes a downward spiral of the company grabbing on harder to the dwindling user base, trying to monetize them harder and harder, until they company itself bottoms out and shuts down the servers.
Those of us that left Reddit willingly when we were tired of being used by them are in the very small minority. They lost, what, like 1-2% of their user base when nearly every single comment in any thread about the API debacle that said, “this is the last straw, I’m leaving and deleting my comment history” was getting massive amounts of support? People on the internet talk a big game, but ultimately are hopelessly addicted to their routines.
This is all by design, of course. We’re conditioned to open their apps and sites by reflex when we turn on the phone or computer. It fuckin works. But dammit if it doesn’t feel good breaking that spell. But it’s super disappointing others are willing to take every slap to the face and simply say “thank you sir may I have another.” Those people contribute to enshittification as much as the companies, honestly.
Lot of truth to this.
Facebook users know very well that Mark has spent the last 10 years, bastardizing Facebook in every way he can. It’s not a good place for security. He doesn’t give a shit about your privacy. He no longers rely on actual people to help step in and resolve on-site problems, rather rely on a stupid hub system and he’s high on his stupid metaverse shit.
Yet, billions are still there.
Reddit, same way. The worst part about Reddit and even Twitter users is the mental gymnastics they’re willing to go through, to justify and rationalize why they’re staying.
People on the internet talk a big game, but ultimately are hopelessly addicted to their routines.
Nice pic to visualize every modern boycott. Aggravating to see people lie about their morals, and then keep eating the shit they are being fed.
Yes, but by completely destroying that they can make the line go up for 2 quarters, so worth it. Also, corpos would actually prefer users not having access to these discussion spaces and the free information they provide, so you would have to rely on overSEOd shit content and ads. I hate what the internet has become
rich, high-intent product conversations
these people make me so fucking sick i cannot
i cannot believe this site i spent so many sad years posting on in high school, with pure heart, posting purely out of a desire for interesting interactions and the potential to make insightful, peer-reviewed contributions that others could enjoy, has turned into such fucking dead-eyed garbage.
“how do we turn our users into money”
Based on that quote, AI might have already taken over the leadership also
It makes me so mad…it’s like a company butting into a conversation me and a friend are having in person.
I’m looking forward to their “Dynamic Product Ads” system to coming back to bite them in the ass when ads for Nestle products appear next to posts talking about whatever horrific thing Nestle is doing this week (and similar things).
The funny thing is, the ai-generated engagement is specifically formatted to still be desirable in that situation, because plenty of advertising is already purely to create goodwill.
Imagine that when people start talking about Nestle being horrible to its workers, a “dynamic product ad” chimes in to retort that Nestle is actually great and cares about its workers.
Exactly like election disinformation? Yup, and plenty of companies can’t wait to have their own disinformation bot net, sanctioned under the guise of “advertising.”
@tearsintherain I see repost bots on the front page all the time now
It was mildy uplifting to downvote those things
And now ensues an arms race, in which advertisers attempt to plant adverts into comment sections naturally, while reddit attempts to stop them doing it for free.
No company with shareholders can ever avoid enshittification.
Next stop: advertisers pushing product placement into generative images, and generative images with product placement littering image searches. It’s a pandora’s box we can’t close
You mean ‘native advertising’? that is something r/hailcorporate was pointing out for years, I wonder if it’s been banned yet
Even without becoming public. This was unavoidable and had to happen at some point due to how valuable reddits knowledge was/is.
Coca Cola would never do anything like this.
Neither would McDonald’s®. Makers of the legendary BigMac™.
I’ve seen these same kinds of posts, obviously ads and less obviously by AI on Lemmy every once in a while which started maybe a month and a half or so ago? Makes me wonder if they were testing their shit over here.
I would not be surprised at all if small scale testing occurred here. It actually (unfortunately) makes sense since the Lemmy API is free to use. They could just trickle out bot comments and gauge reaction.
Scary but true…
Basically, the situation right now…
Unbelievable. I mean look at this…
goatse.png
Err. Hmmm.
Dang
So… is it safe to assume reddit is suppressing it and handing out bans?
Pretty sure they really don’t like ads they don’t make any money from.
I would be more surprised if they weren’t.
We highly recommend only mentioning the brand name of your product since mentioning links in posts makes the post more likely to be reported as spam and hidden.
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