What happened to them being so desperate to make money that they’d charge third party all devs $20 million a year for API access? Surely removing ways to give them money won’t help that situation, right?
I know the API thing was all about control and not the actual money, but they’re just being so blatant about not giving a fuck about the site or the users. What a dreadful company.
As an advertiser, I suspect they’re trying to give us more groups of people to target. Ads are expensive, and generate a lot more money than Reddit gold
As an advertiser
I have a serious question for you, if you have a moment. Do advertisers have any way of knowing what percentage of the views they’re paying for are actual humans, and what are bots?
Because it seems to me that this is an excellent scam on a corporate level: Reddit ditches users and mods in favor of bots interacting with bots, the number of accounts and views don’t dip dramatically, and Reddit, Inc. continues to pull in all that sweet advertising revenue because there’s no way for advertisers to know the difference for sure, or the ratio of bot to humans on the site or in a sub with any kind of precision.
I’d appreciate your thoughts on this, because I’ve been pondering this for a while but do not have any knowledge of advertising metrics, or what would stop a dishonest/bad-faith board like Reddit’s from doing this to some degree just because they can.
Not an advertiser but they generally know % of views (“impressions”) to clicks (called click through rate) and percentage of clicks that turn into sales (called conversion rate).
For that reason, I don’t think they’re trying to get rid of human users completely, just the “troublemakers”.
I think they want to lead the “silent majority” users into a bot advertorial content hellscape where they control all the levers of power and everything is for sale.
Thank you, I think you’re right. Interesting you mentioned click thru rate though, because another commenting advertiser here on Lemmy noticing weird shit with Reddit lately brought that up, saying his click through rate was good but then when he looked into there were many immediate abandons, and someone else explained that’s because people were getting tricked by the ads that look like posts and immediately backing out once clicked.
I’d be happy to find the comment for you but I have no idea how to find shit here yet, lol. I’ll look; if I find it I’ll edit this comment with a link.
EDITED TO ADD I think this is it: https://lemmy.world/comment/644214 (see the other posts by the same guy also if you’re interested, like this one https://lemmy.world/comment/652045 and https://lemmy.world/post/837198)
I just said this yesterday or two days ago when they announced they were going to start paying people for content, but it truly is amazing how Reddit can find another significant thing that will hurt them as a business and move forward with it.
It seems like they’d run out of things that could significantly hurt their business, they just keep finding something else.
Soon they’re going to be down to basic features, And they’ll be like hey look so hyperlinks don’t work anymore. And then that’ll be the end of the press release.
Their “business decisions” are insane right now.
It’s very difficult to see this procession of self-mutilation technologically in another light other than deliberate corporate suicide. Like is someone going to benefit if Reddit goes bankrupt? Is that what’s happening?
Reddit’s incompetence is so mind-blowing it’s unreal. Even a crackhead can manage Reddit better than spez
It’s truly shocking. Like all the Twitter stuff that musk is doing, seems in some way connected to his ego and they seem like genuine mistakes that he’s making because he’s completely out of touch and an a******.
But with Reddit, it’s like I can’t follow the logic of these decisions at all, I can’t tie back these obvious blunders to any sort of logical troubleshooting decision making process for their company.
Perplexing
The logic is to destabilise public forums ahead of upcoming elections, so the wealthy can consolidate more power.
It’s good that Reddit did this today because the memes on the fediverse have been extremely good lately. Reddit Remainers checking it out will find a fun, active community
If I was more paranoid, I’d say that the fucking stupid bean meme bs that happened right when the Reddit api shut down was awfully convenient for Reddit.
I thought it was hilarious and made the community feel fun and alive, which Reddit hasn’t felt like for a long time.
Yeah, Reddit just doesn’t feel good anymore for me. Lemmy does.
