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Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands
- neals 7y agoAs with everything internet: good doesn't last. Now that Reddit has started its demise, where do we flok to next?
- jokoon 7y agoI just discovered that I can't browse voat without login in...
- johnchristopher 7y agoMaybe the stars are aligned for early adopters to try out a decentralized messaging style medium ?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- vkou 7y agoUnless you have a truly original idea that nobody who has given this throught stumbled on - it's not, and it won't work for all the same reasons that Mastodon does not work. Those reasons are harassment, child pornography, and having to delegate censorship to moderators/people with way too much time on their hands. You end up back where you started, with a clunky layer of centralized censorship on top of a distributed system.
- FreeTrade 7y agoI believe it is. https://memberapp.github.io/ https://memberapp.github.io/ All posts are stored on the blockchain using the Memo protocol.
- johnchristopher 7y agoI haven't looked at the software stack but this can't compete with whatsapp/telegram/line on look.
- growt 7y agoI'm not sure if its really a demise. For 99% of users it doesn't matter or it's even positive to not be associated with groups about hate speech or similar stuff.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoI’ve been on the site for 7 years (8 in a few days), have been part of the Century Club for 5 years and I would love to see the site with less bigotry. I would say it would be an improvement!
- foldr 7y agoYou're saying this on HN: a site that's vastly more regulated than reddit ever has been or is likely to be. I'm old enough to remember reddit before the days of subreddits. It wasn't a magnet for extreme content back then. That happened as a result of subreddits.
- jchw 7y agoReddit and Hacker News aren’t really similar/comparable, and extreme content came much, much later than the existence of subreddits (and the admins took a very hands off approach to it then, too.)
- foldr 7y agoAh yeah, I didn't mean to suggest that subreddits immediately led to extreme content. However, they obviously are part of what enables it, since that stuff would never have got voted onto the reddit front page.
- thefz 7y agoYou are right, but HN is regulated. Reddit is moderated. On Reddit there are so many examples of straight bad moderation, personal feuds, and aberrant behavior recently. Take a peek at /r/watchredditdie.
- golergka 7y agoAnd that's why HN is only good for a very specific and narrow subtopic of the whole reddit universe. You can't even have decent political discussion here, not mentioning all the other Reddit's delightful crazyness.
- agumonkey 7y agoAs with everything in life. The virginial bliss cannot sustain. As always, you need compromises and structure to integrate with external world support. Hopefully they don't change it too much.
- tanilama 7y agoYou can go to 4chan or 8chan, there is always some place for even more fringe opinions.
- seiko988 7y agoA quick glance at the voat entry will convince you that whatever comes next must withstand a banking blockade, DDOS, bitcoin dust attack, DNS denial and possibly no one will host your domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voat
- t34543 7y agoReddit really went downhill starting around 2015, so a continued decline isn’t all that surprising
- durnygbur 7y agoAd/brand driven reddit is the end of reddit and means that a new alternative will appear and we don't know yet what it'll be - finally exciting times for the web, again.
- longtom 7y agoThe notion that big brands do not want to advertise in "chaos" seems suspicious to me. In real life, there are Gucci ads right next to the homeless and drug addicts. People vandalize public ads with swastikas, Hitler beards and other sh*t, but brands do not care. Such incentives simply do not exist in real life, because nobody will realistically associate the ads with their coincidental context such as vandalism. I'm not seeing why this should be different on the internet. If it is, then I'd be interested in studies actually providing evidence for that.
- yoz-y 7y agoAdvertising on a neonazi blog is quite different than having a swastika tagged on top of your ad. The latter is quite clearly not your intent.
- m12k 7y agoI think Reddit is one of the only places on the internet that mirrors the diversity and messiness of the real world - but that's not the case for pretty much all the rest of the internet, so people's assumptions and expectations are based on that instead. In the real world, when Gucci has an ad next to a drug gang hideout, they don't worry that they will have to explain to anyone that they're not associated with or condoning the drug gang. That's not the expectation on the internet, because most websites represent a single business or community, not an entire city worth of communities. So advertisers rightfully fear the headlines like 'Gucci advertises on far-right forum' instead of 'Gucci advertises in city in which far right people also live'.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoYup. I think a lot of people - even here, of all places - also don't realize that Reddit and other generic social networks (Facebook, Instagram) aren't like HN. They're like the Internet. That is, /r/programming is to Reddit what HN is to WWW. Child porn groups on Instagram are to Instagram what child porn sites are to the whole Internet. All those social networks, allowing for bottom-up group creation, are micro-Internets over proprietary protocol (UI) on top of HTTP, with free, unsquatted and browser-configurable DNS equivalent.
- sudoaza 7y agoNot even the internet is safe from gentrification.
- m12k 7y agoI'd argue it's almost the other way around. Ever since the internet got popular with companies it's mostly been very 'clean' in that most websites represent a single company or community and you could easily stick to seeing only 'approved' content. Now with 'social media', the internet is finally seeing the real messiness of the real world and places where all types congregate.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoSocial media is best viewed not as Internet sites, but as mini-Internets spun on top of the real one. A company fanpage or company subreddit is the same as company site on the real Internet. A subreddit or community group is the equivalent of an Internet forum of pre-social-media days. The main difference is that all these mini-Internets are fully centralized, controlled each by a single corporate entity, and monetized through advertisement and surveillance.
- hos234 7y agoThe "real mess" of society is different from what social media has created. Social media has added a new dimension to complexity in society, by adding a number(upvote/click/like/view/retweet etc) next to every thought and utterance. Those numbers amplify behaviors both good and bad. People who say social media exposes the real mess, make it easy for social media companies to deny their contribution to the mess. When they start removing like counts (and it's taken way to long for this move) they are basically admitting their contribution to the mess. As data of the last 15 years gets analyzed, on the impact of these numbers on individual and group psychology, expect major class action suits against these companies.
- buboard 7y ago> with 'social media', the internet is finally seeing the real messiness of the real world You only see loud, minority groups. It becomes evident that they 're a minority in every election
- atupis 7y agoI think problem with Reddit advertising is that you at least could not before doing laser-focused campaigns like try to advertise people who are subscribed to ReasonML and sysadmin subreddits.
- mxcrossb 7y agoI’m not sure why any company would pay money to advertise there, when you can easily buy upvotes instead. Sure it takes a little more creativity and a longer investment, but if the current front page is any guide, there are plenty of organizations that can do it.
- maeln 7y agoAd works differently than normal post. Even if your post make it to the front page, it will only be displayed once. Also, it mean the user either need to be looking at r/all or popular, or be subscribed to the subreddit. Ad are display several time per page and will be display whatever subreddit the user is currently on.
- Traster 7y agoThere's a good reason why podcast hosts read the ad copy. Even if an advert is obviously an advert - if it comes from a trusted source it's still more effective. The adverts which are astro-turfed as real posts are more effective simply because they seem to be endorsed by the community you're a part of.
- PaulKeeble 7y agoIt also isn't legal throughout most of the western world so it is a pretty risky thing to be doing. Saying that no one has cracked down on the youtube channels that repeatedly do it nor websites that have been utilising it for 15 years so I guess it is pretty hard to start prosecuting now, it won't be Reddit that shows the necessity of applying that law.
- Traster 7y agoThere actually has been enforcement: https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/mondelez-uk-ltd-a14-275018.html#.VHWcAWSsXvQ https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/mondelez-uk-ltd-a14-275018.ht...
- s9w 7y ago
- GoofballJones 7y agoReddit learned too late about the user generated content business: Don't get into the user generated content business.
- raverbashing 7y agoWell, FB seems to be thriving on it.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoWell, as the disease of advertising progresses, Reddit too will shed all that made it interesting. It so happens that first to go are the people almost universally considered undesirable, but it won't stop at that.
- mwyah 7y agoI dislike advertising as much as the next guy but really, what alternatives do websites like reddit have?
- TeMPOraL 7y agoIndividual donations, subscriptions, being treated as a goodwill or marketing expense by a company doing working in some tangentially related space (the way YCombinator keeps HN running), are some ideas free of the problems of advertising. Here the core advertising-related problem is third party advertising. Were Reddit the co. to have some other business of their own that they advertised on Reddit in order to fund the site, there would still be ads, but they wouldn't interfere with the site itself. Here however, Reddit has to be neutered so that it appeals to generic advertisers - any content or communities that they, the third parties may find objectionable must go. It's hard to a site as Reddit to pivot from the status quo to any of the more reasonable business models, because they were started with third-party advertisements in mind from the get go. The fatal disease was transmitted at birth, but it's only now that it closes on to the terminal stage. Once you get people used to free, it's hard to start charging money, and Reddit the company doesn't have any other business that could fund the site pro bono.
- id_21150930 7y ago"Once you get people used to free, it's hard to start charging money" You can leave your core offering free/ad-encumbered, but add additional services (ideally, replicate your complements) For example, YouTube started off as free / ad sponsored, but look at the incredible revenue streams they have added: • Patreon-like subscription model • Merch integration with spring-tee • Music / Premium / TV subscription <--- this is most likely the largest revenue stream after ads. Now Reddit could be similar by adding: • Paid feeds for sexual content (r/sexsells), trading, crypto, art, etc. • Sponsored "TV mode" streams for major news / sports outlets • Verified status subscription? • Ability to post longer, Reddit hosted, videos behind a paywall with a preview. I'm just spitballing ideas which certainly have their complexities and challenges, but free user-generated content is a great way to acquire users for fractions of a penny. That userbase is reddit's competitive advantage when building any number of additional services.
- s9w 7y ago> known for provocative discussions and fringe groups ??? After the recent cleanups, there is basically only porn, video games and democratic talking points left. There is nothing even remotely provocative that isn't framed by huge warning signs
- JohnTClark 7y agoCan someone explain to me or point to some studies or books that explain why brands, advertisers etc. think that having small problematic groups on a platform affects the brand? You are making an ad for group A and put the ad on subreddits visited by group A, is the "dirt" produce by group B that bad for you that you need to get rid of group B?
- buboard 7y agoThere's activist groups that target advertisers to "let them know" about a platform. They often work as mobs that basically blackmail both the advertisers and the platforms with bad publicity. Advertisers are all about publicity, and so far all of them have caved in (Not sure if they 've ever tried the alternative). Like everything in advertising, i doubt you can find a single decent study about performance.
- tgtweak 7y agoIt's much more that these brands' marketing budgets and campaigns are managed by companies that lose contracts like this when a shareholder, partner, customer or press article brings it to their attention. At the ecosystem level this works - groups generating content that is undesirable (perspective being from the advertisers and their stakeholders) are demonetized and -in cases where policing doesn't happen - entire networks. No publisher or network is immune to this, even Google. It's the macro digital equivalent to boycotting and lobbying and it's effective. Advertisers have a say in where they put their money, and their money indirectly and in some cases directly enables that content. Best you can hope for is transparency and consistency in how the policy is governed.
- jbob2000 7y agoHave you ever worked for a large company that is recognized by everyone? You didn’t update your terms and conditions to meet the regulation date as of 12:01 AM? Lawsuit. You aren’t following accessibility standards? Reported to the human rights tribunal. You gave a perk to some clients but not others? 4,000 calls to the call center. Your ad was pictured next to a post about the nazis? Your brand made the evening news. We have two rules at my company that guide EVERYTHING we do: don’t cause calls to the call center, and don’t make the evening news. Things get crazy when you have customers that number in the millions, it changes everything about how you operate.
- buboard 7y agoReddit is already at the tipping point. I don't know if u ve checked out Mastodon or Riot but they look pretty good already. Basically everything non-heavily-leftist is looking for alternatives. My use of it is limited to some technical and well-moderated subreddits, the rest is just an endless parade of juvenile leftisness. Twitter has become more conductive for serendipitous discovery and lols these days, and they re getting better at helping ignore idiots.
- jimworm 7y agoWhat are those "big brands" willing to accept? If their ads appear on a different sub to those they consider objectionable content, would that be considered sufficiently "clean"? Is there a value placed on moderation, and if so, how much value is captured by individual moderators and how will it be allocated? Perhaps the most important factor in these communities is that most content is junk anyway, requiring mental effort from the reader to remove and avoid. That's what the whole voting thing is for. An advert would be "superjunk" - unwanted content that also has editorial control. It might be an illusion that a community is full of value to be skimmed off, when reality is that the junk is at barely maintainable levels and a little more might push it over the brink.
- neonate 7y agohttp://archive.is/CxvLo http://archive.is/CxvLo
- dclusin 7y agoI wonder if reddit has explored fostering or monetizing commerce that happens on reddit. Wherever people congregate there will often be commerce, formally or informally. But that presents its own set of problems as well.