4 ms·

Probably they should have found a way to require third party apps to display their ads.

by andrewstuart 3y ago

wahahah 3y ago
AFAIK it's generally not a thing because of fraud / lack of metribility.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mrtksn 3y ago
Or sell influence? Pick brands or politics and curate what people see by manipulating the rankings. However this is worse than regular ads. Honestly, I wish those platforms(all the social media) were transparent and pay for use. When it's free the experience sucks for everyone, can you imagine if we had the tech in the telephone era to inject ads in phone calls or reduce connectivity to those who talks stuff not kosher in the current political environment.
- chwilson 3y ago
  app.net[1] tried this in the early 2010s, unfortunately most people (i.e. enough people to justify running the service) wouldn't pony up. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    Wasn't that $50? That was kindof a silly amount of money for the state of the internet and the size of the platform.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      The amount doesn't really matter. As a thought experiment: how big would the network have to be for you to start considering paying for access? The Fediverse (Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, etc) is already clocking in at around ~10M users. How much do you think it would be a "reasonable" amount for a service provider to charge for an account?
      - plagiarist 3y ago
        If they're actually providing a service beyond what's available everywhere else, such as actively removing bigoted garbage or more powerful tools to discover high quality content relevant to me, I'd toss them a few bucks a month. Especially now in 2023. I don't think I would have paid even that much in 2010. And certainly not $50 for a newer and smaller network. I get what you're saying. I acknowledge I am an anomaly in being willing to pay at all. I just wonder if maybe it was the wrong time ($50 was certainly and still the wrong price IMO) for a paid social network to be successful. Perhaps it could work today with a small subscription.
        rglullis 3y ago
        See, that is the problem right there: the things that are "beyond what's available everywhere else" are financed with ads, data mining, or both. I am talking about how much you would pay to have basic access to service. The reason that people don't pay is that everyone wants to add conditions to justify their financial support, and this is why we all end up in the mess we are all in. Now, let me try again: go to https://communick.com/packages https://communick.com/packages and tell me if you think that what I am charging for the basic access packages is unreasonable.
        plagiarist 3y ago
        Ah, you're irritable because it's personal to you. Yes, people place conditions on what they are willing to purchase, that's... how it works? Why do I even want to be on Mastodon, let alone pay to be on it, let alone pay someone who is rent-seeking on top of a platform and content they aren't responsible for? Can't I get access to the social network direct from the source, for free?
        rglullis 3y ago
        > Can't I get access to the social network direct from the source, for free? For free? No, you can't. - You (or someone else) will have to develop the software. The source code doesn't just show up magically on github. - You (or someone else) will have to test the software, triage bugs, help with documentation, etc. - You (or someone else) will have to pay for the servers. - You (or someone else) will have to do content moderation None of these things are free. TANSTAAFL. If you are using it, it will cost you something, it's up to you if you want to pay with your money, your time, or your data.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Unfortunately, this shows how much the people that keep complaining about Elon Musk or Zuckerberg really should not be listened to. People suddenly do not care that much about privacy if it costs them anything or brings some inconvenience. I keep running https://communick.com https://communick.com because I am stubborn and because I can afford to, but honestly I've pretty much have given up hope that the basic services (Mastodon, Matrix) will ever reach enough users to be able to pay for themselves.
    - piaste 3y ago
      > I keep running https://communick.com https://communick.com because I am stubborn and because I can afford to, but honestly I've pretty much have given up hope that the basic services (Mastodon, Matrix) will ever reach enough users to be able to pay for themselves. I have a faint hope that mobile hardware, software, and networking may eventually improve enough that federated communication nodes could run directly off the clients themselves. The technical requirements are far from impossible - without even going for a Linux phone, you can run a nginx web server on Android via termux, and use dynamic DNS and/or IPv6 to stay discoverable as you move through cell networks. And hardware-wise, the power is plentiful, although I don't know how bad the battery drain would be. But of course the experience has to be as easy as click link -> install Mastodon app -> have your own instance running off your device, with nothing but a subdomain in the cloud. Anything less and it's a non-starter.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        We can do that since the late 90's. Skype was p2p and worked very well. The problem is social, not technical. A p2p network will have problem with reputation and moderation. Only the super technical people will bother to deal with trying fighting scammers and trolls. The only alternative would be something pay-to-play to make it costly, but then those people paying will also want the conveniences and benefits provided by a system with some central authority.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  I would not be willing to pay reddit for the opposite reason. They are not doing an adequate job giving moderators proper tools or removing bigoted commenters who are participating in bad faith. I reported multiple comments calling black people "subhuman" in various ways, or the "clever" variations of "stop noticing things" that Nazis write. It's lucky if reddit gives them even a time out for publicly posting their racist delusions, let alone the permanent ban they deserve.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    If you post the n-word on reddit it gets removed immediately - no matter what the context was.
    - plagiarist 3y ago
      Oh, good, that will fix all of it. The last I was on reddit, I was moderating a small subreddit. I had to maintain a regular expression for all the various ways people would write slurs so the poor-quality automated tool would remove comments. There wasn't anything at the administrator level that would remove that or any of the people when they are writing it to be racist. There was a bot you could use to check a user's comment history for hard-Rs. Useful for trying to determine if someone is unintentionally ignorant and might be open to an explanation, or deliberately ignorant and putting on a temporary facade to waste everyone's time and energy. That tool is something that did get banned, for reasons.
pantulis 3y ago
The solution is only allowing 3rd party access to Reddit subscribers, to avoid the need to monetize through ads. If Reddit is asking 12000$ for 50M requests, then a regular Reddit user (344 reqs/day) would be paying around 2,5$/month, which seems more reasonable than putting the burden on the 3rd party developer.
- ryanmercer 3y ago
  >would be paying around 2,5$/month, Which is less than I pay for premium. If more people would just, I dunno, pay for services they use regularly, Reddit wouldn't have a problem.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    I used to pay for Reddit, but they kept getting more and more user-hostile to the point that the use I got out of it was accidental. To give just the most recent example: They PMd everyone in Germany about their great new subreddits (Big US subs with the names translated to German), filled with bots posting successful posts and comments from those big subs, auto-translated. Yeah, that’s a quirky anecdote when Reddit started 17 years ago, it’s a lot less quirky when you do it now.
  - pierat 3y ago
    That's only part of the problem. All the moderators are unpaid 'workers'. And their quality can be abhorrent to the extreme. Basically reddit is the perfect example of getting people to contribute content and work for free. And when people are run off, so does your content and your moderators.
    - ryanmercer 3y ago
      Yeah I don't do the whole "boo hoo unpaid worker" nonsense. I moderate several subs, some of them rather sizable. I do it because I want a quality community, not because I want a payday, I probably average 8-10 hours a week moderating which often overlaps with my active participation in the communities. No one is forcing me to do it, I do it because I value the communities. I similarly give many hours a week to my church, I don't roll up "yo, pay me!" because that's not the point. I show up and teach a class, my wife shows up and leads young women's, we both go and clean the building, when someone needs help and we're free we're there, it's something we care about not a means of earning income. Same goes for moderating Reddit - anyone that thinks it should be a paid gig has no business moderating.
madeofpalk 3y ago
This is basically lose/lose for everyone. API clients would be able to identify ads in the feed and just not show them. "High-profile" apps will be required to show them at risk of Reddit terminating their access, but the long tail will just ignore them. Reddit and advertisers won't get the same "audience measurement" analytics data, and third parties I imagine would be pretty reluctant to dump some privacy-invading third party sdk blob in their app, especially when they don't really benefit from it. Also, one of the attractions of third party clients is lack of ads. This'll turn users away from them.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  > Reddit and advertisers won't get the same "audience measurement" analytics data It's pretty crazy that a site like Reddit needs this to target ads effectively. You often have your interest groups already self-sorted thanks to subreddits.
- toyg 3y ago
  > API clients would be able to identify ads in the feed and just not show them. Meh. Serve ads as JS chunks, measure views; if things don't tally up between api requests and ad hits, you have a word with the developer. There aren't that many Reddit apps with significant amounts of users.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- m-p-3 3y ago
  Or skip the ads problem on third-party apps altogether by requiring the use of Reddit Premium to use third-party apps. That way reddit gets paid, you avoid having to deal with ads and the developers don't have to absorb an astronomical and unreasonable invoice for API access.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
bazmattaz 3y ago
I thought the point was that third party sites purposely didn’t want to show ads

Probably they should have found a way to require third party apps to display their ads.

wahahah 3y ago

AFAIK it's generally not a thing because of fraud / lack of metribility.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

mrtksn 3y ago

Or sell influence? Pick brands or politics and curate what people see by manipulating the rankings. However this is worse than regular ads. Honestly, I wish those platforms(all the social media) were transparent and pay for use. When it's free the experience sucks for everyone, can you imagine if we had the tech in the telephone era to inject ads in phone calls or reduce connectivity to those who talks stuff not kosher in the current political environment.

chwilson 3y ago
app.net[1] tried this in the early 2010s, unfortunately most people (i.e. enough people to justify running the service) wouldn't pony up. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
- plagiarist 3y ago
  Wasn't that $50? That was kindof a silly amount of money for the state of the internet and the size of the platform.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    The amount doesn't really matter. As a thought experiment: how big would the network have to be for you to start considering paying for access? The Fediverse (Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, etc) is already clocking in at around ~10M users. How much do you think it would be a "reasonable" amount for a service provider to charge for an account?
    - plagiarist 3y ago
      If they're actually providing a service beyond what's available everywhere else, such as actively removing bigoted garbage or more powerful tools to discover high quality content relevant to me, I'd toss them a few bucks a month. Especially now in 2023. I don't think I would have paid even that much in 2010. And certainly not $50 for a newer and smaller network. I get what you're saying. I acknowledge I am an anomaly in being willing to pay at all. I just wonder if maybe it was the wrong time ($50 was certainly and still the wrong price IMO) for a paid social network to be successful. Perhaps it could work today with a small subscription.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        See, that is the problem right there: the things that are "beyond what's available everywhere else" are financed with ads, data mining, or both. I am talking about how much you would pay to have basic access to service. The reason that people don't pay is that everyone wants to add conditions to justify their financial support, and this is why we all end up in the mess we are all in. Now, let me try again: go to https://communick.com/packages https://communick.com/packages and tell me if you think that what I am charging for the basic access packages is unreasonable.
        plagiarist 3y ago
        Ah, you're irritable because it's personal to you. Yes, people place conditions on what they are willing to purchase, that's... how it works? Why do I even want to be on Mastodon, let alone pay to be on it, let alone pay someone who is rent-seeking on top of a platform and content they aren't responsible for? Can't I get access to the social network direct from the source, for free?
        rglullis 3y ago
        > Can't I get access to the social network direct from the source, for free? For free? No, you can't. - You (or someone else) will have to develop the software. The source code doesn't just show up magically on github. - You (or someone else) will have to test the software, triage bugs, help with documentation, etc. - You (or someone else) will have to pay for the servers. - You (or someone else) will have to do content moderation None of these things are free. TANSTAAFL. If you are using it, it will cost you something, it's up to you if you want to pay with your money, your time, or your data.
- rglullis 3y ago
  Unfortunately, this shows how much the people that keep complaining about Elon Musk or Zuckerberg really should not be listened to. People suddenly do not care that much about privacy if it costs them anything or brings some inconvenience. I keep running https://communick.com https://communick.com because I am stubborn and because I can afford to, but honestly I've pretty much have given up hope that the basic services (Mastodon, Matrix) will ever reach enough users to be able to pay for themselves.
  - piaste 3y ago
    > I keep running https://communick.com https://communick.com because I am stubborn and because I can afford to, but honestly I've pretty much have given up hope that the basic services (Mastodon, Matrix) will ever reach enough users to be able to pay for themselves. I have a faint hope that mobile hardware, software, and networking may eventually improve enough that federated communication nodes could run directly off the clients themselves. The technical requirements are far from impossible - without even going for a Linux phone, you can run a nginx web server on Android via termux, and use dynamic DNS and/or IPv6 to stay discoverable as you move through cell networks. And hardware-wise, the power is plentiful, although I don't know how bad the battery drain would be. But of course the experience has to be as easy as click link -> install Mastodon app -> have your own instance running off your device, with nothing but a subdomain in the cloud. Anything less and it's a non-starter.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      We can do that since the late 90's. Skype was p2p and worked very well. The problem is social, not technical. A p2p network will have problem with reputation and moderation. Only the super technical people will bother to deal with trying fighting scammers and trolls. The only alternative would be something pay-to-play to make it costly, but then those people paying will also want the conveniences and benefits provided by a system with some central authority.
plagiarist 3y ago
I would not be willing to pay reddit for the opposite reason. They are not doing an adequate job giving moderators proper tools or removing bigoted commenters who are participating in bad faith. I reported multiple comments calling black people "subhuman" in various ways, or the "clever" variations of "stop noticing things" that Nazis write. It's lucky if reddit gives them even a time out for publicly posting their racist delusions, let alone the permanent ban they deserve.
- zirgs 3y ago
  If you post the n-word on reddit it gets removed immediately - no matter what the context was.
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    Oh, good, that will fix all of it. The last I was on reddit, I was moderating a small subreddit. I had to maintain a regular expression for all the various ways people would write slurs so the poor-quality automated tool would remove comments. There wasn't anything at the administrator level that would remove that or any of the people when they are writing it to be racist. There was a bot you could use to check a user's comment history for hard-Rs. Useful for trying to determine if someone is unintentionally ignorant and might be open to an explanation, or deliberately ignorant and putting on a temporary facade to waste everyone's time and energy. That tool is something that did get banned, for reasons.

pantulis 3y ago

The solution is only allowing 3rd party access to Reddit subscribers, to avoid the need to monetize through ads. If Reddit is asking 12000$ for 50M requests, then a regular Reddit user (344 reqs/day) would be paying around 2,5$/month, which seems more reasonable than putting the burden on the 3rd party developer.

ryanmercer 3y ago
>would be paying around 2,5$/month, Which is less than I pay for premium. If more people would just, I dunno, pay for services they use regularly, Reddit wouldn't have a problem.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  I used to pay for Reddit, but they kept getting more and more user-hostile to the point that the use I got out of it was accidental. To give just the most recent example: They PMd everyone in Germany about their great new subreddits (Big US subs with the names translated to German), filled with bots posting successful posts and comments from those big subs, auto-translated. Yeah, that’s a quirky anecdote when Reddit started 17 years ago, it’s a lot less quirky when you do it now.
- pierat 3y ago
  That's only part of the problem. All the moderators are unpaid 'workers'. And their quality can be abhorrent to the extreme. Basically reddit is the perfect example of getting people to contribute content and work for free. And when people are run off, so does your content and your moderators.
  - ryanmercer 3y ago
    Yeah I don't do the whole "boo hoo unpaid worker" nonsense. I moderate several subs, some of them rather sizable. I do it because I want a quality community, not because I want a payday, I probably average 8-10 hours a week moderating which often overlaps with my active participation in the communities. No one is forcing me to do it, I do it because I value the communities. I similarly give many hours a week to my church, I don't roll up "yo, pay me!" because that's not the point. I show up and teach a class, my wife shows up and leads young women's, we both go and clean the building, when someone needs help and we're free we're there, it's something we care about not a means of earning income. Same goes for moderating Reddit - anyone that thinks it should be a paid gig has no business moderating.

madeofpalk 3y ago

This is basically lose/lose for everyone. API clients would be able to identify ads in the feed and just not show them. "High-profile" apps will be required to show them at risk of Reddit terminating their access, but the long tail will just ignore them. Reddit and advertisers won't get the same "audience measurement" analytics data, and third parties I imagine would be pretty reluctant to dump some privacy-invading third party sdk blob in their app, especially when they don't really benefit from it. Also, one of the attractions of third party clients is lack of ads. This'll turn users away from them.

AlexandrB 3y ago
> Reddit and advertisers won't get the same "audience measurement" analytics data It's pretty crazy that a site like Reddit needs this to target ads effectively. You often have your interest groups already self-sorted thanks to subreddits.
toyg 3y ago
> API clients would be able to identify ads in the feed and just not show them. Meh. Serve ads as JS chunks, measure views; if things don't tally up between api requests and ad hits, you have a word with the developer. There aren't that many Reddit apps with significant amounts of users.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
m-p-3 3y ago
Or skip the ads problem on third-party apps altogether by requiring the use of Reddit Premium to use third-party apps. That way reddit gets paid, you avoid having to deal with ads and the developers don't have to absorb an astronomical and unreasonable invoice for API access.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

bazmattaz 3y ago

I thought the point was that third party sites purposely didn’t want to show ads