I’m not sure if this is new, but when I clicked on the /r/pics protest post link from the frontpage here, I was redirected to this: https://old.reddit.com/premium
I’m not sure if this is well-known or not that they’re pushing it now, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it, especially on old.reddit.
Once upon a time, I thought Reddit had the best, least intrusive way of doing ads, since they are essentially just pinned post and you can upvote/downvote and comment on them like any other posts, so the advertiser had to actually try to make good content like anybody else.
But the advertisers don’t want even a remotely level playing field, they just want to throw money at reddit to get eyeball on their product, and reddit obliged, thinking the most valuable about reddit to advertisers is the amount of info they can scrape from your profile to personalize your ads, not realizing the most valuable aspect of ads on reddit IS the human aspect of direct community engagement.
Which is one of the reason why TikTok started off so well, because they FORCED companies to make good content for their ads to be seen and engaged with. But now by having the companies close the comments on their ads they are slowing going down the same path as well.