Reddit forces personalized ads, starts X-like user payment program
arstechnica.com
Like it or not, Reddit wants to "improve ad performance."

I left a couple of months ago. Couldn’t be happier.

The writing is on the wall. The leader thinks the Genius-with-hair-transplants is a superstar, despite destroying a globally recognised brand. Inspired by this, Spez is trying to get Reddit ready for an IPO. This means, maximise profits by any means.

  • @cjsolxEnglish
    7•1 year ago

    Has Reddit’s popularity dipped? We know its quality dipped, but it’s probably better known now than it ever has been. Doesn’t matter how many bots there are if there are also real people there too.

    • @CabrioEnglish
      8•1 year ago

      It’s been hard to tell because reddit isn’t releasing user retention statistics that are easy to find for other social media sites (minutes per user per day), also due to vote obfuscation it can be difficult to know from vote counts because they could just manipulate the bias.

      There’s also a lot of established communities around media/internet personalities that are largely unaffected by the changes and unlikely to move without significant fan pressure.

      But people go where the content is, last time I checked the top 5 posts on Reddit were under 30k votes and were all tiktoks. That tells me that the content creators and the progressive adaptors have all moved on already, the rest is attrition over time as the service and content continues to stagnate.

      The one thing reddit has propping it up artificially is it’s remaining position as a valuable information resource particularly for niche topics and especially while the fediverse doesn’t get boosted in seo yet.

      • TygrEnglish
        7•1 year ago

        Your last paragraph is precisely why I deleted all of my niche topic content that had a ton of votes. I didn’t want Reddit making SEO money with ads on my content since the service I used to post it was being forced to shut down.

        I haven’t had a Reddit account since 1 month after Apollo shut down. Deleted everything.

        I do visit still, using bookmarks, to the old subdomain, with Adblock.