Calling them “free-form ads,” Reddit said the new advertisements are its most native format ever, designed to look and feel like community content shared by real people.
The ads, meant to mimic the site’s megathreads, will enable advertisers to utilize a variety of formats in one post, including images, videos, and text.
According to numbers from Reddit, free-form ads got 28% more clicks than all other types of ads on the site and saw a jump in community engagement.
The next time you see an interesting post in your Reddit feed, take a closer look - because it might just be a paid advertisement.
I remember it already being a thing 5 years ago with upvote/downvote buttons, karma and everything. I guess they just removed the abyssmally small grey text that said something like ‘paid ad’ in a corner?
I used to downvote them. Now I just nothing them.
I assume the downvote doesn’t really count. It just looks to you as if it did.
I used to post nasty things when they allowed that. Then I used to downvote them. Then the ad blocker I used blocked them so I never saw them. Then I stopped posting on Reddit.
Report them as malicious content 👍
This was a thing like 10 years ago too, iirc. Ads had threads and you could post in them and up/down vote them. That… didn’t go well. For advertisers, that is.