This is the weirdest goddamned thing I have seen in quite some time. I keep poking at it and finding more weird shit.
Did you know that the reddit marketing team just spent a week in Cannes with a bunch of their big clients congratulating themselves on how well they’re all doing?
Did you know that reddit is bragging about those incredibly weird ads that say “Psst… Can’t stop scrolling? It’s time for a hydration break” as a success story?
What the fuck is this? I don’t understand the majority of it but it definitely doesn’t sound good. E.g. “Tinuiti joined the Reddit Independent Agency Program in 2022 and has gone on to triple its spend on the platform, managing successful campaigns for clients including e.l.f, PacSun, Unilever Health & Wellbeing Collective, and Yohana.”
What is this video? It… honestly makes sense to me that their ads work well comparatively speaking (as I’m sure they did for Gamestop). But that doesn’t mean the whole video isn’t super weird.
What the fuck do they mean by “a generation turns to Reddit’s finance communities to safeguard their futures” and why do they keep talking about crypto, anxiety, and mental health when offering “insights” about these communities to their advertisers?
Why does the header for their insights about “The LatinX Experience” explain that only 4% of members of the community support the term “latinx,” and then the whole thing continues to use it regardless?
Did you guys know about all this weird shit? I literally am having to pull myself away because I keep finding more.
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What the fuck, I keep finding more.
Is this a guide to how to get hold of people’s tax refunds? They thoroughly confused me by calling tax refunds “tax returns” in the short description, but regardless of that, it sure looks like a guide specifically and only on how to motivate people to spend their tax refunds on your stuff.
This one is fascinating. It is either a fairly genuine guidebook on how as a company to engage and be a productive member of a community to communicate authentically with your customers… or else a guide for how to infiltrate a community anonymously and subtly insert little recommendations for your products in a way where they won’t be detected. Or maybe it is both, depending on who is reading it.
The shill bit is probably the single worst thing. If there is one reason to go to reddit when looking for opinions on something, it is to get genuine opinions from users or customers. Thinking that part of the business model is to infiltrate communities and nudge, despite how obvious it might be, it is completely crazy and potentially counterproductive. The moment the trust is broken, I will ignore reddit as I ignore the first 80% of a google search page…
I was in a sub that was obviously filled with shills. In the comments and posts. It wasn’t overwhelming but noticeable for sure.
These really are pretty bizarre. People never cease to amaze me. Thanks for posting this (:
I particularly like how in that second one, they publish quotes from Reddit while attributing them simply as “Redditor, /r/cryptocurrency”. It shows you what they think about who owns contributions.
I’m getting an AccessDenied
It’s not though. The front page is PR bullshit. Once you go beyond the first layer, it’s an extremely thorough guide, written by dishonest people, for dishonest people, on how to manipulate the reddit userbase into buying your shitty products.
I’m actually not sure that most big companies do have pages like this. I think their marketing teams probably look at the general public in exactly this way, but they mostly have more sense than to say it out loud. Do you think you can find a page hosted by Google Ads, or Fox News, that explains the breakdown of their different user segments and how to successfully manipulate each one of them by targeting their anxiety or their mental health issues?
written by dishonest people, for dishonest people, on how to manipulate the reddit userbase into buying your shitty products
Isn’t that what every profit-driven company does? I mean, it’s shitty, but I don’t think it’s something exclusive to reddit.
But… the computer or phone you’re using to post this was made by a profit-driven company, as was the internet service you’re using, as was the electricity that powers that thing, etc etc. I actually don’t think there’s anything wrong with running a business or trying to make a profit, or running ads to promote your business. You can do it honestly or dishonestly, and one is fine and one is not.
Uh, no. The phone was made by workers. Workers laid the infrastructure and maintain the networks. Workers run the power plant and maintain that infrastructure as well.
Profit happens when the business takes more money than is needed to Do The Thing. That money is then given to people who (generally) have nothing to do with Doing The Thing. These people then take their
extracted valueprofits, and increase their holdings so they can get more.So, in the extreme case (which is a lot of the US system right now) I 100% agree with you. Trying to squeeze all of the value you can from the employees and the customers, so it can all go to the investors, is a toxic and dangerous tradition that’s responsible for a lot of the evils of the modern world. It also leads in some cases to the investors suffering, also, in the not-overly-long run.
I wouldn’t say that that automatically makes any profit-seeking enterprise a bad thing though. Like most other things humans engage in, there’s a good way to do it and a bad way to do it. It can accomplish wonderful things, like creating these here technological marvels and making them available to more or less everyone, as well as come with significant dangers.
So, if the workers can do the phones / laptops / etc themselves, why haven’t they? Nothing’s stopping any group of people from creating a phone or laptop that’s cheaper because they don’t need to pay the investors. Nothing’s stopping any collective of people from maintaining their own mesh network that provides internet service without the need for everyone to buy a subscription from somebody.
I would argue that the fact that a lot of the successful stuff that you and I depend on for our daily lives comes from profit-seeking enterprises is itself an argument that that aspect plays an important role in the system that produces the stuff. You and I can have whatever ideological viewpoints we want to have about it, but you have to also look at the real-world outcome and what seems like it works in practice. I would also argue that the prevalence of software that isn’t produced by profit-seeking enterprises is an example of “the exception that proves the rule” – in a domain where it’s actually feasible for a much more loosely organized and less financially powerful group to still accomplish great things, their productions compete with and sometime exceeds the centrally-produced stuff in quantity and quality. There are other domains where the socialistically-produced stuff is also obviously the right answer: Highways, clean water, health care, power plants. The lack of the socialistically-produced cars, phones, coffee shops, and so on, is to me a fairly strong argument that in those domains you need a profit motive for the thing to be successful.
I’m not trying to touch off any kind of argument with this comment, just saying how I see it.
So to expand on my other post: Compare this site with Vox’s advertisers site or Fox News’s hilariously boomer-y advertisers page. I see a lot of things but I don’t see anywhere on either of these where they’re advising their clients on how to get hold of people’s tax refunds (although I’m sure that Fox’s marketing team says that and worse behind closed doors).
marketing team says that and worse behind closed doors
That’s my point, all companies driven by profit do that, we just don’t know.
Key word is “driven by profit”, not all companies are like that, there are also smaller companies that do care about their customers, but if they get big enough, or they get investors involved, they change for the worse.
And among the worse, some companies are smart and don’t disclose what they really think to the public, other are stupid like reddit and totally lose trust by showing their true colors.
Enshitification. Step 2 specifically.
That last one is hilariously bad. “We know so much about our communities that we know they would hate how we speak about them here, anyway want to buy ads?”
Redditors don’t doom-scroll—they engage with intent.
Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Mask: off
“Reddit Hot Take” lmaooo. Someone please make versions of those for Reddit’s very hottest takes over the years
