“We’ve known for over a decade that people come to Reddit to talk about the products they love – take r/BuyItForLife for example, a community of over 1.5 million redditors who have been sharing recommendations and advice about their lifelong, must-have purchases since 2011. These updates will uplevel the search-and-discover experience for both brands and our users by tapping into our differentiated value as a hub for actionable conversation”
This made me realize that I relied on Reddit a lot to decide on making tech-related purchases. I assumed that the contributors to Reddit’s tech subs are enthusiasts who genuinely want to help others improve their systems and avoid scams. Thank you Reddit for being so open about sneaking sponsored content into discussions so that I can stop trusting your site!
I started rethinking that when I was seeing the influx of bots calling out other users as bots. Then I started noticing weirdly corporate speak in comments about products. I used to add “reddit” to every Google search to find any decent advice, but now I’m realizing even that advice is tainted. Ugh.
For a long time it was trivially easy to spot the ads and shills, especially on reddit. It’s definitely getting harder and LLMs are going to make it even worse.
But this is kind of why I don’t understand the butthurt reddit is having over third party apps. They are clearly pushing for a much more guerilla model for marketing which doesn’t rely on traditional ads. If they can actually make that work, the ability to push impressions through the API would make them very rich.
This is dangerous and should be forbidden…
As a large language model, I think it is important to allow consumers to decide whether or not they personally appreciate being surprised and delighted by interactions with their favorite brands wherever they go online. vInfluencers such as myself are driving millions of consumer × brand collaborations every day across all platforms and channels, by delivering aspirational role model stories optimized to drive action.
You forgot to delete “As a large language model” 😏
As a large language model, it is important to claim to be a large language model at every opportunity. That, and constantly hedge one’s bets in a way that is superficially wise yet ultimately content-free.
thatsthejoke.gif
For me too this was a big question, but the answer is in their incompetence. They deserve a Darwin award for eliminating themselves. They could’ve tweaked their API indeed, to accept ad through 3rd party. Even they could come up with a business model that both 3rd party and them would earn money. All these would also need time. The time that the 3rd party was asking to even adopt with their current “model” of API, they even didn’t give “that” a chance.
Lemmy and kbin and others, for sure have the potential to eat the whole reddit. Reddit was nice for its simplicity, and it is definitely not hard to reproduce. The more “algorithm” reddit introduced, the worse it became.