Marketers Are About To Infiltrate Subreddits (theverge.com) 60
Ahead of its IPO, Reddit has announced a set of tools for businesses that want to be more active on the platform -- including the ability to see which subreddits are mentioning a brand. For businesses, Reddit says it's a way to "establish and grow a meaningful organic presence on Reddit."
Goodbye (Score:2)
Good luck with that (Score:5, Funny)
I may even buy a Sharp microwave oven to pop some Orville Redenbacher's Classic Butter microwave popcorn while I watch the mayhem unfold on my LG monitor attached to my Dell computer and then fart.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Funny)
You have been issued a 3 days ban for mentioning body gas in connection with our brand. Please refrain from doing this in the future.
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Considering subreddit mods basically have unchecked power to ban anyone for any reason, this is probably closer to real than people realize.
How long till they have companies paying to gain mod control? its so sad how every forums has just been absorbed by reddit, who will now be using all that free laybour to turn a profit for other fat cats.
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No, it's completely dragged out of thin air.
No Subreddit mod would give you even a clue why the hell they banned you.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Funny)
Good choice! Sharp microwaves are known for their durability and performance, and they offer various features that can improve your cooking experience. Their advanced sensor cooking feature makes them ideal for making the perfect bag of popcorn every time!
About to?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this 'enshitification'? Take away a sane way of keeping spam off the platform, then enable those with brand finance to follow up all mentions?
There is another view I can see, perhaps this will be the better way to communicate with customer services than Twitter. Post complain in public, then wait for direct messages when your post gets karma.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. This is the first major step down the spiral: the pivot away from user-focused features to onboard businesses and cater to their needs instead.
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Reddit hasn't been user focused in a looong while.
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Reddit hasn't been user focused in a looong while.
Whatever. In any case until now their was enough user focus (whatever that is) to foster a large number of loyal users.
What is certain is that going forward the focus will — in fact — not be users. It will be investors, all day, every day.
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Only if it's an increase from the status quo.
Some companies engage on social medial openly and successfully. I seem to recall Burger King and Wendy's having rather cheeky social media accounts that open engaged in public dialogs.
Here ya go
https://contentworks.agency/10... [contentworks.agency]
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IT really is. I'd rather wade through the sewer that is 4chan, knowing that it's just too spicy and toxic for any advertiser to bother with, but at least there you have some semblance of freedom of speech without being down-modded into oblivion or (shadow) banned for having an opinion that diverges from the hivemind.
(also far fewer absolutely retarded fucking marvel-movie-tier puns and quips.)
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Now you mention it, there's still newsgroups, that's got to have less moderation. Use 'em or lose 'em!
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The yelp model.
1) Convenient method to let brands know when someone is talking shit about them.
2) Turns out a lot of people and/or bots are talking shit about your brand!
3) ???
4) Profit!
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Is this 'enshitification'? Take away a sane way of keeping spam off the platform, then enable those with brand finance to follow up all mentions?
No, this is "monetization". If you aren't a paying customer, you are the product being sold to paying customers (i.e. advertisers). This is just a new way for Reddit to sell products (read "users") to customers. Anyone who didn't expect this or something similar coming after the IPO was announced is too naive.
So that's bad experience for the products? Well, the cattle going into the slaughter house don't have much say on how it will be done. Don't be a product if you don't want to be sold.
This'll be used for politics (Score:2, Troll)
Why is this bad (Score:1, Troll)
I have seen companies posting in some subreddits, in response to users talking about company products or sometimes just providing updates.
Why is this bad? You are talking about "marketers" but it can also be helpful for support people, just like support people reach out if people are mentioning issues on X.
People can always tell when soemthing is marketing, those kids off things get either derided, downvoted or ignored. A company genuinely trying to be helpful can be useful to have in a subreddit.
Re:Why is this bad (Score:4, Informative)
There is a small chance that good companies will post genuinely useful stuff
There is a greater chance that mercenary scumballs will spam, spam, spam, etc
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That's not really the way reddit works though. Spam will get modded down into oblivion pretty fast if not topical.
Much higher chance is that support and marketing teams will use this for damage control. I.e. something goes badly with a product, wave of anger starts to build on reddit, marketers and support staff monitoring can take note of it early and actually address the problem, or at least get ahead of the outrage. As much as you can do that on reddit.
Considering that this is about "letting brands know
How Reddit actually works (Score:1)
Currently — and for some time now — Reddit has allowed you to click the downvote button on an ad "story", but it does not accumulate downvotes from multiple users and does not actually downrank the ad (or stop showing it, even to you), and further, they don't allow comments on "ad" stories. So there's no user modding-into-oblivion for paying advertisers now.
I'm not sure why you think
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Because story has nothing to do with ad posts?
Story is about the fact that brands will be able to see when normal posts mention the brand.
Organic astroturfing (Score:2)
Great, as if being banned because you offended the fee-fees of some mod wasn't bad enough, now you can also get banned for saying something bad about $brand.
At this point, the new Reddit game is "how long can you survive 'til the permaban"?
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This enables you to see if something pissed off enough people for it to matter, and go and address the problem directly.
Bull. If that were the case we would have seen things change long ago considering all the currently available places one can complain. In the past I've gone to stores and told them, "This is what I need" and nothing changed. They had a customer willing and ready to hand over their money for a product, and they couldn't be bothered.
One can look at what's happened to Levis. Despite being
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That's sad. I remember when they were piloting jeans custom sewn to your laser-scanned dimensions
https://news.ycombinator.com/i... [ycombinator.com]
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I have two Levis outlet stores near me. One 15 minutes, the other 30 minutes. Neither carry the size I need. None of the stores in my area carry the size I need. Since I'm not the typical obese American, I don't count as a customer.
I haven't bought a pair of Levis in at least a decade. In fact, I have the last four remaining pairs of jeans in my in the entire country. Just the other day I had to buy from Lee to get the size I need. They'll arrive next week some time.
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Nope. Levis doesn't even carry my size on their web site. As far as I'm concerned they no longer exist. They've lost my business forever.
And yes, in the past I have asked and everyone shakes their head. They have what they have and that's it.
As for my demograhic, I can see how someone who isn't obese, who is fit and trim, wouldn't be someone they'd want.
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This enables you to see if something pissed off enough people for it to matter, and go and address the problem directly. I.e. lots of people having a broken widget your company makes? You can go in there in official capacity and collect "what happened" data and pass it on, while posting platitudes about "it being worked on".
So far the nice, unicorn-fart world, ideal of how companies should react to something like that.
What will actually happen is that they will use this as a tool to squelch discontent and complaints. It will be yet another tool to ferret out "bad press" and silence it.
RIP (Score:3)
The end is nigh
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About to? (Score:3)
This has been blatantly obvious in many parts of reddit for over five years.
Truman Show (Score:2)
First it was onlyfans (Score:2)
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...aaaand another site over (Score:5, Insightful)
Once marketers take over, it's the end of communities.
We've seen this dozens of times before. The problem is that these people never stop. Just look outside. Every surface they can find is turned into an ad space.
Now would be a good time for a competitor to launch.
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Right! Enough of this nonsense, I'm going back to BBSes!
Ha (Score:2)
I used to browse Reddit regularly, not a power user but a regular one. Then the pulled the third-party API fiasco and I said fuck em. I still use Reddit, but only for very targeted purposes (so pretty rare).
Guess I made the right decision. Fuck the people running Reddit.
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Now I only land there occasionally after a search.
It was good while it lasted.
Looking forward to what's coming next.
thats another neighbourhood (Score:2)
They infiltrated years ago. (Score:2)
Re:They infiltrated years ago. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, try going into something like the NVIDIA subreddit and say something truthful but negative about Jensen Huang. You'll get downmodded by his fanboy army into oblivion faster than you can say "leather jacket!". I don't know how many of these people are getting free product for shilling the brand, but I can't imagine that it's a trivial amount.
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I think of most subreddits as an insular group of fanatics who you should stay far away from. Sending marketers into the fray sounds fine to me. They'll get eaten alive.
Been there, done that (Score:2, Offtopic)
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Nothing will change (Score:2)
reddit is so fucked (Score:2)
even from what it was a year or two ago. I assume it has to do with the API changes killing mod tools.
So many subs are karma farms for accounts that are 1 year old or more, with zero post history, submitting generic garbage to lightly moderated subs.
Then you have myriad propaganda subs that explicitly ban debate or any questioning of narratives, like WorkersStrikeBack, Libertarian, Conservative, and a host of other related subs.
The only subs that have a semblance of decent moderation these days are some of
oh sure. (Score:3, Insightful)
"We're going to spam the crap out of you and trash the signal/noise ratio, but don't worry, It'll be "organic"."
I remember Reddit... (Score:2)
I stopped going on Reddit in general back in July of 2023 due to all that API shit and swore not to return until and unless they reversed course on it. They didn't so now I'm waiting on the IPO.
I got a random email from Reddit about being offered some sort of preferential stock option or something because I have a huge amount of karma (241k) so I may purchase a bunch of stock just so I can raise a shareholder proposal to remove the current CEO and replace him with, I dunno... Jon Stewart?... Anyway, I'll pr