Everyone acts like this is hurting reddit. It doesn’t make a fuck what they write on that board, every person who places a dot helps Reddit by being a added number on the user board.
Honestly... yeah. After seeing how Netflix proved that you can give zero fucks about what your customers say and that they will give you more money after you bend them over, I see no reason why Reddit doubling-down on monetized bullshit on the platform wouldn't be equally successful. These big corps realize that no matter how bad it gets, they will always find paying users as long as you give them their dopamine fix, protests or no protests.
But long term it could. People might get annoyed by the lack of content other than protesting and check reddit less. It also keeps the conversation on alternatives like lemmy here.
Also, if reddit believes that the community has genuinely turned against them and will ruin everything on purpose, they might rethink their actions (obviously unlikely).
Sometimes people just like to flip tables out of frustration even if it won’t accomplish much. A lot of angry redditors just want to burn it all down and I hope they succeed.
As an extreme example, if /r/place was truly covered with “fuck spez” 100%, would that be an enjoyable thing for people who don’t care about what’s going on? They’d probably get mad and leave. Which would hurt reddit.
It also costs reddit extra money to deal with all of this.
It’s similar to workers protesting instead of just quitting. There’s a point to protesting and not everything is solved with a simple boycott.
When digg was dying, many people still used digg, but just to point others to reddit. In hindsight, would you say that it didn’t matter since they were still using digg?
They aren’t going for long term as they have show the last few years and more so the last few months… They are pulling a sears and it’s working as planned.
The people who are going to spend money on that place are advertisers, all they want is people going to a site where their ad is and will be seen. A giant swastika in the canvas would bring in way more views than everyone drawing happy little trees and flags of their country. Content means nothing, views are the point and it’s working.
Advertisers, unlike Reddit, often think about more than raw numbers. And so do the brands who hire those advertisers. Part of why Twitter is hemorrhaging cash is that a lot of brands really don’t want to see their logo displayed next to a giant swastika, even if it means people are seeing their ad.
Sure, a swastika on your front page for months at a time is a bad look. When you give people a place to do “free” art and the draw something inappropriate it creates fast controversy and clicks and a good chance for them to rationalize all the shitty changes they have made recently.
Wrong way around, the shitty changes rationalise the graffiti. Or are you oblivious to something called time, it creates this thing called a sequence of events. But you knew that because you’re disingenuous, not stupid, right?
Having worked in the advertising business (on the tech side), I can assure you that the content is hugely important to the vast majority of brand advertisers. Somebody like P&G will not buy ads promoting their fabric softener in any place that will turn people away. Tucker Carlson’s show lost advertisers even though it was the highest rated news show on TV.
Direct-response advertisers (like Google search advertisers, say) have a higher tolerance but will still restrict the hell out of their placements.
For example, go to a browser without ad block and search “Disney”, you’re gonna get an ad. But try, say, “Disney barf” or “Disney beer” or “Disney ugly” and those ads just disappear; they don’t want to be associated with any negative valence.
I don’t know why everyone here is asking like investors and advertisers are completely oblivious and stupid. Most people don’t just throw money at things without looking into it at all, particularly when it’s their career. Advertisers absolutely care what their ads show up next to, the whole point of social media ads is targeting them to users with similar interests.
Honestly do we even want them? A very large portion of why reddit has turned into such a shithole the last few years is the newer people. Let them have that clusterfuck while we enjoy lemmy .
Eh, I don’t think that’s fair. There’s still a lot of good redditors out there stuck on reddit because they don’t know any better. More technical and veteran redditors are more likely to be willing to jump ship because they know how much reddit is a sinking ship and how it’s going to end up dying out.
Tons of crap like millions of “Fuck spez” all over the place, big ones and small ones, at one point they took up almost a 5th of the visible area. There were multiple statements about never forgetting what was taken from us or joining other social media. There were insults about spez in other languages and a guillotine with a snoo in it labeled Spez
I get that they’d want to remove slurs from the board but did they really remove the “never forget what we lost” banner with the 3rd party app icons? Because that’s really just a peaceful protest and it would be very lame if they removed that…
Sure, but that’s something for reddit users to do. There are 63k active Lemmy users monthly, and there are 430 million active Reddit users monthly. I dropped Reddit with the app death, but people are vastly overestimating the direct impact that Lemmy could possibly have on Reddit.
Reddit’s not gonna start dying until the population starts migrating in significant amounts to alternatives, which is probably going to be a little cataclysmic for Lemmy.
Things don't happen overnight. I have noticed this platform improving as time goes on. I find incredible content with authentic, real discussion here. Everyday the content grows and the conversation threads become longer and more varied.
This is it exactly: the difference in the discussions and posts between when I joined a few weeks ago and now is striking. It’s reminding me of early reddit before the Digg migration and I’m hopeful it will continue to improve
Also for interaction - number of active users is a very important metric - and with something like this they basically guarantee that a lot of users are checking very regularly - and the investors for the IPO probably will never see that place
Maybe some investors are that lazy, but I doubt it’s most. You can Google “reddit” right now and multiple articles come up about what’s going on with r/place, that’s pretty much the least you can do before investing in a company
If they think that giving people an outlet for anger on the internet actually causes people to get that anger out of their system… where tf have they been for the past 40 years? That can work in person, but online, the more people rage, the more they want to rage. Giving them an opportunity just pours gasoline on the fire.
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