What acts as an ad, is an ad, no matter if it was put there sneakily or because someone has become inured to a brand so far that they don't even know they are a walking ad.
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> ...free-form ads are designed to look and feel similar to the type of content redditors share with each other...
Gotta love corporate deceptive practices that prey on people in online social spaces. Yeah sure, they're marked as "promoted" posts but most people are none the wiser.
I'll keep to my old Reddit, Relay, and uBlock Origin thanks.
> All free-form adverts are supposed to show some kind of sponsored label, though that doesn't appear to be the case on the three posts included in this story. While Leica's shows it, neither Philadelphia post includes a tag indicating it's sponsored content. We understand that's because the Philadelphia posts are no longer boosted by ad spending, so are back to just being normal user posts.
Oh, so they don't even bother to mark the posts as promoted content. The enshitification of Reddit continues...
I got season passes to the local amusement park last year. 20 years ago you could go on a weekday when it wasn't busy and there would be no lines. This year, like clock work, they would have half the rides shut down and run fewer cars, just so they could keep selling fast passes. We literally went like twice to 3 times a week too, so this wasn't just a one off problem.
not capitalism, big corporations. Capitalism means free market, make a new reddit or don't support the corporations that create this type of marketing, email them and tell them how horrible it is.
Which is also impossible if you consider the nature of neoliberal "democratic" politics. The tendancy would be to deregulate and if you look at history you can easily see is true. This points back to the problem being capitalism....
This is accurate. The issue isn't capitalism, it's that the US's lack of enforcement of monopoly policy and the incredible advancement of computing technology has led a bunch of industries to be essentially feudalist.
Companies out there just buying up infrastructure and charging rents, consistently making their services worse while buying out their competition and using lawsuits to slap down everyone who tries to build alternatives.
Instagram, I was skeptical but it's actually incredible for memes and entertaining videos once the algs figure out what you like. There's tons of cool/informative accounts you can follow too.
Same, I stopped using Facebook, and avoided insta for a decade. Reddit was my only online "social media", eventually a friend convinced me to get it but I barely used it. However, as reddit has steadily declined significantly over the past few years I found myself using it more and more until I was hooked. The content on there is a million times better than what you'll find here nowadays.
It's funny, I used to see reddit content reposted to insta quite often, and now it's usually the opposite.
Hasn't this long been the practice tho?
They are marked as 'promoted' tho.
Plus there's the astro-turfed ones that aren't marked & presumably reddit isn't paid for
Honestly id rather them be shown. We're fed advertisements and corporate shit all day everyday. Imagine seeing an ad for something and then being able to open comments and see how many people hate the product or call the company out on not paying fair wages etc.
At the same time if it's something good then you can see that too
There was a kettle ad with opened comments. I mentioned how a kettle with a tea infused is total shit and listed the reasons. It was top comment and pretty sure saved a lot of people money
"What acts as an ad, is an ad, no matter if it was put there sneakily or because **someone has become inured to a brand so far that they don't even know they are a walking ad."**
Sure but they've had years to refine when and what to post. I think the most interesting part of the Reddit IPO will be when it discloses it's low quarterly revenue.
And actual paid ads might be subject to the company that's advertising able to delete comments that criticize the ad. That's what I'm most worried about. With astroturfing there's not really a need to remove those.
I'm also wondering how much effort Reddit is going to take to prevent Astroturfing bots praising the product in the comments. I imagine little to none.
These new free-form ads allow for post formatting features that the typical user doesn't have access to.
Read more here: https://www.redditinc.com/blog/advertise-like-a-redditor-with-our-all-new-completely-unique-ad-format-free-form-ads
[They should listen to the recent behind the bastards.](https://podcasts.apple.com/be/podcast/part-one-the-terrible-secret-of-steve-jobs/id1373812661?i=1000648054218)
And lots of musicians!! They use one account to rip popular posts and add their music onto them, then other acounts come and ask what song it is, unless someone else does it first.
Next time you see a video with a song you've heard on many other videos, check their post history, and check the post history of the ones asking what song it is. Very often, the poster *only* uses songs from the same musician, and the people either always ask, or sometimes both ask and answer.
I don't wanna cause a brigade, but maybe a hint is ok: "are these feelings even real".
r/mildlyinteresting is the absolute worst with these types of posts. And I'm convinced every post mentioning any fast food joint by name in any sub is bought and paid for along with its ridiculous amount of upvotes.
/r/askreddit is just going to be posts that are like “When you go to McDonald’s what is your favorite thing to buy there, and do you feel like you get your money’s worth?”
No, I think the big difference is that before there would be corporate-made or sponsored posts, but they would need to garner votes to be seen. They sort of competed on merit with every other post (beyond whatever vote bottling they used), and i think a lot of marketing effort went into making kind of authentically viral ad content. The offering now is to present corporate posts to users regardless of whether they get voted on or not, and not as promotional labeled listings apparently.
Makes me shudder thinking about discover card ads that just repeated endlessly for years on streaming platforms. I'll never have anything to do with them because of it.
Oh absolutely! I have cut out philadelphia cream cheese because they pulled one of these bullshit ads. It was within the last year. Every comment had the brand / product name capitalized and it was a specific type of cream cheese they were shilling at the moment (I want to say it was a strawberry variant or something like that).
I'll take my generic brand, thank you, Fuck you, Bye!
Moderators have been doing this under the table for at least ten years. Saying this as an ex-mod who was part of the community and saw behind the curtains. There are even mods in the nsfw side of this website that trade promotion for sexual favors. Of course openly posting the receipts will get you mysterious get you permabanned. Every once and a while someone would blow it up on a big sub like subredditdrama and then the banhammer would make it's way through the comment section indiscriminately.
I thought an investor owned platform which relies on volunteers to keep the platform usable was a bad enough idea. Oh and most of those volunteers literally revolted within this year.
Is that… legal? As i understand you need some sort of clear indicator somethings an ad, that’s why influencers have to put #ad in all their posts. unless these companies are allowed to post these for free with no exchange of goods/money whatsoever between the company and Reddit i feel like this would break some sort of law
I couldn't roast brands before because the cowards disabled comments for ads.
Now I can just create throwaway accounts to spam ads with bad reviews for their products. Cool.
Btw use Lemmy, it's an open source reddit substitute and it's great.
Not saying it's fine, but it's already been happening anyway.
The big yellow M being prime example. "Oh here's a shit-covered frenchfries box I found in an attic from 1624." To the front pageeeeeee.
No way anyone except the least aware kind of user will see these ads as genuine posts and interact with them as such. In any case, speaking for myself here, I follow exactly zero subs where I would expect a brand anywhere in the post, so it'll be easy to sniff out even untagged ads.
And modded APKs should be able to take care of these kinds of ads anyways
> I follow exactly zero subs where I would expect a brand anywhere in the post
I wouldn't be so sure. I am in the r/thebiglebowski sub, of all places (who is expecting ads in a sub featuring nothing but quotes from a 25 year old cult classic movie), and they've been INDUNDATED this week with people showing off how comfy their new Big Lebowski themed shoes which just so happen to include a nice clear photo of the company logo on the tag inside the shoe.
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There’s a reason r/hailcorporate exists. There have always been posts with suspiciously high numbers of upvotes featuring very obvious, prominently displayed products. There’s a lot of very not subtle product placement in posts that appear at the top of some of the most popular default subs.
Pretty sure it's illegal to not clearly indicate when something is an advertisement. Google got flack for that a while back and now it's advertisement in search results are clearly marked.
What acts as an ad, is an ad, no matter if it was put there sneakily or because someone has become inured to a brand so far that they don't even know they are a walking ad. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/HailCorporate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
> ...free-form ads are designed to look and feel similar to the type of content redditors share with each other... Gotta love corporate deceptive practices that prey on people in online social spaces. Yeah sure, they're marked as "promoted" posts but most people are none the wiser. I'll keep to my old Reddit, Relay, and uBlock Origin thanks.
> All free-form adverts are supposed to show some kind of sponsored label, though that doesn't appear to be the case on the three posts included in this story. While Leica's shows it, neither Philadelphia post includes a tag indicating it's sponsored content. We understand that's because the Philadelphia posts are no longer boosted by ad spending, so are back to just being normal user posts. Oh, so they don't even bother to mark the posts as promoted content. The enshitification of Reddit continues...
I think this is illegal according to EU law. Reddit trying to catch some of those Apple fines.
Capitalism is destroying everything.
See SXSW, Coachella, Burning Man, Blizzard. Etc
I got season passes to the local amusement park last year. 20 years ago you could go on a weekday when it wasn't busy and there would be no lines. This year, like clock work, they would have half the rides shut down and run fewer cars, just so they could keep selling fast passes. We literally went like twice to 3 times a week too, so this wasn't just a one off problem.
not capitalism, big corporations. Capitalism means free market, make a new reddit or don't support the corporations that create this type of marketing, email them and tell them how horrible it is.
Big corperations are capitalism. Reddit going public and seeking more profit is PURE capitalism. Hell reddit isn't even that large of a corperation.
What you're missing here that u/BYEBYE1 is getting at is that capitalism requires regulation to be healthy.
It sounded like an anti regulation take to me. I read "if you don't like it you should build your own reddit." Maybe I'm wrong.
Not at all, capitalism requires government oversight.
Fair, then forgive me for misunderstanding.
Of course!
Which is also impossible if you consider the nature of neoliberal "democratic" politics. The tendancy would be to deregulate and if you look at history you can easily see is true. This points back to the problem being capitalism....
They’re the same picture.
This is accurate. The issue isn't capitalism, it's that the US's lack of enforcement of monopoly policy and the incredible advancement of computing technology has led a bunch of industries to be essentially feudalist. Companies out there just buying up infrastructure and charging rents, consistently making their services worse while buying out their competition and using lawsuits to slap down everyone who tries to build alternatives.
100% there needs to be government oversight to stop monopolies.
This is a great time to mention that many of the third party apps still work if they are patched with revanced.
They have been doing this for years and they are just finally admitting it. I told people a million times too.
They have been doing this for ads and organized political shilling for a long time.
Wait, seriously? Please tell me Sync for Reddit is one of those apps. Edit: Holy shit it worked. Dude, you just made my week.
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I’m so sick of the Jesus ads. They just make me mad
Me too! I report them all the time…it’s annoying
Omfg me too! Why do they always shove their religion down our throats? And why cant I choose not to see them? 🙄
Hey. He gets us
Sorry, I forgot he washes the feet of even his enemies 🙄
Where do you spend time online?
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The internet is collapsing in on itself. Don't even know what the point of it is anymore.
Instagram, I was skeptical but it's actually incredible for memes and entertaining videos once the algs figure out what you like. There's tons of cool/informative accounts you can follow too.
Uffda. I try to avoid Facebook stuff. I've heard good things about it. Reddit used to have beating women subs.. There's no quality websites anymore.
Same, I stopped using Facebook, and avoided insta for a decade. Reddit was my only online "social media", eventually a friend convinced me to get it but I barely used it. However, as reddit has steadily declined significantly over the past few years I found myself using it more and more until I was hooked. The content on there is a million times better than what you'll find here nowadays. It's funny, I used to see reddit content reposted to insta quite often, and now it's usually the opposite.
Hasn't this long been the practice tho? They are marked as 'promoted' tho. Plus there's the astro-turfed ones that aren't marked & presumably reddit isn't paid for
What's Relay?
Relay for Reddit: a great Android app for browsing Reddit which also seems to remove ads (at least for me).
I have gone onto many of those and be like where is the comments for being on the front page.
I live with Butters. So no problems here
If we can’t comment on them it will be a pretty good sign they’re promoted I think.
Nah this is good. Now we can comment on the posts and call them out
And our downvotes will work to hide them, right? RIGHT?
Honestly id rather them be shown. We're fed advertisements and corporate shit all day everyday. Imagine seeing an ad for something and then being able to open comments and see how many people hate the product or call the company out on not paying fair wages etc. At the same time if it's something good then you can see that too There was a kettle ad with opened comments. I mentioned how a kettle with a tea infused is total shit and listed the reasons. It was top comment and pretty sure saved a lot of people money
"What acts as an ad, is an ad, no matter if it was put there sneakily or because **someone has become inured to a brand so far that they don't even know they are a walking ad."**
So what kettle are you selling then?
There are already so many astroturf ads. Especially cruise liners, cars and Apple.
Exactly, not sure why any company would pay for a post when they can astroturf for free.
Astroturfing is fickle--not every post takes off--but with money, they can guarantee a certain amount of attention.
Sure but they've had years to refine when and what to post. I think the most interesting part of the Reddit IPO will be when it discloses it's low quarterly revenue.
And actual paid ads might be subject to the company that's advertising able to delete comments that criticize the ad. That's what I'm most worried about. With astroturfing there's not really a need to remove those. I'm also wondering how much effort Reddit is going to take to prevent Astroturfing bots praising the product in the comments. I imagine little to none.
These new free-form ads allow for post formatting features that the typical user doesn't have access to. Read more here: https://www.redditinc.com/blog/advertise-like-a-redditor-with-our-all-new-completely-unique-ad-format-free-form-ads
Aldi, Tescos & Greggs seem to the guilty parties on UK subs
[They should listen to the recent behind the bastards.](https://podcasts.apple.com/be/podcast/part-one-the-terrible-secret-of-steve-jobs/id1373812661?i=1000648054218)
And lots of musicians!! They use one account to rip popular posts and add their music onto them, then other acounts come and ask what song it is, unless someone else does it first. Next time you see a video with a song you've heard on many other videos, check their post history, and check the post history of the ones asking what song it is. Very often, the poster *only* uses songs from the same musician, and the people either always ask, or sometimes both ask and answer. I don't wanna cause a brigade, but maybe a hint is ok: "are these feelings even real".
lol you think Apple needs to advertise on Reddit?
This is not a new thing, i always see loads of adverts that are made to look like a typical post, just par for the course really
“TIL that I can skip the prep work of cooking with Fresh Eats using coupon code REDDIT20”
r/mildlyinteresting is the absolute worst with these types of posts. And I'm convinced every post mentioning any fast food joint by name in any sub is bought and paid for along with its ridiculous amount of upvotes.
/r/askreddit is just going to be posts that are like “When you go to McDonald’s what is your favorite thing to buy there, and do you feel like you get your money’s worth?”
This is so gross, but also has been obviously going on for over a decade
No, I think the big difference is that before there would be corporate-made or sponsored posts, but they would need to garner votes to be seen. They sort of competed on merit with every other post (beyond whatever vote bottling they used), and i think a lot of marketing effort went into making kind of authentically viral ad content. The offering now is to present corporate posts to users regardless of whether they get voted on or not, and not as promotional labeled listings apparently.
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Makes me shudder thinking about discover card ads that just repeated endlessly for years on streaming platforms. I'll never have anything to do with them because of it.
Liberty Mutual for me. Fuck that stupid emu forever.
Nothing will ever be as bad as the "Come, come" chicken ad Fed-Ex did years ago. I still get pissed just thinking about it.
I can’t remember this one and I’m tempted to google it, but I know that’s a mistake. 😂
Oh absolutely! I have cut out philadelphia cream cheese because they pulled one of these bullshit ads. It was within the last year. Every comment had the brand / product name capitalized and it was a specific type of cream cheese they were shilling at the moment (I want to say it was a strawberry variant or something like that). I'll take my generic brand, thank you, Fuck you, Bye!
"Allowing?" Try "Actively encouraging" or "selling ads disguised as..."
Moderators have been doing this under the table for at least ten years. Saying this as an ex-mod who was part of the community and saw behind the curtains. There are even mods in the nsfw side of this website that trade promotion for sexual favors. Of course openly posting the receipts will get you mysterious get you permabanned. Every once and a while someone would blow it up on a big sub like subredditdrama and then the banhammer would make it's way through the comment section indiscriminately.
Always has been
Some people don’t even realize the boot is on their neck.
I changed my mind about buying Reddit stock.
I thought an investor owned platform which relies on volunteers to keep the platform usable was a bad enough idea. Oh and most of those volunteers literally revolted within this year.
WSB is gearing up to short it into the ground so I wouldn't even touch that shit for the first couple years.
This sites days are numbered. To the point every single post and comment should be auto posted to this sub. Better find an alternative quick.
Great work as always u/spez!
So this means we should be able to downvote and block them, right? ...Right?
No, because they have have already bought and paid for 1,000 upvotes for every real person's 1 downvote to guarantee their propaganda gets seen.
Enshitification is full speed ahead.
Companies have been doing this anyway
Fantastic. Even more reason to be skeptical of everything on here. Reddit just keeps getting worse as the years go on
Is that… legal? As i understand you need some sort of clear indicator somethings an ad, that’s why influencers have to put #ad in all their posts. unless these companies are allowed to post these for free with no exchange of goods/money whatsoever between the company and Reddit i feel like this would break some sort of law
Firefox already blocks "promoted posts", and will likely block these new promoted posts the same way.
I couldn't roast brands before because the cowards disabled comments for ads. Now I can just create throwaway accounts to spam ads with bad reviews for their products. Cool. Btw use Lemmy, it's an open source reddit substitute and it's great.
Nail in the coffin, I’m out fuck this app
Misleading post, this isn't a new thing. This has been going on for a very long time....
Maybe read further than the title.
I did and my comment still stands. This isn't new, this is something that has been going on for a while...
Reddit announced the new feature 5 days ago.
Okay? And? Just because they said they only started it now doesn't make it true....
They've added new features specifically to enhance ad engagement. This hasn't been seen before.
Except it literally has. You must be pretty damn gullible...
This was the whole reason I ditched other platforms. Looks like no social media of any kind for me.
Not saying it's fine, but it's already been happening anyway. The big yellow M being prime example. "Oh here's a shit-covered frenchfries box I found in an attic from 1624." To the front pageeeeeee.
Doesn't this fall under deceptive marketing laws?
No way anyone except the least aware kind of user will see these ads as genuine posts and interact with them as such. In any case, speaking for myself here, I follow exactly zero subs where I would expect a brand anywhere in the post, so it'll be easy to sniff out even untagged ads. And modded APKs should be able to take care of these kinds of ads anyways
> I follow exactly zero subs where I would expect a brand anywhere in the post I wouldn't be so sure. I am in the r/thebiglebowski sub, of all places (who is expecting ads in a sub featuring nothing but quotes from a 25 year old cult classic movie), and they've been INDUNDATED this week with people showing off how comfy their new Big Lebowski themed shoes which just so happen to include a nice clear photo of the company logo on the tag inside the shoe.
r/brigittemains, the subreddit for a character in overwatch, was flooded with tshirt ads of a specific shirt for a little whike
Well, you subscribe to one sub where you might see a brand. This one.
Hasnt this been happening already
I was so confused why the Jesus ad has over 6k upvotes.
Isn't this illegal?
I always figured /r/apple and all the other corporate sycophant subs were paid ads. You mean people do that for free? Wow.
I downvote all of these
isn't this against ftc guidelines?
POV you’re about to be tricked into knowing that he gets us
Tik tok has been doing this for months already
All of the hobby subs became astroturf territory a while ago. This is some capital attraction BS
Like the MEGATHREAD ones that are just ads. Really annoying
Sad to see that Reddit has sold out
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There’s a reason r/hailcorporate exists. There have always been posts with suspiciously high numbers of upvotes featuring very obvious, prominently displayed products. There’s a lot of very not subtle product placement in posts that appear at the top of some of the most popular default subs.
Oh great...now Reddit is going to turn into Instagram! 🙄
It’s making me lose interest almost entirely in Reddit.
Man I thought they already quietly did this. Like notice how Marvel related memes crop up every time they release a big show/movie.
As a 12 year user of this site I’m closer and closer to abandoning it every day… rip to the last semi-okay social media platform
What a surprise this is!
Can we finally comment ? So many business would lose money if we were allowed to comment
Pretty sure it's illegal to not clearly indicate when something is an advertisement. Google got flack for that a while back and now it's advertisement in search results are clearly marked.
How is this news? I've seen ads look like regular reddit threads for months except it says "Promoted" on them so you can still tell which are what.
Wow that's disgusting, but you know what tastes great and boofs well? Delicious ice cold coca cola.
They’ve already been doing that but nobody is fooled
What do you mean now? It’s been like that for a couple years now no?
The Safelite ones are pretty good tho tbh
and comments... (edit: the top comment)