The ads/manipulation does a thing that helps you attain profit or power. You want to manipulate what people see and pay for… so you pay reddit to allow you to mass deploy bots bypassing moderator levers. They have the community, you have the objective, you pay for the help of doing this and they probably have their own bot farms included.
They can even internally flag these entries as bots and use their AI partnerships to analyze what works on users and what doesn’t to trigger a specific response, and to avoid using techniques that get called out as bots.
They have their public ‘sponsored’ content, but I promise for big spenders they have a program that has no sponsorship callout. They probably brand it with nice fancy marketing terminology that makes it sound like you’re an angel doing god’s work by driving conversions or some stupid shit.
ieGod@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
Yeah reddit’s a weird one. Their financials, aside from this year, are also horrendous. Not sure what value they really bring.