Submitted 6 months ago by tearsintherain@leminal.space to technology@lemmy.world
#For sale: Ads that look like legit Reddit user posts
“We highly recommend only mentioning the brand name of your product since mentioning links in posts makes the post more likely to be reported as spam and hidden. We find that humans don’t usually type out full URLs in natural conversation and plus, most Internet users are happy to do a quick Google Search,” ReplyGuy’s website reads.
I’ve been on Lemmy ever since the reddit API fracas. To date, I have not seen a reason to return. I have, however, seen many reasons to stay away.
There are just certain communities that haven’t picked up over on Lemmy. D&D, Pathfinder, LFG, and I’m sure many others. I hate reddit with a passion but there is still stuff there.
Not for long. It’s about to be non-stop Bots and models just talking back and forth to each other.
Yeah of course you can find everything on Reddit and clearly not that much on Lemmy.
But Lemmy is the perfect alternative for me. I only go on Reddit through web search results on Ecosia. It’s really only useful for when I’m looking for a specific answer to a specific subject.
Time to open a D&D instance!!
Fuck id kill for Grimdank on here.
Yea, I pray this gets better. The only really active non-tehnical communities I have seen here are political and… woke ones. I really hope at least some gaming ones would switch.
I’m kind of surprised that factorio community here is so inactive. I thought there would be significant overlap between lemmy’s technical audience and factorio players.
The larger engagement is a potential reason…I just lurk there with an API modded sync client. If they ban my throw away or block the API I’m done
Reddit wasn’t built in a day either
Larger engagement requires people to make and join communities/subs and we all need to help that happen. It took years for reddit to have what you’re talking about and it’ll take time here too. Sadly we’re at a point in internet history now where many people have tried their hand at being mods and admits and most of those discovered how much it can suck. We’re past the point of it being some exciting new thing so I think a push for better tools and options for those that might consider it is needed. People also have less time and mental energy to take on such roles now than 10-15 years ago.
The day my modded Relay client dies will be a sad day. Lemmy is great but sadly a bunch of communities didn’t make the leap here.
Same same. I feel like I got out of an abusive relationship.
I wouldn’t go back anyway because I don’t want Spez to profit from my data
Amen. I should have seen it earlier, but the API debacle told me that Reddit is run by “my way or the highway” management. And they showed they didn’t care at all about their users. I used to post spicy OC memes. Realized there’s no point in adding value to a platform that does not value it’s own people one iota.
There is only one thing Reddit has (or had anyway) that I regret not having on Lemmy, which is a robust community for my U.S. state and a small one for my specific town. There’s really no good place for discussions of that nature that approach anywhere near anything beyond flame wars anywhere else on the internet that I can find.
But I’m still not going back.
The depressing thing about all this is that this stuff actually works. Most people will happily consume whatever shit is served to them.
I left in a huff when they jumped the shark and dropped 3party app support. I was a pretty heavy user / contributor and fully thought I might crawl back at some point. Turns out I’m doing fine without going back and the alternatives, while massively smaller, are so much less crappy feeling. I think a lot of people would feel the same way if we could just get them to try the green eggs and ham. I think it’s great that Kagi is starting to index Lemmy, but the one gateway to get people over here that might actually work would be if Google searches started turning up Lemmy content. I think that would grab some attention.
Same! Also a Kagi subscriber. Hello! I thought Reddit might cave on the 3rd party thing for a while. Then they were doubling down and treated the developers of those apps like shit. I was a happy Apollo user, and I trusted what he said about how Reddit acted. I moved to Lemmy. It was confusing at the start but now I feel as at home here as I did in Reddit. If not more actually, since our user base is smaller, I feel like community is closer and has a little more tech know-how too. I do miss some fun Reddit things but I think Lemmy and the fediverse has a ton of potential and I want to be part of it ☺️
I literally only go back for one niche sub and only using that sweet, sweet adblock.
lol is this a discrete Kagi Ad?
Just gonna suggest searxng as an alternative to kagi if you want something open-source, free, and still customizable.
Most searxng instances also index lemmy.
I think there was a post a while back where someone found Lemmy posts on search results. I think it’s still being drowned out by bigger platforms but it’s good to see it happening!
I was very similar, heavy Reddit user that quit over thr 3PA shitshow last year. Not sure if you’ve noticed this, but my attention span has gone way up.
I’m unfortunately on Reddit regularly, but that’s only because it still has decent tech support search results. Haven’t logged in since the APIpocalypse
I still visit smaller subreddits when looking up technical fixes (like unraid) but I no longer post and got rid of all my old posts.
Hopefully as Lemmy grows, I can leave that shithole for good.
I still miss many of the nice communities though, Lemmy is fine, but it has less users in total than many of my niche communities. I still visit Reddit sometimes to find something out about my interests, although that might slow down if bots really take over Reddit
When you’re constantly inflicted with advertising it’s the fish not seeing the water story. Fuck advertising propaganda and malware networks. Fuck advertising without consent in public spaces. And most of all fuck reddit for betraying their mods and users and treating them like pieces of shit because they can get away with it.
Homie, most people in my office don’t read fucking books. Half the people in my life before I was an adult have grown to never touch a book or educational material in their adult lives. We’re fucked. By and large people just want to not care about anything it seems. I still get scoffed at when mentioning google and they’re under an antitrust lawsuit right now. We are not going to last unless education comes to the forefront.
“With Dynamic Product Ads, brands can tap into the rich, high-intent product conversations that people come to Reddit for," Reddit EVP of Business Marketing and Growth Jim Squires said in a statement.
Gross.
Jfc people came to Reddit because up until now they were getting replies from real people with that have no financial interest in the outcome. This completely subverts everything people valued about Reddit. This fucking guy.
If people who are still on Reddit don’t leave over this, I don’t know what will make them leave.
Yes, but by completely destroying that they can make the line go up for 2 quarters, so worth it. Also, corpos would actually prefer users not having access to these discussion soaces and the free information they provide, so you would have to rely on overSEOd shit content and ads. I hate what the internet has become
rich, high-intent product conversations
these people make me so fucking sick i cannot
i cannot believe this site i spent so many sad years posting on in high school, with pure heart, posting purely out of a desire for interesting interactions and the potential to make insightful, peer-reviewed contributions that others could enjoy, has turned into such fucking dead-eyed garbage.
It makes me so mad…it’s like a company butting into a conversation me and a friend are having in person.
“how do we turn our users into money”
What research is telling them that? Where was the survey? These people are making shit up.
I remember seeing threads like “What was the best purchase that you made for under 100” or some variation every once in a while. I’m sure those got corpo eyes real interested if they weren’t advertising in them already.
Yeah, that’s marketing for you.
Based on that quote, AI might have already taken over the leadership also
Ew.
Full of corporate speak BS
Yes, because Malware, Amarican spit, Caremel and insert company name here are all having an intense beutiful pipedream fetishistic relationship with the nice folks at r/darksidesmokingfetish (NSFL)
this is sarcasm not libel!
I wish I could get all the mods from the subreddits that rolled over in June/July in a room and slap each and every one upside the head.
why?
Because they thought if they just folded to the site admins that everything would be okay in the end. “Oh, we built a community! We don’t want to lose it, so we’re opening back up so daddy Spez doesn’t take away our power!”
The style in which that post by Ophelia_SK is written seems exactly like chatGPT. I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly makes me feel so strongly, but it’s something to do with how sentences and paragraphs are constructed. They always have the same cadence with the commas and how thoughts are laid out. It’s got that generically positive tone as well.
Kinda cool though, I feel like I’m becoming able to spot these. It’s like being able to spot a photoshop by the pixels. I’ve seen quite a few shops in my time.
I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly makes me feel so strongly, but it’s something to do with how sentences and paragraphs are constructed.
It has the classic 3 section style. Intro, response, conclusion.
It starts by acknowledging the situation. Then it moves on to the suggestion/response. Then finally it gives a short conclusion.
the “This is photoshopped, i can tell by the pixels” has now become “This is LLM, I can tell by the sections”
And don’t forget balanced. However, consider, it’s also…
Yay we’re developing the uncanny valley for AI generated content
And so the Turing test lives on! /s
The full url written out is a good clue, but beyond that, AI sounds off-puttingly positive because it’s always trying to be as inoffensive and appealing to everyone as possible.
You are dead on. That post absolutely fucking reeks of AI. I want to say if you can’t smell it a mile off you’re an absolute cretin, but there are probably millions of people who’ve never really spent much time with LLMs and would be easily fooled by this garbage
how thoughts are laid out
Perhaps you’re noticing the lack of deixis?
Without going too technical, deixis is to refer to something in relation to the current situation. For example, when you say “Kinda cool though, I feel like I’m becoming able to spot these.”, that “these” is discourse deixis - you’re referring to something else (bots) within your discourse based on its relative position to when you wrote that “these”.
We humans do this all the bloody time. LLMs though almost never do it - and Ophelia_SK doesn’t, that’s why for example it repeats “debt” and “job” like a broken record.
It’s because of the soulless soulless emoji at the end. LLM developers have been adding them to the ends of all GPT conversations because they statistically trick people interacting with them to think they are having emotional connections
You see all over the place in Amazon reviews too. You basically can’t trust the reviews anymore.
Does any body know of an open-source reddit alternative? God, I wish that existed :/
I love how marketing people are so abnormal that they need tips on not sounding like a bot.
I’m looking forward to their “Dynamic Product Ads” system to coming back to bite them in the ass when ads for Nestle products appear next to posts talking about whatever horrific thing Nestle is doing this week (and similar things).
The day Spez decided to turn his shitty circus into an IPO, was the last warning bell.
Did anything that happened from last year tell anyone anything over there? No because a large amount of Reddit users are lost causes, they can’t cope getting outside their comfort zone. They’re like Facebook users, too drugged up on their insatiable need to be righteous, to be validated, to feel like they’re heard and to play up to an audience who more than likely would not like them if they met them in person.
Soon we’re going to find Spez saying the exact same thing Mark said - “Dumb fucks”.
And now ensues an arms race, in which advertisers attempt to plant adverts into comment sections naturally, while reddit attempts to stop them doing it for free.
No company with shareholders can ever avoid enshittification.
Will it apply to porn subreddits?
“Hey u\i_love_big_tiddies, noticed that you love big tiddies. Could we interest you in our new product: AstroCam Super Binoculars, so you can look at big tiddies from as far away as a quarter mile?”
I know it’s a real problem and all, but dear lord does Lemmy in particular love that word.
Well, I just stopped using reddit so this is good timing.
I think it’s harder to post to Reddit as a human being than it is as a bot. You have to read like six paragraphs of text (which doesn’t show up on old Reddit) to make sure that your post is formatted correctly, and then a mod will look through your comment history and ban you because they read everything you’ve ever posted and discovered that you own a car or something.
I really would like to quit Reddit but I have to admit that Reddit has a lot more variety in terms of content, so I’ll keep using it until Boost for Reddit finally breaks for good.
50% of the content on Lemmy falls into four categories:
It has definitely become more noticeable on Reddit that huge numbers of either compromised or sold accounts are being used by bots to sell shit. They are in basically every thread now, getting upvoted to appear more legit until someone calls them out and they delete their content.
Reddit is definitely on the way down. And a decent amount along the way. But unfortunately, it still is the best option for a modern day message board. I want to use Lemmy more, but there just isn’t enough content being posted by enough people.
There’s something sad about society losing a such a unique source of knowledge, but hopefully we’ve collectively learned something about the dangers of trusting proprietary solutions.
Anyone found a reliable way to search across Lemmy instances they can share?
Echo chambers were literally the biggest issue with that site. Now it chatGPTs itself?
The only remaining use for reddit for me is basically being a Stack Overflow for non-technology stuff (want to find the best bidet, there’s probably a review post on reddit that someone put together).
Now that comments might be well-hidden marketing attempts, there’s legit no trusting that information anymore.
Way to go, Reddit. In a few months, I’ll no longer have any reason to look at a post from 2024 or later.
Yeah, I’m done with it.
most Internet users are happy to do a quick Google Search
Yeah, the average redditor won’t throw abuse at you for suggesting they use google to find out what something is.
So... is it safe to assume reddit is suppressing it and handing out bans?
We highly recommend only mentioning the brand name of your product since mentioning links in posts makes the post more likely to be reported as spam and hidden.
Like Barbie™, now available on Blu-ray and select streaming service!
Basically, the situation right now…
It sucks because I use reddit as a source to find out info about products . Now I won’t.
So ultimately I might buy less?
Why are people still on there?!
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months ago
It should be illegal to misrepresent an ad as a post or comment. This exact thing should be against the law. The boundary between advertising and social media is so thin at this point. It has to stop. It’s dangerous for consumers.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The law requires YouTubers to identify sponsored segments. I don’t see why that shouldn’t also be applied to social media posts.
hayes_@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
The law does apply to social media posts.
The social media company has to mark sponsored content and give users the means to do so themselves (when the partnership is between the user and a third party rather than the social media company).
Unfortunately it’s hard to prove and profitable to lie.
obinice@lemmy.world 6 months ago
In which countries, though? That’s a key point that seems missed from a lot of responses discussing “the law”.
Laws vary quite significantly from nation to nation, and without that key context, there’s not much that can be garnered.
andrewth09@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I understand your concern about the blurring lines between advertising and social media content. Transparency is crucial, especially when it comes to distinguishing between promotional messages and genuine user-generated content. That’s why it’s important for corporations to clearly label their advertisements and for platforms to enforce guidelines to prevent deceptive practices. On a lighter note, have you heard about Bachelor Chow? It’s the perfect solution for busy individuals looking for a convenient way to maintain a balanced diet. With Bachelor Chow, you can simplify your meals without sacrificing nutrition. Check it out today!
psycho_driver@lemmy.world 6 months ago
OMG are you me?!? I too can’t get enough of Bachelor Chow! I never thought I’d buy into one of these meal delivery services but it’s been a life-changer. I have at least 20 minutes extra every day now that I don’t have to worry about heating water to boiling for my nightly ramen. Think of what my employer can do with those extra 20 minutes?! Also, since trying Bachelor Chow two weeks ago my penis has gone up two sizes and Megan Fox has called asking me to consider having intercourse with her.
xor@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months ago
Twice. I did it twice.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 6 months ago
If corporations are people, my friend, then they can have a conversation with you. What’s the harm in that?
Image
Syrc@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Still waiting on the first corporation to get thrown in jail
ElCanut@jlai.lu 6 months ago
It’s already illegal in the EU, several influencers have had trouble with the law because of this in my country (France)
prole@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
This is what people like Musk are concerned about when they claim to be “free speech absolutists”. This is where their concern for that freedom begins and ends.