in my experience, reddit advertising has been idiotic for several years.
I go to a basketball subreddit. there are no relevant ads about basketball. not local team tickets, not streaming services, basketball equipment, basketball merch, or even a video game.
I go to a subreddit for a tv show. it’s similar. There are no ads or links to buy dvds or tickets to a convention or anything related to the show.
They could totally target advertising based on subreddit and they don’t.
Is this because they think they’re more likely to get a more valuable click by showing you targeted ads from the highest bidder?
Targeted ads always seem to be so poorly targeted.
I can’t believe for as long as I’ve been on Reddit I never realized that point you just made. Good shit dude.
This is Macro scale issue with whole US stock market not an specific Reddit Issue I Believe
I’ve checked some companies and that seems so, though reddit seems to be the only one that lost ~40% value in one month
Tesla and DJT have lost similar amounts in the last month.
General rule for posting stock prices: sometimes things are obvious when you zoom out a bit.
In this particular case, Reddit stock price is still up several percentage points from the Trump rally that affected just about every tech stock after 2024-10-30 about. Same applies to other stocks like Tesla.
So at this point it’s nothing more than a return to normal. No need to attribute anything more to it. But sure, if this descends keeps going for some time more, it’ll be different.
Interesting! I didnt know that so many tech stocks were impacted on that date. Is there anything special about the start date of reddit’s stock decline? Or was it simple a “straw that broke the camel’s back” situation, where some insignificant thing started the downward trend?
Stocks overall took a downturn when investors finally realized Trump wasn’t bluffing bout his tariff plans
I’m not experienced with stock markets, but is the concept of ‘normal’ really relevant, especially after a whole quarter? What factors would give it a tendency to return to the prior state?
Stock markets are very close to brownian motion. There is no return to normal.
There is a market portfolio (people use the s&p500 as a proxy for this) so returns of sectors or individual stocks should be made relative to this.
I think it started bc Elon bitched about the white people twitter sub was inciting violence and it shut down for a bit and now with saying Luigi
Reddit is pretty useless for getting any kind of advanced information on any topic. The impression I had of the US election based on it was completely out of line with reality, so in that case it couldn’t be trusted as an accurate source of information on current affairs.
People are addicted to it, but you’d have to be pretty sad to pay for it.
Blocking ads on it is a trivial matter. It never made any money.
The question is why did anyone think it would ever be worth much at all.
The impression I had of the US election based on it was completely out of line with reality
I’ve largely switched to Lemmy for the past two years, but this was really the last nail in the coffin for reddit for me too. It’s an enforced echo-chamber and no longer a reliable source of information. It’s hard to notice how bad things are when the politics are leaning in your direction, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and it feels gross.
Lemmy is obviously pretty politically homogeneous too, but the difference is that I don’t feel like someone is trying to trick me. Topics and and sources are clearly influenced by the individual posters’ opinions, but it doesn’t feel like there’s a coordinated behind-the-scenes effort to push an agenda, which makes for a better vibe.
For me, it was the massive uptick in bans that proved the manipulation was real
Are you an Apollo exile?
I was a “Reddit is Fun” user for at least a decade
I literally just uninstalled both rif and rif premium 1 minute ago. Their last update was June 2023. I can’t believe it’s been that long.
Yep, its got pretty extreme. So many comments seem to be bots, and it really feels like you’re being pushed in a certain direction. I can’t fathom how it got so bad
There are bots on here too. I’ve noticed a lot of handled accounts that will reply consistently with pro Russian propaganda. Some may be bots, but others are handled. Either way, the goals are the same.
You sadly can’t escape it these days.
No matter where you go, it’s best to be aware and double check sources.
I’ve noticed a lot of handled accounts that will reply consistently with pro Russian propaganda.
without evidence, you are just spreading fud
I said “I’ve noticed” which is anecdotal, but others have shared similar experiences with me. That along with the well documented interference campaigns, it’s not a stretch to draw the same conclusion here on Lemmy.
Did you read the article I shared by chance?
this is just more fud.
I wish I didn’t have to be skeptical, but sadly I do. If you read the article I shared, it outlined how insidious foreign influence campaigns can be.
For example, in 2019, 19 of Facebook’s top 20 pages for American Christians were run by Eastern European troll farms.
That’s just one example of many. We all need to be hyper vigilant.
So this place isn’t overrun by bots. Awesome. As someone new here, are there fewer bots bc it’s a smaller audience, or are there actually protections against bots?
Welcome welcome! The few bots that try to spam have been found out and disconnected relatively quickly (there have been a number of Fediverse-wide intentional efforts to spam that were dealt with).
The comment quality tends to be higher on average and braindead meme chains that bots can copy for karma farming are far less common.
That said, the Lemmy experience is yours to craft. Subscribe and block as needed, don’t feed the trolls, don’t sweat getting a few downvoted comments here and there, report bad behaviour and have fun.
So, it’s all down to federation, essentially. If an instance allows its users to act in bad faith (lemmygrad, exploding heads, etc), then typically people will ask their instance admin to defederate from them or else move to a server that will. And if you can’t find a server you like? Great news! Just pull down the source code and start your own!
Worth noting that lemm.ee pretty much does not defederate with anyone so is great if you are going to be moderating any communities because you can actually see nearly everyone that is posting.
Yeah, I also have a strong [left] libertarian bent, and I appreciate that .ee admins trust me to block servers I don’t want to see for myself. I think the only two that .ee has defederated from are lemmygrad and exploding heads (Nazis).
Unless I am wrong I don’t even think that those ones are blocked.
Oh shit, maybe I’m just banned lmao
lesser bots, i think because reddit bots are mostly political propaganda ones from RU and US.
your comments also wont get astroturfed by russian bots most of the time, or angry conservative doesnt know how to discern the meaning of your comments.
lemmy.world news and politics subs mirrored reddit strongly during the election shill op
people were banned to ciritizing Kamala’s campaign. Any discussion of 3p was also banned.
With that being said… federated nature permits people with different opinions to find other subs for discussions.
There’s a difference between being banned and being downvoted to oblivion for pushing idiotic tactics.
i said banned…
Lies
Absolutely correct, comrade. And what happened? We leftists told everyone Kamala is evil, and the people listened to us and didn’t vote Democrat. We got Trump into the white house. And then the Democrats realised that they need to appeal to the left to win next time. So they’ve cleaned up their act and taken genocide off the agenda. And now they’re actually stopping Trump’s fascism. He’ll be impeached any day now!
I can’t tell if this is sarcastic or serious.
I choose to believe that the current Republican regime and the pressure by Democratic constituents on Democrats will push the Democrats to be more liberal and do more, but honestly there’s some clear “first Hitler then us” vibes to that thinking that I can’t get past
I’m a proud Marxist-Leninist! I personally believe that using tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution was justified, because anyone who disagrees with Stalin on how to achieve communism is a Nazi. And if you want to see the benefits of the marxist-leninist ideology, all you have to do is look at Joe Biden’s recent outspoken support for a worker owned state.
Its value is equal to its usefulness as a propaganda organ. Twitter wasn’t purchased to make money. A megaphone is more of a tool than an investment.
Dunno, I think Musk was forced to buy it, then he suggested it was going to be all sorts of things while massively cutting costs, before pivoting to giving Trump a quarter of a billion in order to get access to government.
I don’t think there was any intention to buy twitter for propaganda, and I haven’t seen any evidence that shows to what degree (if at all) it helped Trump get elected.
I mean, you DO understand that the current situation involves granularity like we have never witnessed before, algorithmic fuckery that we have been warned about, and the fact that access to Twitter data in controlled by the guy who initiated all of the fuckery involving twitter, right? What I’m saying is that your standard for evidence is not in touch with the current reality. Fortunately, this guy can’t seem to hide his intentions, so we really don’t need an in depth analysis. The only ones who would wish for the rest of us to demand such a thing in order to believe what we are seeing in front of our very eyes are the ones who would benefit from the truth being obscured… Oh. I think I understand now
he only used it as a propaganda tool after he was forced to buy, he had to make that money back somehow, SAUDIS and putin did step in to help.
Exactly. I responded to somebody who said twitter was bought not to make money but as a propaganda tool.
Then a sequence of morons ‘attacked’ me. (I put attacked in quotation marks as it hardly counts as any kind of ‘attack’.)
I wish I was naive as you.
Reddit is pretty nice as a source of information, but mostly on smaller and more obscure things, not big political topics like US elections… that’s what the last year has taught me, at least.
Stop, stop! He’s already dead!
I thought they were supposedly going to be making money selling training data for AI’s.
And what is an ai trained on reddit going to help with? Misinforming people on specialised topics, or misinforming people on current affairs?
Edit - I suppose you might be able to train an ai not to reply as per replies on reddit, dunno.
lol
Fuck if I know. I never said it was a good idea!
Might just be drop from a peak, but lets hope it keeps dropping.
Now what I under understand (not condone) is the reddit leadership trying to cash out.
What I cant understand is why a VC / big investor would want to touch it with a 10ft pole. There is nothing unique or proprietary on Reddit. Its value commercially is in the existing content and paid ads. With ads you’re limited because you can only saturate so much before you see user drop off.
Now they took it one step further and are censoring the content creators that make it all possible in the first place. As if anyone is stuck on that site - I know I’m not.
Anyway - nice to meet everyone. Fled digg for Reddit; now thankful this island appeared after fleeing once again.
Reddit has a huge user base, that is their value. They generate a lot of data every second, which can be sold. Of course this is technically possible on other platforms, but they do have it right now right here.
I get that, but long term investors need to be confident that the user base will stick after continuing to erode the platform.
That’s the part I have no confidence in. Will they make money for the short term? Absolutely, and a lot of people will get rich. But in 5-10 years?
I joined reddit ~15 years ago and there was already a very large, active userbase. It’s not a young platform, and there have been multiple protests against them by their users, yet reddit is still very much alive. I don’t think the confidence from investors is unfounded. Pissing off their users has kind of proven that there isn’t a real competitor out there.
We’re in the minority of users who have actually gotten fed up with them to the point of finding an alternative. Most people will complain but still stick around and stay active on reddit. They get new users daily who don’t know reddit as anything other than what it is now. People generally don’t care.
As is, I don’t see them going out of business anytime soon. If they continue to make ridiculously idiotic business decisions they might, but that’s on-brand for them at this point.
I can see it going either way.
I probably spoke to broadly and I agree with you 100%.
It is not something I foresee happening overnight. But a slow decay.
As censorship, commercialization and advanced bot traffic increase, the content quality will go down. Once it becomes a forced echo chamber (vs the organic it is now), it starts to look like Twitter post Elmo acquisition.
Now does Twitter still have users, paid subscribers and traffic? Absolutely. Does anyone want to buy their stock?
And I’ll repeat this until I’m blue in the face and user name - it’s an old website forum - nothing unique from a technical standpoint. Anyone can start one who has the hosting ability. Their moat is the users. They have no ecosystem that locks you to their platform. The only thing lost from leaving is your reddit Schrute bucks and Stanley nickels.
Edit x5 because I can’t spell Schrute
I don’t think we’re the right demographic to judge that as our view is very distorted by our own experience. The reddit “exodus” is barely a blip in their daily user count - in fact DAU has gone up by 50% since the API changes which is huge especially for a mature platform. This makes it very desirable as it shows that the more aggressive monetization effort doesn’t in fact drive users away.
Fair point and maybe I am looking at it wrong. I tunneled on the visual / idea that once it ceased being what made it popular that it would be no more.
But I can now see it being another grazing pasture for seniors to scream their political fears into the void like Facebook.
Digg still continues to exist to this day. I’m sure reddit will do the same. Become an unused relic of the past that nobody uses anymore
Did Luigi save us from reddit? What can’t this man do?
When you start banning long-term users over bullshit. This happens. Hope it crashes and burns all the way to the ground.
A lot of overpriced stocks are pulling back. A recession is bad for ad dependent media.
This particular decline was caused by a bunch of insiders, including one greedy pigboy, selling some of their shares.
That’s not necessarily a sign of any problems at the company, though. These insiders are probably carrying this equity from before it ever went public and sell shares periodically as part of their (insane) compensation. For instance, the aforementioned greedy little pigboy sold $2m according to that article, but still holds more than $90m at current valuations.
There have been multiple sellers since the end of Feb that have had an impact. Pays to be an insider lol.
Specifically, insider Benjamin Seong Lee sold 92,299 shares of the firm’s stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, March 4th. The shares were sold at an average price of $157.35, for a total value of $14,523,247.65. Following the transaction, the insider now directly owns 115,001 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $18,095,407.35. This trade represents a 44.52 % decrease in their position. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which can be accessed through the SEC website. Also, CAO Michelle Marie Reynolds sold 11,965 shares of the business’s stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, March 4th. The stock was sold at an average price of $157.41, for a total transaction of $1,883,410.65. Following the transaction, the chief accounting officer now owns 48,418 shares in the company, valued at $7,621,477.38. The trade was a 19.82 % decrease in their ownership of the stock. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. In other news, CEO Steve Ladd Huffman sold 14,000 shares of the business’s stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, February 28th. The stock was sold at an average price of $160.30, for a total transaction of $2,244,200.00. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer now directly owns 597,515 shares in the company, valued at $95,781,654.50. The trade was a 2.29 % decrease in their position. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available at this hyperlink.
That’s not necessarily a sign of any problems at the company, though.
It’s a very strong sign that there aren’t a lot of people waiting to buy.
But then, as many people already commented, the market is not very hot right now.
It’s just FUD, diamond hands 💎🤝, to the moon 🚀 🌒, etc etc
/s just in case
I’d love for someone to buy as much Reddit stock as possible and make Reddit answer to any ridiculous demands.
Ah, yes. The theoretical good billionaire.
Yeah, that went great when Musk bought Twitter
Uhh guys I hate reddit too but the entire economy is tanking.
This isnt a reddit thing and has nothing to do with reddit itself
Compare to s&p 500, nyse, NASDAQ, etc.
It’s down all around but not 40% down
Not yet anyway
I am trying my best. Not buying Heinz or Mars bars. Buying Bramwells and Titan bars instead. Where practical avoid American.
Putting the red in reddit.
Unfortunately the it already left when I signed up here a couple of years back.
