Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#21

Post by m12k » Mon, Oct 07, 2019, 9:10 AM UTC

longtom wrote: post #11

The notion that big brands do not want to advertise in "chaos" seems suspicious to me. In real life, there are Gucci ads right next to the homeless and drug addicts. People vandalize public ads with swastikas, Hitler beards and other sh*t, but brands do not care. Such incentives simply do not exist in real life, because nobody will realistically associate the ads with their coincidental context such as vandalism. I'm…

I think Reddit is one of the only places on the internet that mirrors the diversity and messiness of the real world - but that's not the case for pretty much all the rest of the internet, so people's assumptions and expectations are based on that instead. In the real world, when Gucci has an ad next to a drug gang hideout, they don't worry that they will have to explain to anyone that they're not associated with or condoning the drug gang. That's not the expectation on the internet, because most websites represent a single business or community, not an entire city worth of communities. So advertisers rightfully fear the headlines like 'Gucci advertises on far-right forum' instead of 'Gucci advertises in city in which far right people also live'.

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#22

Post by maeln » Mon, Oct 07, 2019, 9:14 AM UTC

mxcrossb wrote: post #20

I’m not sure why any company would pay money to advertise there, when you can easily buy upvotes instead. Sure it takes a little more creativity and a longer investment, but if the current front page is any guide, there are plenty of organizations that can do it.

Ad works differently than normal post. Even if your post make it to the front page, it will only be displayed once. Also, it mean the user either need to be looking at r/all or popular, or be subscribed to the subreddit.

Ad are display several time per page and will be display whatever subreddit the user is currently on.

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#23

Post by zerm778 » Mon, Oct 07, 2019, 9:14 AM UTC

mxcrossb wrote: post #20

I’m not sure why any company would pay money to advertise there, when you can easily buy upvotes instead. Sure it takes a little more creativity and a longer investment, but if the current front page is any guide, there are plenty of organizations that can do it.

cause buying upvotes would not work at scale and you take the risk to get busted for doing that.

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#24

Post by dspillett » Mon, Oct 07, 2019, 9:17 AM UTC

golergka wrote: post #14

foldr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're saying this on HN: a site that's vastly more regulated than reddit ever has been or is likely to be. I'm old enough to remember reddit before the days of subreddits. It wasn't a magnet for extreme content back then. That happened as a result of subreddits.

And that's why HN is only good for a very specific and narrow subtopic of the whole reddit universe. You can't even have decent political discussion here, not mentioning all the other Reddit's delightful crazyness.

> And that's why HN is only good for a very specific and narrow subtopic of the whole reddit universe.

Which is a good thing IMO. Not everything needs to be the next (or just another) digg/reddit/whatever. HN deliberately has a more specific focus than that of reddit, it is a feature not a flaw (if you watn everything to be reddit, then perhaps you would consider it a flawed feature).

> You can't even have decent political discussion here

Again, this is very deliberate. While there are some specific circumstances where significant political discussion is on-topic here, it generally isn't. See the very first section of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for official word on the matter.

Complaining that you can't have the political discussion that you want on a forum where politics is officially off-topic, is like complaining that you can't have the bacon cheese burger (with real pig and cow involved) that you want in the vegan restaurant you've decided to take lunch in.

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#25

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Oct 07, 2019, 9:17 AM UTC

foldr wrote: post #6

neals wrote: post #2

As with everything internet: good doesn't last. Now that Reddit has started its demise, where do we flok to next?

You're saying this on HN: a site that's vastly more regulated than reddit ever has been or is likely to be. I'm old enough to remember reddit before the days of subreddits. It wasn't a magnet for extreme content back then. That happened as a result of subreddits.

Well, HN is an equivalent of a subreddit, not Reddit itself. There are plenty of subreddits with HN-level quality of discussion, and there are plenty of extreme content websites out there. Reddit as a whole is essentially a smaller Internet, dimensionally reduced into a discussion board format.

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#26

Post by m12k » Mon, Oct 07, 2019, 9:17 AM UTC

mxcrossb wrote: post #20

I’m not sure why any company would pay money to advertise there, when you can easily buy upvotes instead. Sure it takes a little more creativity and a longer investment, but if the current front page is any guide, there are plenty of organizations that can do it.

Yeah, I think the article actually mentions this subtly when it talks about "machine learning tools that recognize suspicious or badly behaved accounts". Sure that'll hopefully catch some russian trying to sow discord, but I'll bet you it's mostly to combat the upvote-farms, so their own offering becomes better by comparison.

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#27

Post by Traster » Mon, Oct 07, 2019, 9:18 AM UTC

maeln wrote: post #22

mxcrossb wrote: post #20

I’m not sure why any company would pay money to advertise there, when you can easily buy upvotes instead. Sure it takes a little more creativity and a longer investment, but if the current front page is any guide, there are plenty of organizations that can do it.

Ad works differently than normal post. Even if your post make it to the front page, it will only be displayed once. Also, it mean the user either need to be looking at r/all or popular, or be subscribed to the subreddit. Ad are display several time per page and will be display whatever subreddit the user is currently on.

There's a good reason why podcast hosts read the ad copy. Even if an advert is obviously an advert - if it comes from a trusted source it's still more effective. The adverts which are astro-turfed as real posts are more effective simply because they seem to be endorsed by the community you're a part of.

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#28

Post by vkou » Mon, Oct 07, 2019, 9:20 AM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #4

neals wrote: post #2

As with everything internet: good doesn't last. Now that Reddit has started its demise, where do we flok to next?

Maybe the stars are aligned for early adopters to try out a decentralized messaging style medium ?

Unless you have a truly original idea that nobody who has given this throught stumbled on - it's not, and it won't work for all the same reasons that Mastodon does not work.

Those reasons are harassment, child pornography, and having to delegate censorship to moderators/people with way too much time on their hands.

You end up back where you started, with a clunky layer of centralized censorship on top of a distributed system.

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#29

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Oct 07, 2019, 9:22 AM UTC

m12k wrote: post #21

longtom wrote: post #11

The notion that big brands do not want to advertise in "chaos" seems suspicious to me. In real life, there are Gucci ads right next to the homeless and drug addicts. People vandalize public ads with swastikas, Hitler beards and other sh*t, but brands do not care. Such incentives simply do not exist in real life, because nobody will realistically associate the ads with their coincidental context such as vandalism. I'm…

I think Reddit is one of the only places on the internet that mirrors the diversity and messiness of the real world - but that's not the case for pretty much all the rest of the internet, so people's assumptions and expectations are based on that instead. In the real world, when Gucci has an ad next to a drug gang hideout, they don't worry that they will have to explain to anyone that they're not associated with or c…

Yup. I think a lot of people - even here, of all places - also don't realize that Reddit and other generic social networks (Facebook, Instagram) aren't like HN. They're like the Internet. That is, /r/programming is to Reddit what HN is to WWW. Child porn groups on Instagram are to Instagram what child porn sites are to the whole Internet. All those social networks, allowing for bottom-up group creation, are micro-Internets over proprietary protocol (UI) on top of HTTP, with free, unsquatted and browser-configurable DNS equivalent.

Re: Reddit, where chaos thrives, tries to clean up to attract ads from big brands

#30

Post by m12k » Mon, Oct 07, 2019, 9:22 AM UTC

sudoaza wrote: post #12

Not even the internet is safe from gentrification.

I'd argue it's almost the other way around. Ever since the internet got popular with companies it's mostly been very 'clean' in that most websites represent a single company or community and you could easily stick to seeing only 'approved' content. Now with 'social media', the internet is finally seeing the real messiness of the real world and places where all types congregate.