Marketers Are About To Infiltrate Subreddits - Slashdot

Marketers Are About To Infiltrate Subreddits

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  It surely was nice to hang around, shame for the ruination.

• I may even buy a Sharp microwave oven to pop some Orville Redenbacher's Classic Butter microwave popcorn while I watch the mayhem unfold on my LG monitor attached to my Dell computer and then fart.

  • You have been issued a 3 days ban for mentioning body gas in connection with our brand. Please refrain from doing this in the future.

  • Good choice! Sharp microwaves are known for their durability and performance, and they offer various features that can improve your cooking experience. Their advanced sensor cooking feature makes them ideal for making the perfect bag of popcorn every time!

• Is this 'enshitification'? Take away a sane way of keeping spam off the platform, then enable those with brand finance to follow up all mentions?

  There is another view I can see, perhaps this will be the better way to communicate with customer services than Twitter. Post complain in public, then wait for direct messages when your post gets karma.

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    Yes. This is the first major step down the spiral: the pivot away from user-focused features to onboard businesses and cater to their needs instead.

    • Re:

      Reddit hasn't been user focused in a looong while.

      • Re:

        Whatever. In any case until now their was enough user focus (whatever that is) to foster a large number of loyal users.

        What is certain is that going forward the focus will — in fact — not be users. It will be investors, all day, every day.

  • Re:

    Is this 'enshitification'?

    Only if it's an increase from the status quo.

    Some companies engage on social medial openly and successfully. I seem to recall Burger King and Wendy's having rather cheeky social media accounts that open engaged in public dialogs.

    Here ya go

    https://contentworks.agency/10... [contentworks.agency]

  • Re:

    IT really is. I'd rather wade through the sewer that is 4chan, knowing that it's just too spicy and toxic for any advertiser to bother with, but at least there you have some semblance of freedom of speech without being down-modded into oblivion or (shadow) banned for having an opinion that diverges from the hivemind.

    (also far fewer absolutely retarded fucking marvel-movie-tier puns and quips.)

    • Re:

      Now you mention it, there's still newsgroups, that's got to have less moderation. Use 'em or lose 'em!

  • Re:

    The yelp model.

    1) Convenient method to let brands know when someone is talking shit about them.
    2) Turns out a lot of people and/or bots are talking shit about your brand!
    3) ???
    4) Profit!

• I have seen companies posting in some subreddits, in response to users talking about company products or sometimes just providing updates.

  Why is this bad? You are talking about "marketers" but it can also be helpful for support people, just like support people reach out if people are mentioning issues on X.

  People can always tell when soemthing is marketing, those kids off things get either derided, downvoted or ignored. A company genuinely trying to be helpful can be useful to have in a subreddit.

  • There is a small chance that good companies will post genuinely useful stuff
    There is a greater chance that mercenary scumballs will spam, spam, spam, etc

    • Re:

      That's not really the way reddit works though. Spam will get modded down into oblivion pretty fast if not topical.

      Much higher chance is that support and marketing teams will use this for damage control. I.e. something goes badly with a product, wave of anger starts to build on reddit, marketers and support staff monitoring can take note of it early and actually address the problem, or at least get ahead of the outrage. As much as you can do that on reddit.

      Considering that this is about "letting brands know

      • 1 hidden comment

• Great, as if being banned because you offended the fee-fees of some mod wasn't bad enough, now you can also get banned for saying something bad about $brand.

  At this point, the new Reddit game is "how long can you survive 'til the permaban"?

  • Re:

    I would argue that this is the exact opposite. Imagine being a marketing/support guy monitoring social media for posts about your company. This enables you to see if something pissed off enough people for it to matter, and go and address the problem directly. I.e. lots of people having a broken widget your company makes? You can go in there in official capacity and collect "what happened" data and pass it on, while posting platitudes about "it being worked on".

    It may even help solve some of the issues.

    • Re:

      This enables you to see if something pissed off enough people for it to matter, and go and address the problem directly.

      Bull. If that were the case we would have seen things change long ago considering all the currently available places one can complain. In the past I've gone to stores and told them, "This is what I need" and nothing changed. They had a customer willing and ready to hand over their money for a product, and they couldn't be bothered.

      One can look at what's happened to Levis. Despite being

      • Re:

        One can look at what's happened to Levis. Despite being the top jean brand in the country, if not the world, they've cut back their offerings. Now, you get five waist sizes and two lengths to choose from. If you don't fit in one of those, tough shit. How often do you think people have complained about this and nothing's changed?

        That's sad. I remember when they were piloting jeans custom sewn to your laser-scanned dimensions
        https://news.ycombinator.com/i... [ycombinator.com]

        I worked on Levi's Original Spin program (orig

      • Re:

        Strange...

        It might be where you are shopping.

        At the outlet mall near me, at the Levi branded store, the number of sizes and styles seems to within reason, at least to this nerd and his hot wife who picks out the cloths beyond cisco golf shirt and bib overalls.

        • Re:

          I have two Levis outlet stores near me. One 15 minutes, the other 30 minutes. Neither carry the size I need. None of the stores in my area carry the size I need. Since I'm not the typical obese American, I don't count as a customer.

          I haven't bought a pair of Levis in at least a decade. In fact, I have the last four remaining pairs of jeans in my in the entire country. Just the other day I had to buy from Lee to get the size I need. They'll arrive next week some time.

• The end is nigh

  • 1 hidden comment

• This has been blatantly obvious in many parts of reddit for over five years.

• I predict Truman Show like levels of product placement will ensue. "Who the hell are you talking to?", as I look around the subreddit in confusion.
• OnlyFans was bad enough and damn near ruined Reddit with spam. This⦠will seal the deal. Goodbye and good riddance.

• Once marketers take over, it's the end of communities.

  We've seen this dozens of times before. The problem is that these people never stop. Just look outside. Every surface they can find is turned into an ad space.

  Now would be a good time for a competitor to launch.

  • Re:

    If only there was some free and easy way to Use Networks to host discussions instead of relying on private web-based discussion forums.

• I used to browse Reddit regularly, not a power user but a regular one. Then the pulled the third-party API fiasco and I said fuck em. I still use Reddit, but only for very targeted purposes (so pretty rare).

  Guess I made the right decision. Fuck the people running Reddit.

  • Re:

    Same. I used to actively browse it using Slide from my phone or the browser on my desktop.
    Now I only land there occasionally after a search.
    It was good while it lasted.
    Looking forward to what's coming next.
• It's been a long time since they were even hiding it.

  • Re:

    Yeah, try going into something like the NVIDIA subreddit and say something truthful but negative about Jensen Huang. You'll get downmodded by his fanboy army into oblivion faster than you can say "leather jacket!". I don't know how many of these people are getting free product for shilling the brand, but I can't imagine that it's a trivial amount.

• Check out some of the pro-ukraine and pro-israel subreddits if you want to see some real marketing.

• • Re:

    If I had to choose between trolls and marketers, I'll take the trolls, ban the marketers, and flush the influencers down a toilet. Of the three, only the trolls are usually obvious with their agenda.
    • 1 hidden comment
• Newsflash, marketers have been on reddit for years.

• even from what it was a year or two ago. I assume it has to do with the API changes killing mod tools.

  So many subs are karma farms for accounts that are 1 year old or more, with zero post history, submitting generic garbage to lightly moderated subs.

  Then you have myriad propaganda subs that explicitly ban debate or any questioning of narratives, like WorkersStrikeBack, Libertarian, Conservative, and a host of other related subs.

  The only subs that have a semblance of decent moderation these days are some of