This is the second advertising post I've seen on lemmy and they were both today. I'm wondering how other people feel about it or if they've even seen posts like this?
Personally I'm livid and hate seeing it here. One of the things that attracts me to lemmy is the donation based, volunteer run, distributed, open access nature of it. I don't want it to become profit driven and I really don't want to see companies in what I belive should be a purely social endeavour. I really think making it profit driven will ruin it, if that means it stays smaller then I'm okay with that.
Now I know I can block them and move on which is what I've done. I'm also pleased to say that both posts I saw were heavily downvoted and I did my part too.
I'm curious if other people agree with me and don't want advertising like this on lemmy? Also, what do people think we can actually do about it if we don't want it around? Petition instance admins to ban advertising accounts? Then how do we define one? Can anything actually be done or do I just have to block and move on from a possibly ever increasing flow of advertising until I get bored and move on?
Sorry for the long rambling post and thanks if you read this far.
Ideally like the nsfw option I would like a sponsored tag to filter on. Even a tickbox to avoid sponsored stuff like the hide bot posts.
I feel like “sponsored” implies that Lemmy (be it instance admins or any platform devs) are getting something out of it, which I don’t think is the case. Right now if advertisers are signing up and posting ads i see that as no different than junk mail in my email inbox. It’s garbage that benefits no one at best and actively harms the platform at worst.
And if Lemmy does decide to take advertiser dollars, they better step carefully. That’s one of the places the slippery slope fallacy actually does apply. I do NOT want the fediverse to turn into Reddit 2.0
Lemmy doesn't have to take a cut for it to be classified as a sponsored post.
Think about YouTube with their contains sponsored content tags in videos. YT takes no cuts from hello fresh or Nord VPN being advertised in a video. YT only gets money from the ads they roll.
Yeah, that's a good point. But in that example there's at least a relationship between advertiser and content creator. The content creator is showing their audience an ad in return for money from the sponsor.
Anyone advertising on lemmy right now is just getting free ad space. There's no relationship between the advertiser and the platform/content creator. They don't give the platform money for better servers, nor do they give creators money to create engaging content. They're more akin to a parasite than anything of benefit.