At the end of the day, Reddit is just a message board. The absolute hubris to think that one could seriously go public with a message board website... It's baffling.

Honestly, Reddit missed the ship to IPO. They should have done it a decade ago if at all.

Without mods, Reddit will become overrun with bots, rendering the precious data Reddit so desparately tries to monetize practically useless.

For June 20 and 21, the most recent days for which Similarweb has estimates, the ads site got in the range of 7,500 to 9,000 visits, Carr explained, meaning that ad-buying traffic has continued to drop.

I'm glad Reddit is feeling something from this, however, at the same time. I kinda don't care. It's a shame it went the way that it did. But spez can't take back his terrible attitude and decision making on what happened. Most people were sympathetic and wanting Reddit to be profitable and rooting for Reddit. However, spez just decided to come out swinging from nowhere hitting his allies in the face.

I am glad that this happened because Lemmy is very interesting platform.

Cant see reactions Fixed it!

Well we’re here basically figuring it out. Time to show them they aren’t needed anymore.

WE made the content. The community. No doubt the majority of level-headed folk would have accepted ad requirements in 3rd party apps. Hosting isn't free, something needs to be monetized.

But that's not what it's about. It's about locking down content from the new wave of AI models and charging for it. Charging for content we created freely to be shared.

However, Similarweb told Gizmodo traffic to the ads.reddit.com portal, where advertisers can buy ads and measure their impact, has dipped. Before the first blackout began, the ads site averaged about 14,900 visits per day. Beginning on June 13, though, the ads site averaged about 11,800 visits per day, a 20% decrease.

For June 20 and 21, the most recent days for which Similarweb has estimates, the ads site got in the range of 7,500 to 9,000 visits, Carr explained, meaning that ad-buying traffic has continued to drop.

This is the only metric that matters to Reddit, so it's nice to see!

This seems intentional at this point...

Imagine that once upon a time (5-15 years ago), I actually had addblocker disabled on reddit, because I considered it worth supporting. lol

I came from days of dialup and gone through yahoo groups, Myspace, tons of geocity sites, ask jeevs, LiveJournal, and so on. Sites will only be an attraction tell something comes that offers more. With federation and decentralized systems coming up, the hold on people and corporations trying to use you as a commodity will only tarnish the shine that it once was. When companies hold a noose around your neck thinking there isn't another option, telling you to go ahaid and jump, thinking no one will and when something comes by that makes the jump just a step down and you can take off the noose, there is nothing that they can hold onto anymore. They cannot say you have nowhere else to go. With the choice around in a federated system, you cannot be held hostage by a single entity. When people have the freedom of choice, the people win.

I literally made a reddit account a few days before the hullabaloo started, specifically to buy advertising on reddit.

1. The ad interface is terrible. Most of my experience is with Google Ads, but in general, platforms try to be super-nice to their advertisers and give them a good experience. Not reddit. The same overall shittiness the infests the rest of the site is also in their ad portal.
2. Most of the clicks were fairly poor quality (high bounce rate).
3. Whatever I tried to configure to limit geographic reach to US+Canada either wasn't set up right or was just ignored. I got plenty of clicks from all over world.

I stopped advertising on blackout day for moral reasons regardless, but it also seemed like it just overall wasn't worth it in general. And, my observation of the ads I see as a user has been that they aren't at all tuned to what I would be likely to want, or constructed so I'd be likely to click on them. Some platforms I have to consciously avoid clicking on ads or scroll past them deliberately when my natural tendency is to click on them. On reddit it's just weird nonsense that I want to scroll past anyway.

In short, my brief experience with reddit ads made me conclude that it's probably a waste of money anyway.