The real fuck spez would be a blank canvas. He doesn’t care what we write on there as long as he’s getting clicks and engagement
Is that why their valuation keeps falling?
I mean I get the idea, but it’s not accurate in practice. When your commodity is your community and your community is showing nothing but disrespect towards your plans and authority, you become a very volatile investment.
See: Twit- sorry, X. See X for example.
User engagement doesn’t help as much as a literally mutinous userbase hurts.
We can please not bring the “we did it Reddit!” culture to Lemmy?
Reddit is a privately held company. Their valuation is falling because someone at Fidelity arbitrarily said so. Right now, given the current economic trends, almost every consumer tech company is taking a beating (Discord, Substack, etc), so in the larger context Reedit’s drop in valuation is expected and smart money is expecting it to rise once the economy becomes hot and more investors have money to risk on consumer companies.
The biggest value of a social media is the influence it has on culture and society as a whole, which is why advertisers want to get in on the action (think of Facebook influencing elections). Engaging on the platform and even constantly talking about the platform is a great sign of it’s lasting influence.
So no, spending an hour putting pixels on r/place is not a great way to stick it to Reddit. Constantly talking about Reddit and basically giving it free ad-space and mind share on Lemmy also does not stick it to Reddit. The original poster is correct: best thing is a blank canvas.
And ignore all the click-bait articles about how Reddit is going to fall any day now. They all basically play on your wishful thinking for clicks, they aren’t based on reality.
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I think this opinion is a bit… strange.
So no, spending an hour putting pixels on r/place is not a great way to stick it to Reddit. Constantly talking about Reddit and basically giving it free ad-space and mind share on Lemmy also does not stick it to Reddit. The original poster is correct: best thing is a blank canvas.
This is basically a rehash of: “There is no bad publicity!”
That’s complete nonsense. An advertiser looks at a few things in a website to advertise on. Three very important factors: Traffic, because you want a sufficient number of people to potentially click your ad. Engagement, because people who participate on the website will be more likely to click your ad and then buy something. AND brand identity. That third one is the reason why advertising Disney plus on PornHub might be a bad idea, even if PornHub has great engagement and traffic.
This third factor is the problem reddit is currently facing, and has always been facing: Really big players spend millions on PR so that they are catching the current feeling of what is hip, young, and positive in their advertising and brand identity. They also want to advertise their product on websites which give people the same feeling: They want their product displayed on websites which feel young, hip, and positive. You do not want your product associated and displayed on a website whose userbase is obviously annoyed, negative, and keeps shouting “Fuck Spez”, whatever that means.
That has been a reddit problem for quite a long time: It never had a brand identity which was glitzy and positive enough to be very attractive. It isn’t young, and hip, and positive. It always had the stigma of being a “nerd cave”. Which is fine, if you have a product that you don’t mind to be associated with that, and if the userbase is happy with that. “When did the Narwahl bacon?”, was cringey as fuck, but it reflected an essentially positive attitude and feeling of a userbase which didn’t mind to be associated with the site. As an advertiser you can work with that, and cann piggyback on that.
You do not want to piggyback on “Fuck Spez”. Because you don’t want your product to be associated with an obvious feeling of negativity and frustration. You don’t want your brand to be caught in that. The best option for an advertiser when faced with a website that carries clear negative reputation and connotations, is to just not be there.
So, I think what you are saying here, is not true. It would be better for reddit, if nobody talked about reddit. A bad reputation, and a brand identity associated with “frustration” (in exchange for more clicks and engagement) is far worse than being a “mostly neutral nerd cave”, which is a bit less popular.
Guy’s whole post opened up as a paradox.
“Can we not do the we did it reddit thing?”
My post was nothing like the “we did it reddit” thing.
Also their post started off needlessly like an attack. Like a reddit post.
Engaging on the platform and even constantly talking about the platform is a great sign of it’s lasting influence.
You do realize you’re on a sub dedicated to reddit, right? It’s hypocritical if you’re telling users to not engage yet stay in a sub that talks about the site.
Also, this is wrong. Advertisers do care about the traffic, but they also care about stability and how their brands will be perceived. This is why nsfw reddits don’t advertise. Now put yourself in the shoes of an advertiser: there’s a lot of traffic on reddit but there’s a lot of hate and vitriol, with the threat of users leaving and just a lot of bots propping the communities up. Would you spend money to advertise on such a volatile site when there are literally other, maybe even bigger, sites available to you without all the BS or threats to how your brand/product will be perceived? I mean, you might. But you’ve probably made tons of better business decisions than that.
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But what if we do catch the boston bomber though. Maybe Bernie could still have a chance if so
How does their board measure success? As there is a majority of lurkers, what’s the best price of one’s effort?
The advertisers don’t care if the engagement is respectful or not, only that it’s engagement.
It’s not really like that, if it’s toxic, advertisers don’t want to associate their brand with it. Look at how many videos on youtube got demonetized.
I don’t know about that. There’s a reason why Twitter keeps losing advertisers. If you’re Nike, you don’t want an ad for Nikes next to a guy spouting a racist rant or hurling a bunch of insults.
I understand what you’re saying, but
Profitability != Value
When political power is part of the return.
That’s what makes reddit attractive to someone like Tencent.
They care if it’s monetizable
its over for reddit right now, and this r/place doesnt change it no matter how much traffic they get from this, its temporary, once it ends, it dissapears, so i dont think having some fun will hurt lemmy or will make spez win
Honestly, even if the whole lemmy.world (for example) joins, it won’t matter. The bots and streamers (and their fanbase) alone outnumber us too much for us to even make a dent on their traffic. People here are grossly underestimating the number of bots and reddit users. Like they think because some protestors join it’s suddenly going to drastically shoot their engagement numbers up. Lol.
The average user has already forgotten about the API changes
I agree. I’m just not sure how that relates to what I said (not being snarky - just a bit confused).
There are still some people who are unaware of either spez, the protests, or reddit alternatives. Tbh, i still can’t believe it. Even if they don’t end up leaving, i think it’s important for them to know a bit of history to understand things better when reddit pulls another shit like this (which they will probably do more of after the IPO).
“repressed” would be more fitting as many users are even angry that mods are moderating less strict. They don’t want to hear that it’s gotten more difficult to moderate without the tools, they just want to fuel their addiction and carry on as before.
bots?
Germany dashing eastwards. Some things never change.
Gave me a good chuckle
Traditions.
Oh they expanded the canvas so people can keep placing more and engaging with Reddit more? How unexpected…
yeah, well, it’s literally the same thing they did the other times sooo …
The first place didn’t have any canvas expansions iirc
they started expanding it in order to accomodate op’s mom
Spez seeing this
Lots of people saying this is playing right into reddit’s hands, but can someone explain this reasoning to me please? People click on a pixel and reddit profits… how exactly?
Like this isn’t going to bring back their mods or power users, they’ve burned those bridges already and the exodus of lurkers is just a matter of time at this point. I don’t see how making some pixels say “fuck spez” helps them.
It drives active users and increases activity on the site. Reddit tracks site usage metrics, and active user count + engagement are two of the most important metrics, since more active users = more eyeballs on ads, and more engagement = more ads that can be placed in front of those eyeballs.
The fact that the majority of the new active users are bot accounts that can’t be advertised to is secondary, since the people who would invest in a reddit IPO wouldn’t typically look that deep, they’d just look at the top line metrics and go “oh, there’s a big bump on activity, this is a healthy website.”
I see what you’re saying, yeah, and I don’t think you’re wrong. It’s just that this creates a strong visual of how fucked the site is, that there’s such a massive show of resentment. Like, making a bunch of negative comments is one thing, but it’s easy to miss or obscure. The place image is so unmissably clear that it has to do more damage to reddit than good.
Plus even if this short term bump helps, I don’t think the reddit situation is really salvageable long term. Like user engagement is going to go down over time as they realise how bad it is to browse communities that are poorly moderated and losing submissions. If the place stunt is enough to make a real difference to metrics then those metrics are already permanently hosed.
Another thing is that the number of people doing the protests are insignificant if you consider the botters and streamers. I mean, even if NONE of the protestors engage in r/place, it will barely touch their metrics.
This is anecdotal, but I saw one person in Discord claiming (and showing screenshots) of having 500+ bots. And that’s just 1 person.
Oh, I agree overall. Long term, reddit is fucked with a capital F. But I think the goal right now is to put enough lipstick on the pig for the IPO, and then to immediately bail out and let the schmucks holding the bag clean up the mess. (The fact that there’s no real coming back from something like this, and even if there was any such theoretical recovery would take years and is prone to end up further sabotaging the website, is irrelevant.)
You go to the site and see an ad on the way. Reddit profits.
Reddit turns around to their investors during their IPO and say “look at how many people flooded to our site to engage with r/place.” Reddit profits.
People see the chaos and decide to add your two cents to the canvas. The cycle repeats. Reddit profits.
Look how many people engaged only works if you manage to supress the context. Which -given the fact that r/place war already reported about each prior year- is not going to happen.
So you are basically saying people looking for advertising are going for a platform full of fucks, insults and destructive comments/behavior struggling to moderate because they are too stupid to look at anything but numbers of how many people loggend in?
They’ve had so many opportunities to advertise a competitor to migrate to, but instead they keep paying this guy to insult him.
To be fair, people have tried to advertise Lemmy multiple times, only to have it covered up. I wouldn’t be shocked if there were admin involvement.
Plus the 0,0 point in the center of the canevas is join lemmy ! and the giant fuck spez have protecting them from the xqc raid last night
I think you need to check again because I’m not seeing either right now. In fact, I see one noticeable mention of spez and it’s in another language and pretty small. And my conspiracy theory is that admin had bots running to ensure it.
Rage is profitable!
I do like to see it-- and I’m not with all these negative lemmings, a handful of people jumping on Reddit isn’t a big deal since we’re talking millions of users (and by the way it’s healthier for Lemmy to not shun double dippers, not everyone’s communities have migrated).
Also, having moonlit at a social media company, I can say shortsighted folks do jerk off to engagement metrics, usually traffic and interactions. Doesn’t change a death spiral, and usually more experienced staff know to take it in context (I e. Is it lower than last time) so either you have dumb staff relaying bad information to the top or you have smart staff panicking, quiet quitting, etc.
In other words, folks need to relax. Reddit will do reddit things; just take comfort that you’re not alone in the fuck spez mentality.
Another thing I keep forgetting to add is the exposure. I’m honestly shocked at how mamy people are ignorant to the protests. A lot of them don’t even know who spez is. Even if they don’t leave reddit, they’d at least have an idea of what reddit is becoming.
Would they care? Maybe not. But they can’t even decide for themselves if they don’t even know wtf is going on.
Right! Although that’s mildly astounding given it was so unavoidable on like, every subreddit. But yeah, I remember seeing out of the loop messages months into the protests. Hell, even local news covered it here. Lol
I didn’t know or care until I was hit with the wave of questionable bans that seem to be going around.
What! You can’t say that! YOUR BANNED! but it wasn’t me though, be cool. Lol
huh?
There was never more than about 10 of us on the chat. It was an exceedingly small operation with a pretty good impact IMO.
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People keep talking about this, but the number of new accounts even if they are bots, probably look great for reddit’s IPO.
This is all in pursuit of that all mighty dollar. This was not a random surprise at all.
I think they’re allowing new accounts a week of age, compared to a year in the past iterations. It all about boosting those engagement numbers.
@TeamAssimilation Last time they allowed brand new accounts to engage, I don’t remember if they did in 2017 or not.
Build up even more for the next one too…
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For sure, they have a serious problem with how to monetize their user base, but if someone asks “Well after the exodus”… they’ll just turn around and say "At the end of July we had the most user ever interacting with our system, our future is healthy.
Honestly, reddit is going to become a more decrepit place over the next five years, especially with this IPO. It’s turning point hasn’t happened yet, but it’s definitely starting to move towards it.
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How on earth the admins thought this was a good idea, haha.
They don’t care if people write “fuck spez” or “join lemmy.” They only care that people are engaging with reddit.
I mean it’s getting them a ridiculous amount of traffic right now.
What is this stupid giant red square trying to cover it up
That’s a russian streamer. Typical.
Imagine cementing yourself into history as such a complete asshole that you were a critical catalyst for a movement towards decentralization.
It starts like that and then the people running scripts and other power players take over
The people making that (netherlands, germany etc.) are using scripts themselves. So, it should be possible.
Germany published some stats on their Discord about two days ago - IIRC they have around 3k bot users and the bots usually “just” correct some pixels on specific artworks, while their total user number is around 90k.
Most of them use an overlay though, that helps with the pixel placement.
It’s quickly getting overwritten by white dots
Imagine a c/place? Or does Reddit own a patent for the concept of giant pixel art maps?
there’s already a thing called pixelcanvas… except it runs forever
idk how old it is but I remember messing with it in 2020
they changed it up after place 2022 tho.
older pixels used to have more cooldown, and the center used to be at 0,0…
but now cooldown is 60 seconds near the center and the center is at 10kI considered ways to do it, but without implementing it in Lemmy code, there is no way to do it…
Or m/place …but that’s the point with federation it is just another website, it’s just https://pixelplace.io/
used to spend a lot of time on
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Pretty sure they just added a bunch of pixels to the side, the rest should still be untouched. Well, as untouched as it ever is.
