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18 votes
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Megan Thee Stallion and fast food’s ongoing pursuit of Black buy-in
6 votes -
Sexist and offensive vintage ads that would never fly today, 1940-1980
23 votes -
All the ways Netflix tracks you and what you watch
9 votes -
Fide sparks anger with ‘gross’ breast enlargement sponsor for women’s chess
7 votes -
Diners beware: That meal may cost you your privacy and security
8 votes -
New Norwegian law will require advertisements where a body's shape, size, or skin has been retouched to be labeled
16 votes -
BTS - Spot's On It (Hyundai + Boston Dynamics ad) (2021)
4 votes -
The Chinese content farms running hundreds of "factory TikTok" accounts for marketing
4 votes -
Man against marketing
5 votes -
Scroll has been acquired by Twitter
4 votes -
In a grief-filled year, brands from Etsy to Pandora let you skip Mother's Day emails
6 votes -
The Instagram ads Facebook won't show you
26 votes -
Getting kinky for the sake of data
4 votes -
Why Lichess will always be free
19 votes -
I called off my wedding. The internet will never forget
24 votes -
Scale was the god that failed
10 votes -
Murder coffee
3 votes -
I looked at 100 ads for menstrual products spanning 100 years — shame and secrecy prevailed
26 votes -
How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation
10 votes -
Google’s FLoC is a terrible idea
31 votes -
Google to stop selling ads based on your specific web browsing
29 votes -
How would you improve advertising on Reddit?
Let me preface that I'm well aware that if given the choice between frequent, untargeted ads or fewer targeted ads, the average Tilderino's response would be "Neither." However, given that social...
Let me preface that I'm well aware that if given the choice between frequent, untargeted ads or fewer targeted ads, the average Tilderino's response would be "Neither."
However, given that social media at scale has yet to establish a sustainable business model that doesn't rely on advertising (people like free content, after all), it seems advertising has become a necessary evil (and has pervaded nearly all forms of media for the past century regardless).
With that in mind, I think coming up with creative solutions to deliver relevant advertising while preserving user privacy and avoiding destructive feedback loops (i.e. where the search for ad revenue compromises the user base and content generation) is an interesting thought exercise. This is one of social media's largest problems, imho, but it might be easier to analyze just Reddit as a platform due to its similarities (and notable differences) to Tildes.
A couple thoughts of my own:
- Whitelist "safe" subreddits - A massive problem for Reddit is identifying content that brands want to avoid association with (e.g. porn, violence, drugs). While new subreddits crop up every day, the large ones do not change so fast and could be classified as safe content spaces (e.g. /r/aww)
- User subreddit subscriptions - Rather than target ads based on the subreddit currently being viewed, why not use the subs people have voluntarily indicated they are interested in?
- Allow users to tag content - While people can report content to the mods today, there is no ability to tag content (like Tildes has) from a user level. Content that's inappropriate for advertising may not necessarily be a reportable offense. By allowing users to classify content, better models for determining "good" content vs. "bad" could be developed using ML.
- Use Mods to determine content appropriateness - User supplied data may introduce too much noise into any given dataset, and perhaps mods are a better subjective filter to rely on. Certain subreddits can have biased mods for sure, but without trying to overhaul content moderation entirely, could mod bans/flair be used to indicate suitable content for ads?
- Use computer vision to classify content - While this wouldn't work at scale, an up-and-coming post could have a nebulous title and difficult-to-decipher sarcastic comments. The post itself could be an image macro or annotated video that could be used to determine the subject matter much more effectively.
To be clear, the spirit of my initial prompt isn't "how can Reddit make more money?" per se, but how can it find a sustainable business model without destroying itself/impacting society at large. Facebook and Twitter seem to have optimized for "engagement" metrics which leads to prioritization of outrage porn and political divisiveness. Snapchat and Instagram seem to have succumb to being mostly an ad delivery engine with some overly-filtered content of "real life" influencers (read: marketers) strewn in between. None of these seem like a net-good for society.
What are all your thoughts? Perhaps Big Tech social media is irredeemable at this point, but I'm trying not to take such a defeatist attitude and instead explore any positive solutions.
9 votes -
Building a dystopia to make people click on ads | Zeynep Tufekci
12 votes -
The Super Bowl of dissonance
5 votes -
YouTubers have to declare ads. Why doesn't anyone else?
24 votes -
'This used to be your favourite show': Polish media falls silent to protest tax
6 votes -
How a dumb hat threw me in a tailspin
8 votes -
The frustration of hoping and not getting
4 votes -
Grindr fined 10% of their global annual revenue ($11.7 million) in Norway for sharing deeply personal information with advertisers, including location, sexual orientation and mental health details
28 votes -
The daisy ad and an appeal to fear
4 votes -
FTC issues orders to Amazon, TikTok, Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Snap, Twitter, WhatsApp, and YouTube seeking data about practices related to personal information, advertising, and user engagement
29 votes -
Widespread malware campaign seeks to silently inject ads into search results, affects multiple browsers
18 votes -
YouTube Vanced: A privacy-friendly YouTube app for Android with ads and telemetry stripped out
38 votes -
YouTube can now place ads on all videos even if creators don’t want them
26 votes -
YouTube Terms of Service updated with the “right to monetize”
26 votes -
Why do political ads love to feature girls instead of women? Defiant young girls have become a political symbol in a country that fears grown women.
15 votes -
The German government's new coronavirus ad, subtitled in English
@Axel Antoni: The German Govt's latest Corona advert - now subtitled in English. Quite good. pic.twitter.com/nbRZIm9RcN
11 votes -
Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to two NYU researchers, demanding that they shut down their research into political ads and disinformation on FB’s platform
30 votes -
Ads improbably sprout on ad averse Substack
4 votes -
Podcast listening is hard to track, but that doesn’t mean advertisers aren’t trying
10 votes -
Analysis of UK charity websites finds that tracking is prevalent, with almost all of the most popular charities including trackers for advertising or data brokers and failing to comply with GDPR/PECR
8 votes -
Auto industry TV ads claim right-to-repair laws would benefit "sexual predators"
18 votes -
Apple delays "asking permission to track" privacy feature in iOS 14, releases more information about upcoming privacy updates
12 votes -
The small effects of political advertising are small regardless of context, message, sender, or receiver
6 votes -
Joe Biden campaign launches official Animal Crossing: New Horizons yard signs
8 votes -
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism - A new, short book by Cory Doctorow that looks at big tech as a monopoly problem
18 votes -
How a strange face in a random 19th-century newspaper ad became a portal to a forgotten moment in ASCII art history
6 votes -
Ad agency Ogilvy abused Twitch donation messages to cause multiple streamers to advertise Burger King for only a few dollars
9 votes -
Reddit CEO defends their intention to run Trump ads ahead of election, outlines their plans to move comments on ads into subreddits
51 votes