Ahead of IPO, Reddit blends advertising into user posts as FTC starts asking questions about that mega-deal with Google to train AI

What's really happening here is that advertisers can use the Reddit Ads Manager to create normal user posts and then pay to make them appear prominently on the site and in the app as promoted posts, aka adverts.

Look it's not exactly revolutionary or new, google search has been littered with promoted ad results for years. But I still hate it. Fuck off, reddit. No respect intended. Icky. So glad I stopped using it.

There's never been a day where I regretted deleting my Reddit account and removing that site from my life. It's only gotten worse since I left.

Here's the truly evil part:

All free-form adverts are supposed to show some kind of sponsored label, though that doesn't appear to be the case on the three posts included in this story. While Leica's shows it, neither Philadelphia post includes a tag indicating it's sponsored content. We understand that's because the Philadelphia posts are no longer boosted by ad spending, so are back to just being normal user posts.

Ad stays up in perpetuity, tag has a shelf life, after which it looks like a normal post. Can you sponsor a post for an hour like it's a seedy motel room?

Also: As these are regular posts with brief decoration, I'd assume uBO might have trouble filtering them out.

I am pretty much done with reddit and Google. My use of those two platforms have dropped to about 5% of my total online time.

Reddit user look ads will be the enshitification of reddit like how google search returns junk links making it unusable.