this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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[–] Prove_your_argument@piefed.social 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The ads/manipulation does a thing that helps you attain profit or power. You want to manipulate what people see and pay for... so you pay reddit to allow you to mass deploy bots bypassing moderator levers. They have the community, you have the objective, you pay for the help of doing this and they probably have their own bot farms included.

They can even internally flag these entries as bots and use their AI partnerships to analyze what works on users and what doesn't to trigger a specific response, and to avoid using techniques that get called out as bots.

They have their public 'sponsored' content, but I promise for big spenders they have a program that has no sponsorship callout. They probably brand it with nice fancy marketing terminology that makes it sound like you're an angel doing god's work by driving conversions or some stupid shit.

[–] BakerBagel@midwest.social 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I understand that Reddit has value to an individual or small board that can control what is posted to reddit. What i am saying is that Reddit's value is entirely in soft power and has no actual path to profitablity. If i am Condé Nast then i can benefit from owning reddit. But Reddit will never pay a dividend, so buying stock in the company is worthless unless you are convinced that some idiot will pay more for it down the road.

[–] Prove_your_argument@piefed.social 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

no actual path to profitablity

You don't think reddit can make money from advertising?

[–] BakerBagel@midwest.social 1 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

It hasn't been able to thus far, same as every other "free" social media site other than Facebook. The problem is the sheer scale of the data that these sites have to main makes their overhead costs insane. To make profit from those ad spaces would require those ads to be too expensive to justify to the companies. It would be like trying to operate the New Orleans Superdome purely on ad space. The rate would be way too high to for companies advertising to ever get a return on their investment. Reddit can run ads to subsidize their costs, but it will never be viable as a primary revenue stream for them.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

its useful as a propaganda tool, much like Xitter.

[–] BakerBagel@midwest.social 1 points 19 hours ago

I agree. But propaganda tools typically aren't publicly traded because they are a venture that requires a lot of expenses but being it little cash value, which is the entire point of the stock market.