When you browse on the 1P Reddit app you no longer have a curated feed. It's filled with suggestions ("because you visited /r/place-you-dont-sub-to before posts"). And on top of that, controlling whether the view is condensed or as expanded cards does not affect ads. So you'll get a giant "he gets us" jesus ad that takes up half the screen - and if you do something like report an ad, say it's not for you (in my case, I selected something like "it's offensive"), you'll still get the same giant ad.

The Reddit experience they want me to have is not the Reddit experience I'm used to from the 3P apps, and I think that's why they're trying to kill them off. People that want a curated list of forums and a few memes/gifs aren't driving engagement as much as they'd like, so they tried to clone TikTok. And it sucks, so I'm gone after June 30th.

Verification metrics for basic ads are things like: when was the ad shown, how much of the ad was visible, which parts (pixels and video timeline), what content was also visible while the ad was shown, clicks, bot/script/adblock detection, and whether the ad was on-target (age/gender/location of user).

Ideally, these metrics are also independently verified, so Reddit's tracking and the advertiser's own provided/preferred tracking (like DoubleClick Verification).

Typically the video player or ad renderer needs to be customized to collect these metrics and understand VPAID/VAST/VMAP/MRAID for how/when to show the ad and what tracking is needed. Plus support for mixing content and ad encoding formats.

It's basically an arms race to compete against Facebook/Google's ad serving and tracking capabilities and I'd say even most 1st party premium ad publishers with full time ad tech teams often have difficulty consistently passing verification convincingly enough. So it's understandable that Reddit has very low confidence in single developer apps being able to pass the ad verification bar, much less over API which isn't a well worn ad serving path.

The default is to not pay for an ad shown until the publisher can prove it was actually shown and independent verification matches. It's a lose-lose situation for the user and publisher to show an ad but not get paid for it (but the advertiser still benefits, so they'll make a good effort to find reasons to not pay).

Brand safety is also the highest priority for most advertisers. They don't want their ads shown next to content they disagree with. Which the publisher also has to prove they've done in a way that can be independently verified.

Some of these problems are very hard to solve with tech, and for these cases, the solution is often "just trust me". It's not uncommon to simply let advertisers have access to audit ad serving code. It's easy to trust a big entity like Google or Facebook or even Reddit, but it's very hard (and a lot of work) to trust random single dev apps (or even companies lead by untrustworthy figures like Twitter).

The bigger (unsolved) problem is: how do you prove your advertising actually worked? How do you convince a customer like Coke or McDonalds with massive advertising budgets and not immediate trackable sale/action that their money was well spent? So far the tech solution is to just provide a lot of data supporting that the ad was served exactly as the advertiser wanted.

People don't want to see ads because ads are intrusive. The solution to this problem that the ad industry sees is to make ads more intrusive. So it's kind of a positive feedback loop of user-hostile garbage forced upon them, and no wonder that people want to make ad-free experiences.

The "good" publishers will simply charge more per ad and do more hidden proof of trustworthiness, such as being more open to code audits/transparency, more user tolerable ad practices/product deisgn to minimize bad behavior/increase tolerability, or better ad targeting to simply demonstrate more effective conversions. Think Facebook (the tradeoff here is they know a lot more personal information about you to be able to do this).

Unfortunately, most ad publishers fall into the "bad" camp where they know they won't receive payout for some portion of their ads, so they increase the amount of ads shown to make up for the shrink or simply show lower paying ads that have more lenient verification requirements. This is more what Google does/encourages.

My experience is advertisers would love to show less ads with higher conversions, because it makes their lives way easier. But they can only buy what's offered, and there's a lot of cheap user hostile publishers desperate for ads (even most of the ad strategy suggestions in this thread are pushing for more ads) and very very few high quality ad publishers.

I understand the API that the 3rd party apps interact with is powered by the legacy platform. The same platform that powers old reddit.

It doesn't seem like reddit are updating that platform anymore (I haven't noticed any major changes to old reddit in years), and I really don't think it has the ability to serve the same ads that the new reddit platform does. It would take a major refactor to either replicate the full API over to the new platform or otherwise feed ads back to it.

BTW, this also raises questions about how much longer reddit will keep old reddit running. It really looks like they are planning to retire the old platform all-together.

Of course, this isn't about ads in and of themselves. It's about Reddit (and, to some degree, tech in general) having lost investor interest and Reddit being this close to bankruptcy, desperately hoping that these 3P clients will provide a stable cash infusion to keep the lights on. Ads alone aren't enough; at least not now with the financial hole they have dug for themselves.

Ultimately, Reddit is panicking and doesn't know where to get the money they need real soon. Their historic practice of another investment round isn't going to work this time. Likewise, slowly transitioning to a paid API, giving developers time adapt like Christian proposed, isn't going to work either as, at that pace, there won't be a Reddit by the time the transition is complete.

Perhaps, but they don't have much choice. If the apps paid a reasonable rate with respect to what is reasonable to app developers, Reddit would still go bankrupt. May as well go big and go bankrupt only if that fails then not try and be guaranteed to go bankrupt.

Thing is, Apollo is on board to pay the big price, but Christian has exclaimed he needs more time to make the necessary changes to support it. Problem is that Reddit doesn't have that much time. Bankruptcy is still inevitable on his needed timeline. The power company doesn't care that you plan to make money sometime in the future when developers have had time to get around to making changes to their software. They want their money when they want it and if you can't make good then and there, that's it.

Remember, they're panicking. Their old model of finding new investment every time the plug was about to be pulled is dead and they weren't expecting that. They need legitimate cashflow now and don't know where else to find it on short notice.

Next will be a massive layoff to follow the small layoff earlier this week to address the haemorrhaging on the expense side. The "everything will be okay in a few days" notice sent to employees today indicates that something "not okay" is coming.

I know reddit was never profitable, but I'm not convinced Reddit is so short on money that they can't last to 2024. They'd probably do major layoffs like so much of the tech industry has this deal and lighten that load. From what I heard, Reddit employs 2000 workers and I can't imagine they need that many to keep the site operational (For reference, Twitter had ~4k employees pre-pandemic, and peaked at 7500 employees... I'm not convinced that Reddit's site complexity is a quarter of the largest site in the world, despite reddit having plenty of traffic as a top site itself).

Yes, that is addressed at the end. 'Next will be a massive layoff to follow the small layoff earlier this week to address the haemorrhaging on the expense side. The "everything will be okay in a few days" notice sent to employees today indicates that something "not okay" is coming.'

You don't want to start there if you don't have to. If they can turn things around there is still the possibility of IPO. Current investors have made it clear that they want off the sinking ship. Only staving off bankruptcy by trimming the workforce to the bare minimum is not a good look for the sake of IPO, however. That is saved for the last ditch effort.

Of course (I was laid off last month, no dev wishes other devs to be laid off). But to open up my cynical side for a bit: I also don't sympathize with these huge companies taking advantage of (what EVERYONE knew was) a temporary boon in tech and growing off of low interest rates proportions that would not be needed in 2-3 years.

I as an individual saved aggressively for when that bubble inevitably popped and I'd very likely be laid off (fears which came true. Twice.). These companies instead decided to throw all bets in, and I can't exactly sympathize when the obvious future called their bluff. If Reddit didn't have a war chest to help wheather the storm with, I just see that as myopic at best and greedy at worst.

While perhaps there is an argument to be made that one can take advantage of another if there is information asymmetry, when you say that EVERYONE recognized the temporary nature of the engagement, to think that temporary hiring under that is taking advantage of a worker is quite silly. A worker needing a guarantee of x number of years of payment had every right to demand it be written into the contract.

> These companies instead decided to throw all bets in

Of course, so did the workers. They didn't have to leave their jobs flipping burgers. They chose to because they saw $$$ in the air. That same greed is no doubt, as before, why they didn't bother putting any conditions in the contract to protect themselves from the downturn you state they knew was coming. They took a chance – sometimes it worked out, other times it didn't. Such is the nature of risk.

To be frank: if you're at that level of negotiation in your contracting, you are either a business owner yourself, or are some of the best of the industry who probably isn't financially worried about a downturn. The latter doesn't have any benefit from chaining themselves to a company. I don't even think contracted workers are safe since many contracts were broken over this.

For the other 99.99% of hourly/salary workers in the US, trying to negotiate specific terms in an at-will state will only end with you being crossed off the hire list.

>They didn't have to leave their jobs flipping burgers.

Sure they did. They were laid off from there too:

https://nypost.com/2023/04/07/mcdonalds-lays-off-hundreds-cu...

I know you were being coy, but every sector of almost every industry is doing this. There is no safe place except for already being rich and not having to worry about years of salary.

Maybe you're not from the US, but it seems you don't understand how US employment works. I'll reiterate: the US is almost all "at will states". It gives freedom in that at any time an employee can walk away (well, almost any time. Funny how that works), but employers can also fire you for any reason unrelated to being a protected class (minority, pregnant, gay, etc.). There is never any safety net guaranteed in the US.

That's fine. You just said that anything else in the given scenario would have you being taken advantage of, so you would want the agreement to be rejected if they cannot commit to those terms.

Remember, this is, in the end, no different than the earlier suggestion that if all a company sees is a short-term hiring opportunity during a temporary boom that they should not hire at all. The long-term job you want doesn't exist either way. You haven't lost anything.

> I'll reiterate: the US is almost all "at will states".

Sure. And I'll reiterate that you can negotiate your own contractual terms. Yes, that does mean some people won't want to work with you, but that's okay because why would you want to work for someone that is taking advantage of you?

To recognize a bad deal upfront, accept it anyway, and then cry foul later is nonsensical.

One word: control.