I recently ran $851 of ads on Reddit and the results were crap. Mean engaged time per active user of 8 seconds (mean - not median!). I makes me wonder if it wasn't mostly bots. If so, who was running the bots?
Bot problems have gotten worse all across the internet, but I think reddit specifically has gotten worse because of their IPO.
It seems that if you're a social media platform, the most profitable option is to ignore bots while swearing up and down that your users are legitimate and you do everything you can to fight bots.
>dark patters that get people to click on ads in the middle of content, where the user instantly backs out once they realize.
I'm sure that is at least part of it. And if they can be creative about how they get the page to draw, they can get you to click on something unintentionally. The shitty website of my local paper is good at this.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...