/r/place going full-on French Revolution now

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These people cannot control themselves. They're protesting a company by making them money.
- If you have an adblocker and/or other privacy browser plugins how do they make any money from you? If anything, you've wasted some bandwidth and server cycles, so you cost them money.
  I suppose an argument could be made that by adding to it you've created some tiny bit of content someone without adblockers might be enticed to see.
  
  They make them money because:
  they use reddit
  spez gets some nice usage stats to show off
  as a direct consequence, advertisers keep paying to put their ads
  also as a direct consequence, investors' confidence in reddit continues to recover; there's a real possibility that, when it IPOs, it will actually go for a decent price
  Now, if enough people go commit ad-block, and advertisers somehow become wise to that fact... then maybe it will hurt reddit's bottom line (at which point spez will start trying to emulate youtube's anti-ad stuff).
  But as it stands, especially if most of reddit's usage is through reddit's mobile app... I'm not really sure how you can block ads there.
  
  Those are fair points. Regarding adblock in the official app, you can use ReVanced to patch an .apk similar to how you block ads in YouTube.
  
  thank you for the info, noted, incredibly based
  
  thank you for the info, noted, incredibly based
  
  You can't go to place on a mobile browser. It pops up a message that you have to use the app or a desktop browser.
  
  I was able to get there via mobile browser. Reddit has said that they've been testing disabling mobile reddit for some people but not all.
  
  (at which point spez will start trying to emulate youtube’s anti-ad stuff).
  I'm curious. What's Youtube's anti-ad stuff? I don't remember the last time I saw an ad on Youtube.
  
  The theory is that their July traffic numbers are probably down so they're boosting them with /r/place traffic so that the drop due to 3rd party apps doesn't look as bad to investors. Reddit probably sees the increased server costs as an investment to boost their IPO valuation.
  
  Aren’t there third parties that track website visits?
  I was curious but couldn’t find any stats for Reddit over the past couple weeks. Google trends was slightly up… but that isn’t really users. (My search also made Google trends go up by 1)
  
  by adding to it you've created some tiny bit of content
  It's sort of hard to visualize the split between collective and individual. If a prolific user decides to stop using reddit, reddit maybe becomes 0.001% worse. It doesn't sound like a lot on its own, but when millions do it.. it becomes significant.
  A little becomes a lot. If a significant chunk of reddit just decided to stop using the site, reddit would lose a lot of money.
  Remember when reddit traffic was down like 3% a couple weeks ago? Let's say traffic to reddit and the money reddit gets from advertisers are strongly correlated. So if traffic drops 50%, they get 50% less money from ads.
  It's probably not exactly the same, especially during a short time span like a week, but just for the sake of discussion.
  With an annual revenue of $350 million in 2021, they avered $29 million a month and $7 million a week. What's 3% of $7 million? About $210k
  $210k is not much for a company like reddit, but it's a significant amount of money. Now imagine we increase the traffic drop by a factor of 3 and increase the length of time down up to a month. We're talking $1.6 million.
  That hurts. And it could start a downwards spiral. Prolific users leave and there's less content so there's less reason for users to come back. Which causes less content and so on
  Unfortunately, I think the majority of redditors have probably moved on from the whole API affair. We still see "fuck spez" like for example in the /r/place but unless reddit creates another scandal in the near future they should be able to recover from this.
  We simply don't have the numbers to hurt reddit so I say go ahead and use /r/place without guilt if you want to
  
  If you are using an account in their service, they still have at least some data about you, which they can sell to third-parties under some conditions (unless they changed that part of their privacy policy). It's probably not a lot, but it adds up I guess.
  
  Apparently it's app only, which can't easily be adblocked
  
  you can use it in a browser on desktops
  
  Revanced has a patch for the official app.
  
  I'm pretty sure there's revanced patches for that?
- The people you want to get off reddit are (shock) on reddit. While it makes reddit money in the short term, it spreads the word to people that aren't aware. Short term gain for hopefully long term loss.
  
  This is also why I don't mind the John Oliver stuff. It's interesting for now, but it will get boring. I just hope it doesn't get stupid like what happened on r/aww
  
  I'm a bit out of the loop, what happened on r/aww?
  
  They decided to go John Oliver only too, except people are now posting normal content and just putting a small John Oliver somewhere in the original picture.
- Does some individuals love circlejerking so much they'd GIVE AWAY money for it? Why yes they would.
- "It's not about the money. It's about sending a message."
  
  Sending a message costs money.

354 comments