Eh, I think this can work like sponsored messages on YouTube videos: probably not immediately a lot of clicks on the product but over time more and more people recognize it and know what it is. And I like to think that over time Spez will be recognized as the soulless fucker who is hated by the very community he is trying to sell. Reddit lost a lot of charm in the last couple of months, even more than was already lost before and his name is tied to the whole thing. I hope!
They also screwed themselves over by playing the r/place trump card so soon after the last iteration in 2022. Rather than doing it to create a cool event to experience once every few years, they did it to drive engagement on Reddit. That’s made people lose interest and even if it’s another 5 years before the next one, many of them won’t come back. It’s a self-acknowledgement that the peak reddit era is finished and wouldn’t have happened without the prior backlash against their enshittification. It’s the type of thing that sets up the conditions for a death spiral, because they’ve resorted to tricks to get people to use the site and eventually they’ll run out of tricks.
It also successfully distracted the userbase and isolated their protests from the rest of the site.
People make fun of Place but I think they knew exactly what they were doing.
Certainly drove their use statistics up a lot, which helps more than the incendiary messaging hurts them (IMO).
Eh, I think this can work like sponsored messages on YouTube videos: probably not immediately a lot of clicks on the product but over time more and more people recognize it and know what it is. And I like to think that over time Spez will be recognized as the soulless fucker who is hated by the very community he is trying to sell. Reddit lost a lot of charm in the last couple of months, even more than was already lost before and his name is tied to the whole thing. I hope!
They also screwed themselves over by playing the r/place trump card so soon after the last iteration in 2022. Rather than doing it to create a cool event to experience once every few years, they did it to drive engagement on Reddit. That’s made people lose interest and even if it’s another 5 years before the next one, many of them won’t come back. It’s a self-acknowledgement that the peak reddit era is finished and wouldn’t have happened without the prior backlash against their enshittification. It’s the type of thing that sets up the conditions for a death spiral, because they’ve resorted to tricks to get people to use the site and eventually they’ll run out of tricks.