2y ago

What do people think about advertising like this on lemmy? Should it be allowed? Could it be stopped?

This is the second advertising post I've seen on lemmy and they were both today. I'm wondering how other people feel about it or if they've even seen posts like this?

Personally I'm livid and hate seeing it here. One of the things that attracts me to lemmy is the donation based, volunteer run, distributed, open access nature of it. I don't want it to become profit driven and I really don't want to see companies in what I belive should be a purely social endeavour. I really think making it profit driven will ruin it, if that means it stays smaller then I'm okay with that.

Now I know I can block them and move on which is what I've done. I'm also pleased to say that both posts I saw were heavily downvoted and I did my part too.

I'm curious if other people agree with me and don't want advertising like this on lemmy? Also, what do people think we can actually do about it if we don't want it around? Petition instance admins to ban advertising accounts? Then how do we define one? Can anything actually be done or do I just have to block and move on from a possibly ever increasing flow of advertising until I get bored and move on?

Sorry for the long rambling post and thanks if you read this far.

73 comments

Personally I think advertisements should be banned.
Brought to you by Carl's Jr.
- We fully agree, and in support of your community, we pledge to never advertise in this space.
  Hardees
- Why do you keeps saying that?
  
  'Cause they pay me every time I do.
  You are an unfit shitposter. Your memes will be placed in the custody of Carl's Jr.

If you're asking me, I'm banning all advertisers and karma-fishers on the spot.
Out of sight, out of mind.
- As the instance rules? So if anyone posts an advertising post the account is banned? Or each person blocking and moving on?

I like the way /r/3DPrinting handled ads. Their mods put it like this,
"It's okay for a Redditor to have a business and share it. It's not okay for a business to have a Reddit account and do the same."
Basically, does that account contribute to the community outside of their business? If so, I don't take issue with it.
- "It's okay for a Redditor to have a business and share it. It's not okay for a business to have a Reddit account and do the same."
  That distinction is so minor it's useless. I block all people who post dumb shit, regardless of whether they're a business or not.
  At least there are no "sponsored" posts that can't be blocked or downvoted. That's the real problem. If Taco Bell wants to post "dank memes", let them. Just don't sticky the post so it survives based on the voting. I block the meme communities anyway.
  
  I think when redittors give a product as a solution to a genuine problem asked about in the forums, (like use xyz software to handle your abc issue), that's an advertisement as well and one we can all agree with having.
  Maybe, and that's a very distant maybe, if you have a solution that you know would interest people in a specific group, (like some car part deal in a car enthusiastic group), that can be put out there.
  In any case, the general courtesy of mentioning your use case (owner, developer or just a user) of the product should be followed.
- See, I'm okay with a business having an account and offering assistance. They should not advertise or proselytize, though I think a basic announcement of a new product is in a gray area.
  
  But how can you trust that their advice or assistance is genuine and not just subtle marketing?
  
  That's a great example of a business taking part in the community. If they go out of their way to be helpful like that, which costs the money, I'm okay with them trying to recoup a little bit through the goodwill they put in.

I would suggest that you censor the spammer's company name in the screen shot. They want to have more exposure and they don't deserve any.
- Thank you! I didn't think of that, changed it now.

It's spam. Report it.

The nature of spam is that it is parasitic. Spammers don't pay for the resources they use for advertising. They're not sponsoring the site or funding development. Instead, they're stealing from the commons.
It's important that spam be unsuccessful here. Multiple Internet services have been ruined by spam before.

Honestly if money has to be a part of it I would rather just pay some instance maintainer a monthly/yearly fee.
- Thanks for answering. What are you paying them for? To keep it clear of advertising, so bannning advertising accounts? Or something else? What about accounts on other instances, paying your instance owner won't affect them?
  You can already donate to your instance, and should if you can afford it 😊
  
  Do you guys recommend that instance owners publish their monthly costs somewhere, vs donations earned? That could help ensuring instances are kept away from RC Cola® sponsored adverts.

Yeet ads to the shadow realm, we didn’t flee traditional corporatized social media just to repeat the same mistakes of monetizing literally everything

Are these spam accounts? Then they should be banned. I could only see ads in the context of keeping the servers running. I think outside of that it doesn't make sense for this kind of platform. If lemmy.world can run entirely off of donations, then I don't see a reason for ads at all, especially if those ads don't even contribute to keeping the lights on.

Unless they're paying for the instances costs, they can get outta here, and even then, i'm gonna block them.

Rules are only as effective as the mechanisms enforcing them - I don’t think anyone wants ads on Lemmy instances, but removal requires moderation tools and staff (volunteer or otherwise) to review everything that’s posted.
I imagine the problem we’ll see is as growth accelerates, post velocity will outpace moderation manpower - short version, you’re always going to have to do some blocking/filtering of your own.

No, advertising is horrible and should not exist on Lemmy. But since it's federated, I wonder how we stop it. The only solution seems to be moderators with quick ban hammers. And what if some instances don't moderate for ads?
- Then there is always the big hammer of defederation.

My dear, ~~religion is~~ ads are like a penis. It’s a perfectly fine thing to have and take pride in, but when one takes it out and waves it in front of my face we have a problem.

I refuse to watch/read/hear any kind of adds.
One of the reasons why reddit app is trash.

Ugh, fuck ads

Ideally like the nsfw option I would like a sponsored tag to filter on. Even a tickbox to avoid sponsored stuff like the hide bot posts.
- I feel like “sponsored” implies that Lemmy (be it instance admins or any platform devs) are getting something out of it, which I don’t think is the case. Right now if advertisers are signing up and posting ads i see that as no different than junk mail in my email inbox. It’s garbage that benefits no one at best and actively harms the platform at worst.
  And if Lemmy does decide to take advertiser dollars, they better step carefully. That’s one of the places the slippery slope fallacy actually does apply. I do NOT want the fediverse to turn into Reddit 2.0
  
  Lemmy doesn't have to take a cut for it to be classified as a sponsored post.
  Think about YouTube with their contains sponsored content tags in videos. YT takes no cuts from hello fresh or Nord VPN being advertised in a video. YT only gets money from the ads they roll.

I don't mind small businesses, creatives etc advertising themselves. When you're self-employed, marketing / promo is incredibly difficult (speaking from personal experience). Like you say, people are free to downvote or block these ad posts. I'd be sad if I made a post promoting a service I offer as a (very!) small business and it got downvoted to oblivion out of reflexive (and understandable) ad hatred.
Once advertisers realise there are eyeballs to be reached here, they're going to start posting. Imo it will be handled best on an instance-by-instance, or even community-by-community basis. I started a community for trance, and as an example I would not be happy if a massive multinational like Threads, or Nestle posted an ad there. I WOULD however, be happy if an event such as Luminosity, ASOT or small local club were to post an ad. There would probably have to be limits if it got out of hand.
- I think there's a big difference with an artist or OF model posting content and then linking to their stuff, it's still an ad really but at least it's relevant to the community.
  These ads are just random posting, I saw the a hair transplant ad just in a random community. If they want to post a before and after pic in the bald community or whatever, that would be more acceptable. This is just annoying, bot like, spam.

I know ads are against the rules of sh.itjust.works, idk if Lemmy.world has similar rules

Reddit is far worse for it.

💀

I actually think its OK, its just like any other account. So simply block them and all is good. Businesses need platforms too. If you dont like that business advertising to you block them. The difference to the big social media giants is that you can't block them cuz they pay them. Also, a bad ad will have significant less reach in lemmy/masto.
- Businesses need platforms too
  I think they have enough platforms already. They do not need to be in the only space which we carved out for us to escape surveillance capitalism.
  
  I agree to that, however I was answering in context of the fediverse taking over and being standalone. Wishful thinking I know, but one can hope.
- If people are going to advertise on an instance I'm involved with I would prefer they go through the instance owner and it be an avenue to fund the instance. I dislike that people want to basically plug themselves and use the instance space to advertise without paying the instance owner for it. If we have to see ads, I'd rather they help the instance exist than just be an eyesore for no gain

I don't concern myself with it.
At the moment, advertising is so rare and low key that I'd have to go out of my way to be bothered by it, and since there's no reason to go out of my way to be bothered by something, I don't.
I assume that as time goes on, there will be more advertising on some instances. I might not know sbout it, since I block any and all ads I can by default, but if I do start seeing them, then I'll just block the instances that run them.
And that's that.

I saw a couple from instances with no posts this morning so I just added those instances to my instance's block list. I don't mind corporate accounts being on Lemmy, I do mind them posting straight up ads.

Advertising in General? F that noise.
This is a moderation problem, it should be fixed with moderation.
Every community should have rules and they should be followed.
Start with no OOC advertisements. You have a 3d printing forum and Bamboo is releasing a new printer? Maybe let them make a single post on announcement asking for what people thing and one more when it releases.
If advertisements start to happen too often, new rule of personal endorsements only with bans as a consequence.
We still need moderation tools like timed bans and shadow bans.

Companies will company, if there's an open door to spam things they will. SPAM in the email realm I recall seeing a stat that it accounts for somewhere around 90%+ of email traffic, so thus all the crazy hurdles of ip lists, dkim, spf, etc.
I've seen accounts created on Mastodon for just that purpose. They get a warning that such is not the platform's purpose, if ignored into the ban bucket they go. The problem is it's easy to create accounts unless the admins want to manually review and approve every applicant. External IP blocks work to an extent, but are always going to be reactive in nature getting banned after they've been reported. Ce'st la'vie (or however it's spelled)
If there's a plus side to it, their presence here means that someone thinks the network reach is enough to be worth the effort to post something here to get some kind of return.
- This is kind of how I thought it might be. Due to the way it all works I don't think we can really do much about it and will just have to adjust I guess.

Some dude is making a living.
It is blessed that he is trying to find customer for his trade, not trying to scam people.

Eh, I'm not 100% against them. There's a time and a place for ads. If a 3d printer company wants to have an account, post they have a new 3d printer, and it's in a 3d printing company, that's an ad, but I want that one. 3d printing filament manufacturer having a sale on filament? I want that ad bc I wanna get that cheap filament. Random driving service in an unrelated community? Block and move on.
I don't think it'll get too bad because there's no automated ads here. All ads/posts are manual, AFAIK. (I'm sure someone will figure out how to automate it.) If it does get too bad, then there should be something more, sure, but it's not there yet.
- I disagree, ads should be pull not push media. If I want to buy something I go to the different manufacturers website and pull all the information from them and then decide what I want to buy. I don't need them to shove it into my face for the other 364 days of the year.

It depends. What is the instance's stance on paid promotion? What is the community's stance on self promotion? Is the person pushing the product adding value to the community by doing so?
Personally. I don't think I'd be on an ad funded instance. That's a nope from me. If a community has a flat ban on self promotion, that can be a little crappy sometimes, but I get it. But like... If Ploopy is posting into the trackball community or the 3d printing community or the open source hardware company, I actually think that's great and I want to see more stuff like that. Yes, its advertising, but that's also a company / person who wants to be a helpful contributor to those communities

I guess it's a good sign that the Fediverse is growing! :) -_-;

I like it a lot better than the Reddit ads with locked comments
- I think you have a good point. I’m not gonna generally lambaste a business/ad in the comments, but I’d like for the option to be there as a possible feedback mechanism. Bans aren’t the only tool.

73 comments