Reddit’s advertisers are already a bit wary. I honestly don’t think it would take much more than a couple of dozen boycott threats via twitter, facebook, whatever for a marketing team to decide it’s not worth the drama and move their advertising dollars elsewhere.

Unlike other controversies where brands can try to appeal to one side or the other, there aren’t really “sides” to this. There’s just people that are vehemently opposed to Reddit’s current actions, and people that don’t care and want to look at memes. The only people that are going to be happy that (eg) IBM are advertising on Reddit is Spez and his staff.

This seems like a simple thing the average Redditor can do right now, and I don’t think it would take much to make a real impact.

I just fired off a bunch of tweets to the advertisers I can see (they seem very regional)…

Thoughts?

    • danOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      Me too but it’s pretty simple to find some:

      • temporarily disable adblocker
      • open Reddit (www not old)
      • ctrl+f and search for “promoted”

      Every one I found thus far are regional ones, but they have a matching twitter handle…

      • Lvxferre@lemmy.mlM
        1·
        1 year ago

        Every one I found thus far are regional ones

        That’s a problem - it means that we wouldn’t be able to focus on a single target.

  • Karlos_Cantana@sopuli.xyz
    3·
    1 year ago

    What companies advertise on Reddit? I don’t use an app that shows ads, so I have no idea who I would be boycotting.

    • danOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      True. But still, marketing teams are pretty skittish and a couple of dozen negative tweets or something is often enough for them to bail just to avoid even the potential for getting caught in a controversy.

      Particularly as, unlike political controversies, there’s nobody to get pissed off with them for bailing…

      • Lvxferre@lemmy.mlMEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Particularly as, unlike political controversies, there’s nobody to get pissed off with them for bailing…

        Thankfully there are plenty, plenty political controversies associated with Reddit that people can - and should - bring up from the grave. It’s all about contextualising them to show that Reddit Inc. still has the same “corporate values” as back then, and that it would likely do the same crap as it did before. (For example, have you heard about TD?)

  • Lvxferre@lemmy.mlM
    1·
    1 year ago

    I personally like the underlying idea, as long as a few details are ironed out:

    • Goal. What’s the final goal that we* would be trying to achieve? For example if it’s to make Reddit’s IPO catastrophic, this means that we’d need those advertisers to break contract (or publicly announce their intentions to do so) before the IPO.
    • Who. How do we get a list of the advertisers?
    • How many. Would we go for all advertisers, or focus on the biggest ones?
    • How. Keep in mind that it’s in the best interests of everyone to keep it 100% legal - otherwise we’d get cops knocking at our doors. So the best approach would be to call people to not conduct businesses with those brands, because Reddit. (We’d need to pull out older stuff for that, not just the third party apps.)
    • How (2). Operation:Razit made me notice that an “online flyer” with call to action + a better explained text works well, but perhaps there are better approaches?**

    *by “we” I mean everyone who decides to join it.

    **I can help specially with the flyer, if you want.