6 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: Announcing Online Presence Indicators
Yeah, as a mod, I've already opted out.
The only good news is that mods *should* be checking this subreddit so they know what the hell is going on.
The only bad news is that I'm sure many don't. And this forces us to go make a settings change to opt out. Opt out sucks. Opt in is the way to go.
Although I know reddit is trying desperately to do things that bring in money and keep the site running. So I do understand why they're doing this. Even though it always makes me sad that they have to.
Comment by RoseTyler38 at 04/03/2021 at 03:00 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The only good news is that mods should be checking this subreddit so they know what the hell is going on.
I didn't know this sub even existed till one of the mods of /r/fuckHOA made a sticky in their sub about it.
Comment by wrosecrans at 05/03/2021 at 06:35 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Although I know reddit is trying desperately to do things that bring in money and keep the site running. So I do understand why they're doing this.
It's still super unclear to me how online status indicators translate into money. If they could clarify that I'd be able to understand the motivation better. But it seems like a really misguided attempt to drive "engagement" as a KPI regardless of whether it annoys users or actually results in engagement that drives revenue.
If you just assume you'll get more page loads as a result of some real time chats, and assume that you get to place one ad per page load -- there's no obvious reason that advertiser budgets will grow just because you increase page loads. It makes more sense that your advertiser pool would have basically the same budgets as they did last week, so revenue per pageload would drop proportionally to compensate. But you have more pageloads per user session, so your cost of operation rises with the artificial boost of engagement.
Like seriously, if reddit can coherently explain, "you get this website for free, and this is how this feature will make us more money" then I'd get it. But as far as I can tell it's just really misguided.