A quote that always stuck with me was: “‘Your ad here’ signs are proof that the ad spot doesn’t work well, otherwise someone would have put their ad there.”
I logged in to reddit on my computer the day after rif went dark, and there were noticeably fewer posts on the front page. I think only 8 or so posts were above 10k upvotes. I wouldn’t be surprised if advertisers are pulling their ads in response.
Your post made me think ads had already invaded. So, I hate you.
That’s not going to happen on Lemmy. It is technically possible but it’s very highly unlikely.
It’s an unfortunate reality but that’s probably going to have to happen. Instances can’t be expected to grow and maintain on pure goodwill. Some might get by with donations but it’s pretty known that Mastodon servers that couldn’t support themselves on donations vanished. It’s a huge ask for someone to pay money, time and effort to run a server for perpetuity. Usually you can only ask for 2 out of the 3 lol.
We already saw the original lemmynsfw get overwhelmed and just want to shut it down and hand it to someone else because they were having to put in so much work.
Hopefully because Lemmy is opt in in every sense, instance owners can do an ad setup that isn’t intrusive or over bearing.
Otherwise it’s just the big instances that are donation covered that stay and grow and Lemmy just becomes centralized around 5 servers or something.
Watching all this happen in realtime is surreal…
Pretty wild, isn’t it? This is what it felt like when Digg v4 came out.
u/Spez is following Elon’s playbook and it might start the downfall of Reddit
The downfall has already begun. The post quality has decreased severely over the last couple of weeks.
Hell for the past couple years the site has had a significant drop in quality.
Am I wrong in thinking this is sad as hell? Like seeing an old faded billboard with the same “your ad here!” text that’s been there for ages.
Sad, but I ain’t mad. This is the bed that Wish.com “Elon” made for Reddit
Great Value Elon!
That was scary. Thought Lemmy had ads already!!
I will leave the second it happens. Crazy.
Mmm, I get the ideological stance, but servers do cost money.
I suppose donations are an option but can’t imagine that being a stable source.
hi its me, Jimmy Wales I’m kindly requesting you to give $1.00 to lemmy
I’m fine with ads. It costs money to run servers and build out the platform.
I’m not fine with the absolutely sleezy way spez handled the api changes and the ridiculous price. Utterly disrespectful to the mods, third party app devs, and Reddit users.
I’d rather we all pay a few bucks to not have lemmy get infested with ads.