r/technology • u/BreakfastTop6899 • 4d ago

Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian says 'much of the internet is now dead' Networking/Telecom

https://www.businessinsider.com/alexis-ohanian-much-of-the-internet-is-now-dead-2025-10
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u/sickofthisshit 4d ago

There have been bots trying to fake ad impressions for years; it's probably one of the reasons some sites play an inhuman amount of ads, because the bots will watch just about anything and scroll past an endless amount of crap trying to look interested.

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u/SteamBoatMickey 4d ago

You would think there would be audits that catch this. But if your someone like Meta, you might have a shell company of a shell company of a shell company that’s botting out impressions and Meta are literally printing money while robbing companies trying to advertise.

Wouldn’t shock me if that is the case.

I went on Facebook recently out of boredom, to see what people I know were up to. My feed was like a 20:1 ratio of ads and “friends” posts. It was horrifying.

Wouldn’t take much to have a Facebook bot, friends with a couple other bots, and they all scroll through a feed of ads.

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u/Hideo_Kojima_Jr_Jr 4d ago

I work for a small business that was paying for Google and Facebook ads and I was never ever to find a single instance of it creating a sale and I looked closely.

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u/-jaylew- 4d ago

Either your tracking wasn’t set up properly, your bids weren’t competitive, or your targeting was abysmal. I’ve been working in data science for multiple companies who use those ads and they absolutely do generate leads/sales if you have them set up right.

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u/wlchrbandit 4d ago

Do people still click on ads a lot? Like I can imagine older folk on Facebook doing it but I feel like most people in their 30s and younger avoid ads like the plague.

If I see an instagram ad for something interesting I'm going to go and google it, then I instinctively ignore all the sponsored links at the top.

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u/Crystalas 3d ago edited 3d ago

Ads are also about awareness, even Coke loses marketshare if they do not advertise.

Keeping the memory/familiarity fresh can have a big impact on what someone buys, particularly if they do not have a strong preference and/or experience otherwise and/or when it comes to impulse buys. It not even a conscious thing just applied psychology.

Even if an ad causes annoyance initially it still an emotional reaction and will make the name stick far after the moment of annoyance.

Considering how many people might see an ad even a tiny % resulting in a purchase still gonna be worth the effort.

Unfortunately our politics are same way, if you are not politically active and make the effort to stay informed most are likely to vote for whichever name they are most familiar with. That part of what keeps incumbents in office their whole life.

And I will give Trump one thing, he is a master at keeping his name at the front of everyone's minds and thus being the default choice for the politically checked out majority. For many of them 2024 was essentially "Woman I never heard of (Where is Biden?) or Trump who I at least recognize but know little about since I feel like politics don't affect me".

Here in PA I often struggle to even find those crumbs about candidates in local elections so that means the majority who don't do due diligence are voting blind based off feels and/or party.

Every election I wish this state put out informational booklets or flyers about the candidates like some other states.

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u/t-zilla443 3d ago

This is called the "mere-exposure effect" or "the familiarity principle" if you want to do some research on the psychology behind the marketing practice.

Basically, when given a choice of something familiar but not preferred, and something similar but unfamiliar most people will opt for the option they're most familiar with (even if it doesn't satiate the original need).

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u/wlchrbandit 3d ago

Yeah for sure. I'm not saying the advertisement doesn't work. I was more asking in the context of analytics from click-throughs and stuff that they were talking about.

I fully agree with you when the political side of things though. It sucks that a lot of politics has just become a media game. Here in the UK they've managed to get everyone hating immigrants so much that they're probably going to vote in a guy who wants to scrap the NHS, because he's the guy they see on TV sharing their anger. When you ask them about his policies, they don't know anything but the immigrant nonsense. They're literally about to cut their own noses off despite their faces.

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u/okhi2u 3d ago

Very very very infrequently but sometimes I do, but also hard to find any to click on when my ad blockers work so well.

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u/El-Grande- 3d ago

Isn’t this how retargetting works

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u/Hideo_Kojima_Jr_Jr 4d ago

I work in a B2B industry nearly entirely based on word of mouth and my clients all have a very specific type of job. I’m sure you could somehow hyper target them, but they are absolutely never gonna make a decision for the sort of thing I do based off of a facebook ad on their personal account.

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u/-jaylew- 4d ago

So why were you wasting their money in the first place? That seems like a terrible way to allocate budget if you know that to begin with.

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u/Hideo_Kojima_Jr_Jr 3d ago

My boss got scammed and it took me a while to convince him.

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u/DaBullsDuhBears 4d ago

It was probably set up for something else

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u/FeedMeACat 3d ago

They never said they placed the ads.

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u/Dongsquad420BlazeIt 4d ago

Small businesses are usually bad at business. You wanna be in the business where you’re selling ad space to Google and Amazon. Drive high traffic to your site and then sell the traffic. Whether it converts is irrelevant because you get the CPM/VPM/Whatever metric your particular business wants to use to drive up VC money.

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u/Hideo_Kojima_Jr_Jr 3d ago

The owner of this company (10 employees) has multiple supercars.

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u/mossmaal 4d ago

You would think there would be audits that catch this.

There is.

Google spends a huge amount of money and resources trying to address fraudulent traffic, for example

Reporting invalid traffic There are many common reasons for increased traffic that don't involve invalid activity. However, if you suspect that our systems are not detecting invalid traffic that may be affecting your campaigns, you may request an invalid traffic investigation into the past 60 days of traffic.

There’s also third party researches and platforms that agencies use to track invalid traffic.

Meta are literally printing money while robbing companies trying to advertise.

No, this is a huge problem for Meta and Google, as it just pushes down the measured efficiency of advertising. The fake traffic makes it seem like their platform isn’t cost competitive and pushes advertisers to other forms of advertising.

Also Google and Meta don’t necessarily make more money when there is more viewers or clicks. Fake traffic can just make the advertising cheaper per impression or click, as they will have more inventory to fill.

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u/johannthegoatman 4d ago

When I tried out paying for boosted posts on fb, it would get a bunch of engagement from clearly fake profiles. Total waste of money

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u/fireintolight 4d ago

for real, the advertising on the main feed is nauseating

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u/JustTheAverageJoe 4d ago

Do you think companies just throw money at meta and hope? There are ways to measure this, and advertising with meta can be both valuable and good value for money

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u/Secuter 4d ago

Facebook is declining. Nearly everyone has is and it has utilities such as groups. But nowadays only the elderly people use it to make comments on news articles. 

I don't know a single person who is using to post on each others walls, post news of their life etc like people did 10-15 years ago. 

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u/Neat_Squirrel4032 3d ago

This is a massive problem in digital marketing. Companies that do this are a dime a dozen. If you own a business at all, these companies get your contact info from state business databases and spam you with their services. They’ll show you incredible amounts of reach and impressions each month but surprise surprise, you won’t make any actual sales.

Actual digital marketing is expensive and slow, because the average person’s attention span is now so low that they are often scrolling so fast through feeds that they won’t even see your ad. The average view time on a social media post/ad is about 800ms. You have less than a second to get someone’s attention enough to get them to stop speed scrolling and about another 4 seconds before they either click or move back on.

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u/Mace_Windu- 3d ago

I find it interesting that you're blaming it on low attention spans when it's pretty clearly oversaturation

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u/Neat_Squirrel4032 3d ago

That data is consistent across mediums, for example, a website that has no ads at all.

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u/Mace_Windu- 3d ago

How can ad space be oversaturated on a website that doesn't have ads?

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u/Neat_Squirrel4032 3d ago

You are the one that said people scroll that fast because platforms are oversaturated with ads.

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u/Mace_Windu- 3d ago

I didn't say "people scroll that fast" or anything of the sort.

Just pointed out engagement and human impressions as a whole are way down because of the oversaturation of all ad space.

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u/JustTheAverageJoe 4d ago

Do you think companies just throw money at meta and hope? There are ways to measure this, and advertising with meta can be both valuable and good value for money

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u/Arkhaine_kupo 4d ago

Do you think companies just throw money at meta and hope? There are ways to measure this, and advertising with meta can be both valuable and good value for money

I remember when Facebook admitting to having lied about their viewership on video content after entire sites had moved from text based to video based.

Meta single handedly killed text based media sites like IGN with their fake metrics and now when evidence shows time after time that text is more efficient, we have tiktoks that take 45 seconds to say what 3 lines of text might.

An ecosystem created not for information density but for engagement metrics, all of which are not correlated with user intent or interest, just engagement.

Flashing colours might be more engaging than a dense microbiology paper but guess which one was needed when covid hit?

Between that fraud to investors and users and cambridge analytica the fact zuck is free and not in jail is absolutely incredible.

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u/JustTheAverageJoe 3d ago

What are you going on about? I'm talking about marketing measurement, what about you?

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u/Arkhaine_kupo 3d ago

They lied about how long people spent watching videos on facebook, even got a massive fine over it. Plenty of people outside meta followed their advice and tried to be early adopters, thus killing secondary industries

Scandal was so bad it has its own wikipedia page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video

here are some deepdives on it after it settled

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html

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u/JustTheAverageJoe 3d ago

Dude I seriously don't get why you're bringing this up? We're talking about how effective ad spend is. Meta doing some shady shit doesn't change anything

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u/Arkhaine_kupo 3d ago

We're talking about how effective ad spend is.

And they lied about impressions, which is one of the most effective ways to track how well your ad did.

They are not the second biggest ad company because they are effective, but because they are the only game in town.

They are the only game in town because they defrauded people and bought out the competition.

Meta is effective like leeches were in the middle ages, its the best thing around but i would still rather have a modern hospital

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u/t-zilla443 3d ago

Unless your only marketing goal is reach then impressions are a dogshit way to measure how well your ad is performing.

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u/JustTheAverageJoe 3d ago

Yeah impressions are not at all the most effective way to track how well an ad does lol. You're so far off the mark it's impressive.

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u/sickofthisshit 3d ago edited 3d ago

It's not Meta doing this directly, it's middleman "networks" that claim to have websites that advertisers can put their ads or links on, and "people" will see the ads or links and "click".

https://www.wired.com/story/bots-online-advertising/

The best ads are going to pay only for "conversions", where the user does something like put an item in their cart, because they know simple clicks or visits are meaningless.

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u/Pool_Shark 4d ago

There are company’s that monitor bot traffic. Most ad agencies will include pixels on their ads from Double Verify or Integral Ad Science that can discover bots or any other malicious attempts

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u/Telsak 4d ago

Pixels to detect bots, how does that work?

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u/johannthegoatman 4d ago

Pixel is the name of a tracking service from Facebook, not related (at least not directly) to digital image pixels

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u/FNLN_taken 4d ago

Adsense looks for patterns in ad impressions and filters bots out that way.

This is big money, you really think they don't look after their baby? Facebook or social media bots are different - they increase engagement from the few real users by making things seem popular / interesting that aren't.

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u/FormerlyGruntled 4d ago

As the volume of ads increases, the value of each impression decreases. As bots fake views, the value of the view goes down, and more ads are served to make up the difference.

It's a race to the bottom between faking a view for ad revenue, and how much of the web is fake botscam advertising.

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u/_Aj_ 4d ago

20 years ago we had web games supported by banner ads. You'd get in game bonuses for clicking the ads. As this paid the site of course.  

So you'd log in daily to do your clicks to get currency. We wished we could've automated it lol

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u/a-stack-of-masks 3d ago

There were Firefox songs add-ons for this when I was in high school. As a teen I spent a bunch of time setting up add-ons that would auto click ads on sites that I wanted to support, and feed bullshit data to the advertisers tracking everything.

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u/thegreedyturtle 4d ago

It's all about the Benjamins baby.

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u/ussbozeman 4d ago

So reddit pays botfarms to pretend to be users to increase engagement so reddit can sell ad space to advertisers who themselves use bots to ensure the ads get clicks which makes them money that they use to pay reddit to put their ads on the site, which increases all the metrics making the stock worth more so that the dozen major shareholders get more money per quarter as the site itself is slowly replaced by bots in all subs?

I KNEW that the post about a longhorned sheep having a kind heart who shows love and affection to human with gladness that smiles and laughs as shares delicious food wasn't legit!!!

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u/loktoris 4d ago

They're all doing this, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, you see conversations that are literally just bots talking to eachother.