#reddit advertising cost

[sociallyactives-blog]

With this infographics you will learn more about why spy reddit is needed for your business.

[artsekey]

I really hate how ads have taken over the internet. On one hand, I know that hosting a website costs money, right? And ad revenue is one of the simplest ways for free-to-use websites to cover their operating costs.

My question is-- and I would genuinely love an answer-- is this ever going to stop? Tumblr ran for a long time without ads. So did Youtube. I know that the cost of hosting so much media has gone up, but there are a lot of users on these websites that make the content that drives people to use the service that don't see any of the money generated by this revenue. On Youtube, there's at least a way for creators to make some money from what they do. For most, it isn't much, but the opportunity is there. On Tumblr, well... the ability to convert the visibility of my blog into any financial gain practically nonexistent, though they did at one point promise that users would be able to make money from ads run on their blogs (whatever happened to that, Staff?).

"You can pay to avoid seeing ads!" Tumblr says, as if the views on my main blog alone over the past few years have not generated more than enough ad revenue to cover the price they're asking me to pay, the person who is actively making content that brings eyes to their ads.

I'm not mad at Tumblr for hosting ads. I get that it has to happen because it's the easiest way to keep the site free, and honestly, I imagine Tumblr's staunch opposition to monetization has been a real obstacle for the team building Tumblr. But at the same time, it feels like yet another small concession in the usability of the site. I'm tired of ads that auto-play with blaring audio while I'm scrolling. I'm tired of adds that, if I touch them while trying to scroll past them, take me to an external site. Outside of tumblr, I'm tired of looking for information online only to get a webpage that's 95% ads and otherwise illegible. Hell, I recently got an ad on Discord. Was it unobtrusive? Maybe. But it was there, for the first time, and I know that won't be the end.

I know the first reply I'm going to get on this is "use adblock", and yes, that's a solution, but think about how much the landscape for media has changed in just ten years.

Popular forums are basically gone outside of reddit.

Youtube, without Red, is ad hell. You can't watch more than 3-4 minutes of video without getting sent to marketing hell.

Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter-- it's terrible. I firmly believe they've manufactured a worse experience through the implementation of ads to convince you to buy into their premium services.

Just Check out this video of Penguinz0 trying to watch a video on a third-party site.

There's discussion of putting ads into video games.

Remember when games didn't include micro-transactions? Blizzard is charging $70 for one mythic skin. You could almost buy Overwatch 1 twice-over at that price-point.

Influencers make a living by making their lives into advertisements.

Youtube has retaliated against users using ad-block on non-chrome browsers by artificially inflating the load times of it's videos.

What can we do about this? I imagine companies see it as an infinite money hack; users can't stop companies from hosting ads, and the action they could take to voice their displeasure-- leaving the site, using other competitive services-- has been all but obliterated thanks to the homogeneity of popular social media outlets. If someone is truly so incensed about ads, well-- it isn't like they have to engage with them, right? They can enroll in a cheap, auto-renewing service to get rid of ads entirely. Well, wait, the price of premium might just have to go up. Don't worry, it's auto-renewing! You won't even notice it. Oh, no, it's got to go up again, you won't even notice it.

There's no incentive for them to cap this behavior, and no way for us as users to pressure them to do so. We create these spaces; we fill them with color, art, activism, community, and the companies that ride on the tailcoat of the spaces we create tell us to give them more. What comes next?

[phantomrose96]

At the risk of having an opinion on Tumblr, that post about having Tumblr do a 48hr blackout like the Reddit one is... kinda just dumb.

Reddit communities going dark was based on well-defined demands against a well-defined new thing the company was doing. Reddit would start charging $xyz amount for API access. This would kill 3rd party apps. The protest was "we want Reddit to renegotiate the API cost to a lesser more reasonable rate that won't kill 3rd party apps."

The tumblr post just seems to be a hodge-podge of every popular tumblr complaint currently, including things staff themselves would clearly like to fix. Like one of the demands is to increase efforts against the spam bots. Buddy tumblr would love to get rid of those things because "your website is infested with sex bots" is not a good look to advertisers. Clearly they don't have a good way to get rid of them otherwise they'd be gone by now. Some 48 hour protest is not gonna make them suddenly better at it.

Other demands include bringing back "go nuts show nuts" which is just straight up not possible anymore. The current CEO made a long post about it a while back explaining why it can't happen. Some of the gripes are just annoying things like Tumblr Live, which tbh would be nice if it was gotten rid of entirely but having it be one bullet point in a random 2-day log off protest isn't gonna do it... You're better off sending thought-out feedback on why it's a problem.

Also like... even if Tumblr said "We're selling all the world's puppies to the factory that tests the efficacy of pepper grinders on animal flesh" which would be a pretty good thing to protest, the Tumblr format itself just can't be organized the way Reddit is. Reddit is made up of a bunch of town center bulletin boards that announcements can be pinned to, with moderators who (for better or worse) can make decisions for a whole community. Tumblr is just everyone's random blogs. Most of you probably don't even know what post I'm talking about cuz it never circulated to your dash. Which version of what post ends up on your dash is a complete clown show. This format doesn't let us organize for shit.

Also parting thoughts, Reddit was able to actually shut communities down and they have better advertiser pull so a missing chunk of the userbase could potentially catch the ire of advertisers. Tumblr is a mud pit and I doubt half the advertisers even know they're advertising on Tumblr.

[nilly002]

Probably nobody that wants to hear this but I am so fucking pissed about reddit killing itself.

Reddit was my favourite place on the entire web. Unlike all the other social media it wasn't about putting individual users on a stage and everyone following them it was simply a shared stage with the users collectively deciding what get's to be in the spotlight.

Yes it was a shithole but it was our shithole. We decided what we got. The algorithm on reddit was utter dogshit and everyone just disabled it, the real algorithm was the hive mind filtering the best content to the top. All the while actual conversation and debate was actually possible because the comments were not arbitrarily limited in length or ordered by what can only be described as little Timmy's first attempt at a Bogosort algorithm.

We had a fucking contract: users bring the content and watch ads, moderators keep the site usable and the amount of effort reddit has to put in to not get sued down to a minimum, all reddit had to do was provide the servers, ban a subreddit once in a blue moon and be content with having a decently profitable site with the factually most worthless users of big social media

But NOOOOO "We NeEd To InCrEaSe PrOfItS! ThOsE pEsKy ThIrD pArTy ApPs ArE sTeAlInG oUr MoNeY" No you idiot they just provided a better service than you did. Why shut them down when you could just copy what they have and make them unnecessary? And then in the process they try to softban nsfw as well because "ItS bAd FoR aDvErTiSmEnT!" god how I fucking hate capitalism.

There's this beautiful thing that people have created in collaboration which brings joy, news, entertainment, education, support and community to so many people and it was ALREADY PROFITABLE but no we need to ruin it to squeeze out as much cash as possible.

Fuck all those people who helped build the website and make it what it is today, fuck all the users who contributed it and spent sleepless nights to make some dumb pixel art bringing your shitty ass website into the news all across the globe fuck all the moderators who spent countless hours doing unpaid labour to keep a community they loved alive and saving you billions in moderation costs, fuck everyone that loves this website

BECAUSE WE WANT MORE MONEY!

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell and for reddit the diagnosis is terminal.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The monetization creep has been evident for a while. Reddit has added a subscription ”Reddit premium”; offered “community rewards” as a paid super-vote ; embraced an NFT marketplace; changed the site's design for one with more recommended content; and started nudging users toward the official mobile app. The site has also been adding more restrictions to uploading and viewing “not safe for work” (NSFW) content. All this, while community requests for improvements to moderation tools and accessibility features have gone unaddressed on mobile, driving many users to third-party applications. Perhaps the worst development was announced on April 18th, when Reddit announced changes to its Data API would be starting on July 1st, including new “premium access” pricing for users of the API. While this wouldn’t affect projects on the free tier, such as moderator bots or tools used by researchers, the new pricing seems to be an existential threat to third-party applications for the site. It also bears a striking resemblance to a similar bad decision Twitter made this year under Elon Musk.

[...]

Details about Reddit’s API-specific costs were not shared, but it is worth noting that an API request is commonly no more burdensome to a server than an HTML request, i.e. visiting or scraping a web page. Having an API just makes it easier for developers to maintain their automated requests. It is true that most third-party apps tend to not show Reddit’s advertisements, and AI developers may make heavy use of the API for training data, but these applications could still (with more effort) access the same information over HTML. The heart of this fight is for what Reddit’s CEO calls their “valuable corpus of data,” i.e. the user-made content on the company’s servers, and for who gets live off this digital commons. While Reddit provides essential infrastructural support, these community developers and moderators make the site worth visiting, and any worthwhile content is the fruit of their volunteer labor. It’s this labor and worker solidarity which gives users unique leverage over the platform, in contrast to past backlash to other platforms.

[flappyhappystim]

how ARE your prices so low? in this day and age id usually suspect something shifty, but having followed yall for so long and ordered and received some products im very happy with im mostly worried y’all are seriously undercharging yourselves!

Hi anon!

Thank you so much for supporting our business and your kind words.

It took Irene and I awhile, but we figured out the minimum margin we need to cover our overhead, materials for packing and stuff like that! We try to keep our products around that margin. (We can’t always if we have an agreement with a supplier to not sell below a certain amount.)

It’s been a learning experience for sure. There were some costs I didn’t even consider when starting. Things like charge backs and human error (oops, sometimes I mess up packing orders and need to fix my mistakes.)

So far though, we’ve been fortunate to not have to pay for advertising! It was thanks to followers we got our start. In the beginning, we had 9 items. And a huge blog shared one of our posts from a follower sharing it, and we ended up selling out over the weekend and that allowed us to bring in a bunch of new items. And you all continue to do an amazing job spreading the word. I’ve seen us recommended on Reddit and other platforms. So a lot of us being able to keep costs lower is thanks to our followers, too! A lot of businesses put a lot of money into advertising and we have not had to.

Whether you’ve interacted with our posts, told a friend about us, or ordered from us, you are a huge reason why we can keep our costs down and we appreciate you all so much. Thank you!

[genericpuff]

https://www.instagram.com/p/CvO2Fo1vbJU/?igshid=NjZiM2M3MzIxNA==

I don't know if you have seen the last thing RS posted on instagram, and I don't wanna sound mean or like I'm criticizing every single thing she does, but, why does this feels a bit off? Like, I know every author needs money, and that's why they sell books, special editions and merch from those books. But seeing how some people who went to that last "book signing" now want to order or buy ANOTHER lo book just to get an autograph or that "exclusive doodle" feels a bit... Idk, bad? Like, the fans have to spend more money than other fans just to get this stuff? It feels a bit like what happened with that Persephone + Ares book that had a special edition that was all black, but costed more than the regular edition so the fans had to spend more money if they wanted their lo novels to look good together. Idk, maybe i'm just seeing too much into it, but I still wanted to ask your opinion on the matter.

Love your work, btw. Lo rekindled is so good, and your art is beautiful!

OKAY SO

I DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THIS INSTAGRAM POST LOL

so I looked into it and yeah! it's off! it's super off!

story time, but there's this band I'm really into where, 1-2 years ago, they had released two new separate EP's, and they were selling them individually as special editions, only for them to then SELL THEM ALL OVER AGAIN AS BUNDLED VERSIONS AND THIS JUST LIKE

IT FEELS VERY SIMILAR LOL

there was also a time where this Youtuber musician my husband was really into was selling vinyls, and we managed to snag a copy in the hour that they were available, only for them to start selling SIGNED copies the week after they had sold out of the original prints

it's just an overall "ech" move because it really screws over your audience for paying attention/getting in first, y'know? That's what's such a big deal about being in a fandom, a lot of people like being "first" so to sell something under the precedent that it's "limited edition" just to print more with an even COOLER thing attached feels like such a fuck you. They're literally just trying to gouge more money out of people who have already bought the thing and "need" the exclusive copy.

This just goes to show btw there was nothing stopping her from signing books personally at SDCC. That feels like such a middle finger to the people who paid money to go to and be at SDCC (travel costs AND attendance costs) esp the people who cosplayed as LO characters and were clearly specifically there for Rachel just to be given a stamp and shooed away with zero conversation (as I talked about in a previous post) and then find out later after you've already gone home days later that you can get a PERSONALLY SIGNED AND DOODLED COPY if you go and buy a brand new book in one specific bookstore. That's so lame man, I can't even.

Just to add btw, not related to your ask really, but it really goes in conjunction with it, there was a tweet recently from Rachel advertising some new t-shirts.

But people who bought the shirts reported that they're INCREDIBLY cheaply made and don't look anything like the products listed. You can even see the low ratings on them but when you actually view them-

I do not feel the need to say it any louder for the people in the back, it's being spoken clearly at this point - WT and Rachel are cashing out on what little merit they have left, they do not care.

AND Y'KNOW WHAT I FOUND OUT WHILE WRITING THIS POST ????

THEY CHANGED THE FUCKING THUMBNAIL!!!

THAT'S NOT WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE 2 DAYS AGO, I CHECKED IT MYSELF BACK WHEN IT WAS FIRST POSTED TO REDDIT AND IT WAS THE GREEN VERSION.

THEY'RE LITERALLY CHANGING THE THUMBNAILS AND ADS TO DISCREDIT THE REVIEWS BEING LEFT.

DO NOT FALL FOR IT. BUYER BEWARE.

[saintmeghanmarkle]

We sinners and people all over want to know if those children belong in the LOS. by u/Technical_Ant_7466

We sinners and people all over want to know if those children’ belong in the LOS. There are so many questionable behaviours surrounding the two Meghan’s. There’s still a nagging question as to whether the California sprogs belong in the LOS.In a constitutional monarchy the rule of law is paramount as is who is eligible to be in the LOS.——————————-The ILBW had honed her fake smiles and silly ingenue mannerisms to marry a title, a walking, talking chequebook with the intellectual capacity of a particularly slow gumball machine. Poor Prince of the planks got engaged to her faster than the speed of light. She rudely announced her megnancy at Eugenie’s wedding , October 22, 2018.It didn’t take her long to start sporting strategically placed moonbumps. The truth, about her megnancies resides in a sterile clinic somewhere in the UK & LA, where surrogates , were carefully vetted and signed rock solid NDA’s.I���m sure the surrogates were well-compensated.There was a catch, of course and that was that in order to be in the LOS children HAD TO BE “ BORNE OF THE BODY”.TW, ever the opportunist, wasn't about to let a measly technicality like childbirth stand between her and a lifetime of money and fame. Moonbumps became her constant companions, growing and varying in size witheach passing month.The inconsistencies and irregularities where an orchestrated charade . The birth, a carefully orchestrated production, brought forth a healthy baby , with no witnesses and wildly varying stories about the hospital, the birth & accompanying legal documents.Moonbumps were hastily discarded,replaced by a parade of nannies who did theactual child-rearing but never stayed employed for long. The ILBW, spoiled and entitled, is a walking advertisement for the downside of unearned wealth.The ILBW and dimwit were secretly indifferent to the LOS rules , focused on expanding the family, adding a girl (another courtesy of the surrogate) to the family, and dishonestly said they had permission to call her Lilibet.( BBC proved that no such permission was given.The charade continued, a web of lies spun and children have never been seen.They could have come clean, and explained the surrogacy, but it wouldn't have suited her. The truth meant less control, less power. Besides, what kind of gold digger admits she doesn't even like children?Now ,as the rumours won’t stop what will they do?They’ve lost everything. That should include the inviskids place in the LIS, unless it can be proven that they belong there beyond a shadow of a doubt.The RF pretty much has said , visit the UK but only with the kids. They’ve never taken the kids to the UK.By now the RF knows that people have seen the crack in her/ their carefully constructed facade. The consequences of her lies SHOULD cost her the one thing she truly cares about: money. The story of the ILBW, the ultimate gold digger, chose to lie about baring children .If she really wanted children she would have admitted using a surrogate.If however, as I suspect she faked her megnancy because she was more interested in being the “mother “of heirs to the throne, and not because she loved and wanted children unconditionally, the Harkles are in a jam (no pun intended).She has no interest in being these children’s mom, not now when she knows it’s just a matter of time before all is revealed.They too will be discarded, as are all people in her life that are no longer useful.PS: Did you know she told Trevor she didn’t want children?Did you know she made her ex husband Trevor sign a pregnancy contract?⬇️https://ift.tt/4aDE0Nf post link: https://ift.tt/aVpOKHi author: Technical_Ant_7466 submitted: May 02, 2024 at 03:08AM via SaintMeghanMarkle on Reddit disclaimer: all views + opinions expressed by the author of this post, as well as any comments and reblogs, are solely the author's own; they do not necessarily reflect the views of the administrator of this Tumblr blog. For entertainment only.

[cyle]

as a backend dev, watching this "rate limiting" on twitter play out was extra stupid if you believe in the "they were trying to cut costs" theory, which must be bullshit because:

to rate limit by user and user type, they'd need to authenticate and load the relevant user record, which hits cache/database and bypasses edge cache. that's the same as just loading everything from the backend, no cost avoidance there.

the rate limit itself is new cache usage, so they're actually increasing cost that way. that count had to be ephemerally stored somewhere!

their own official clients probably never had to deal with 429 Rate Limit Exceeded errors, so yes, they probably DDoS'd themselves in the process

undoubtedly either some engineer brought all of this up and was ignored, or worse, they have no engineers left who understand this level of nuance about operating at scale

so if anything, they increased their server costs, not decreased them. and i know they are not google cloud's biggest customer, so i don't even think that has anything to do with anything here.

my bet is simply that the same thing is happening to twitter that has happened to tumblr: somebody is trying to archive as much as possible of it, and spinning up new accounts to do so via some automated process, and they're struggling to mitigate that. we (tumblr) have mitigated "attacks" like that pretty easily over the years.

[feyarcher]

It's the loss of community from all the social media site distasters of the last year that really gets me. Musk blew up twitter because ????? and I lost a huge source of my regular connection to certain communities and the world generally. Reddit is now fucked because its owner has decided it is cool to be a mini musk or something and so many communities are getting destroyed.

Some people leave immediately when the ship starts sinking. Some people are forced out because the lack of accessibility literally steals their community spaces from them. Others stay to laugh at the asshats in charge. And bad actors come in to make the remnants of the communities into cesspools.

And what are we left with? There is no other platform that entire communities can move to in the exact same way they were before. There is no way to track where every single person who brought value to your community chooses to go. And the scatter remnants are different, forced from text based to [whatever the fuck tumblr is] based or fucking video based. (The turn to video based content with your real identity attached is a whole thing for another time). Or private discord forums that you have to already know about to be able to find because message boards where you can find community and answers with an easy search are gone.

Our communities have been wonderful much of the time (if you can manage to filter out the awful and the rage bait and curate your experience), but we built them on private companies that somehow don't give a fuck about the users who drive the entire value of their site. They focus on advertisers and data collection and never improving the actual experience of the users who mean everything to their stock prices.

The undervaluing of mods, the highlighting of asshats paying $8 to spout off nonsense, the complete lack of caring about what actually makes their platforms useful. And the collateral damage is me, losing communities and news sources and amusement that I have relied on for years. In order to what? Impress investors who are equally stupid and refuse to focus on building a good product and instead focus on what? Ads half of people block anyways? Appeasing the ego of a guy who should take his halfassed spaceship to Mars and not come back?

And the only real short term option we have to fight back is to leave. To not give them our engagement. To tank the stupid metrics they care so much about. At the cost of communities. Of easy information access. Of discovering new people and ideas completely by accident that change your whole world.

Sure, in the long run we can work on shifting to "better" sites. Ones that are open sources or ones we build ourselves. Make your own website. Get involved in modding not for profit sites. But none of it brings back the communities, the connections, the people that we have lost along the way. And today, I'm just fucking sad about it.

[mxjackparker]

I love your work, and I have a question.

I'm a trans guy who is thinking about starting an OF. I have a lot of knowledge in marketing and the kink scene, but otherwise I haven't monetized this part of my life yet.

What are the basics I should know about this kind before I jump in?

The knowledge of marketing and kink will help you a lot! Honestly, most of the work is the marketing, and you'll spend far more time on that than you will making the actual content for your subscription site (at least at first).

My best advice with the start of your advertising would be the sex worker version of "work smart, not hard" - a little nudity and some clips go a long way in your advertising. I realize many people don't want to show themselves for free and want to censor all their ads, but I've always gotten more subs through people finding the clips on my profiles on porn sites than I have through marketing or Twitter or via social media (with Reddit being the occasional exception, when a picture gets a lot of likes, but only with nudes!)

Post in every possible "trans" tag you can find on porn sites, like adding "ftm" and "trans" and even tags like "twink" or "femboy" even if that's not actually your aesthetic because people in those tags often will want to see just any trans guy.

Basics outside of the marketing stuff:

Prepare what you'll do if people in your life find out: vanilla job, family, etc. Take precautions in like with the risk and how bad that'd be.

Get a cheap second phone + a protonmail email account and use that phone number and email when you sign up for stuff so you don't get recommended to people you know!

Create a menu of services you offer and costs; it is easier to get more money from someone already subbed to your subscription site than it is to get a new subscriber. If you can pull £50/$50 from one subscriber, that'll be worth many new subscriptions!

Also I'd hugely recommend going with JustForFans or an equivalent rather than OnlyFans. They permit more content, break down less, and the owners of OnlyFans have donated money to Israel.

I'd also suggest signing up to additional sites, like IWantClips or Manyvids, where you can sell full videos. It'll bring more people to your subscription site, has internal traffic, and you'll make extra money that way and seem more "professional". They also have trans tags/sections!

[kitonmitons]

It really is incredible how quickly the world of freely-accessible social media is dwindling— either falling apart internally or squeezed under the weight of tech monopolies. Or both.

Tumblr’s decision to remove nsfw posts to avoid strikes from Apple’s app store was what tossed the snowball down the mountain. Its demise was connected to internal mismanagement and the need to compete with other huge social media sites at the time they banned nsfw, which are all now under new management and/or owned by massive tech corporations.

That in particular is a point I would like everyone to think about. Every major social media site that we use is part of a larger billion-dollar corporation. Many of them started humbly— Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit were all created by average people. It goes without saying now that Facebook has become a monopoly itself, and we all know the shitstorm twitter is under, which has left us with two primary platforms for free social media: Tumblr and Reddit. We know what is happening to Tumblr, but what of Reddit?

Reddit is owned by Advanced Publications, who also own or have majority shares in companies like Charter Communications (the company behind Spectrum internet, as well as Vogue and The New Yorker) and Warner Bros. Discovery. With funding like that, obviously the intention is not to make Reddit a place of information and socialization— the real intent is to turn it into a money-making machine.

To ensure this, Reddit is in talks of making their company public, meaning they would have to answer to shareholders when making decisions for the website. Shareholders want to see continuous profit, and that cannot be done only through ad revenue, such that Reddit has primarily profited from for years. People can subscribe to Reddit to remove the ads, but subscription services alone don’t see the profits they want to make. The solution to this problem is to push Reddit competitors out.

Some of their biggest competitors, ironically, were their own userbase. Reddit has a slurry of third-party applications made by Reddit users themselves, using Reddit’s API which until recently has been free. Third-party apps such as Apollo gave users a way to use Reddit WITHOUT advertisements, which was lost revenue for Reddit all while using the site’s base code. As a result, this year (2023) Reddit began charging to use its API, resulting in all of these third-party apps shutting down. With no more internal competitors, it’s time to go public and see how much can be made by shareholders— they might even decide to use their new funds to buy out more social media sites, or further integrate failing ones into their system, just as they are with Snapchat.

All this talk about Reddit in a post that is supposed to be about Tumblr. But, the two are related. As Tumblr begins to fall into disrepair and demoderation, we will begin to witness the fall of free social media as we know it. Big tech has dug its fingers in what has quickly become an important piece to our social fabric. The platforms that give us news, connect us with friends and family, connects us to the world, and spreads information is in the hands of just a few tech companies. Tumblr is failing because Yahoo! is failing. Tumblr is failing because WordPress is failing.

It is incredibly easy to blame staff for their stupid decisions, and it should still be mentioned. However, my main concern is the accessibility to free social media itself. The fall of Tumblr is an example of a social media website whose poor decisions— namely the removal of nsfw posts, poor automated moderation and failures to adjust to an aging userbase— cost it everything, but what really resulted in its demise was competition. Tumblr could never compete with giants like Facebook or TikTok. Nowadays, the only site Tumblr could really compete with was Twitter, which will be under a subscription service come January. And as people flock to sites like BlueSky and Threads, the diversity of the online world will only continue to decline. It is exactly the lack of competition that will make it hard for any Tumblr-like to take off, especially since a site like this has always run on user participation, not profit.

My point is, look at the overarching bullshit that is taking away from online life and question whether it’s worth participating in. Find ways to protest online monopolies that are squeezing out competitor sites and making it harder for people to use social media, especially if they aren’t influencers. And take a step back from the staff drama to look at what hostile monopolies and an undemocratic internet is doing to communities like ours.

[existentialterror]

Light's ARG (?) Notes: God Sngol lognS

(I am assuming this is an unfiction project because it has some of the hallmarks: advertising, numbered journal entries, mysterious vibes, a prominent password-locked page... However, if I'm wrong and this is just someone's, like, personal website + philosophy, my apologies for assuming it's anything else. You should explain your stopping time thing though because it seems cool.)

God Sngol lognS / sngollogns.com is an unfiction project I ran into on reddit. Other people have found it through tiktok ads. I was immediately tickled by its use of LaTeX. Like yeah man, alright, I'll hear you out.

The big feature of the website is the "speed of life" PDF, screenshotted above.. The author claims to have paused time, which happens in a 1990-year cycle, in 2023.

The site has a number of PDFs, numbered and labeled "God's Journal Entry #". Some are visible now. Some were uploaded on past versions of the site and preserved in the Internet Archive but are not visible on current versions. Some seem to be visible through the store.

(By the way, PSA, BE CAREFUL ABOUT DOWNLOADING STRANGE PDFS! You can fit a lot of malware in those bad boys. In this case I rolled the dice on it and now have more reason than usual to think they're safe, but if you do the same then you should be aware you're rolling dice.)

Since the outset of its current version, the website has had a password-locked page called "ATLAS". The password is the big mystery. We have tried lots of concepts and words from the site, and some people have even thrown password dictionaries into it, to no avail so far.

Themes found throughout the site and the journals include progress for humanity, death and rebirth, and a trinity of god's scales, god's sword/lightning, and god's eye. The Speed of Life doc says: "If no one else can pick it up… then I will hold this gift up." It evokes the titan Atlas, the name of the locked page.

(The other password locked page, "Planetary Prize in X" was unlocked as of a couple weeks ago. It consisted of some PDFs of prizes the author had awarded to different people - "the Hubble Space Telescope Team" got a "Planetary Prize in Discovery" "In recognition of their legendary contributions to humanity", for instance.)

My tentative read on the story: I think the site's creator ("God Sngol lognS") believes they are the rebirth of Christ and have frozen a longstanding cycle of Messianic arrivals, perhaps allowing humanity to progress forwards. (The site has been around for a couple years but the ads went around on Easter!) They have now moved on to encouraging humanity's progress in other ways.

Right, yes, there is a store. The store sells a number of numbered items (more journal entries?) that cost $100 dollars each and are not yet available. The one item that costs less is "A cup of coffee" that costs $10 and is available now. Someone in the solving discord I'm in did in fact buy it. They got a pdf numbered God's Journal Entry #21 that said "I find it rather poetic. =)" and "Thanks!" So I think they probably just paid $10 to the owner of a fun website, which, well, there are worse things to pay $10 for.

Anyway, this is an odd one because there is a fair amount of material, and the vibes and details are strange and interesting, but we just... haven't made progress on what would appear to be the main step mystery. Still, the site's energy is great, and it appears to be a long-running project.

For future reference, some things I have already tried and have not found obvious clues in:

Any source code

The file hex of the pdfs

Embedded files or messages in the PDFs themselves

Any of the site's embedded images

The most active solving community for this that I'm aware of is the Nightmare Keys Investigation discord. (I'm hanging out in here but I do not run this discord, join at your own risk, it's an ARG enthusiast discord run by youtuber Nightmare Keys). There's a google drive in there with notes, copies of a bunch of pdfs and backups of the site, etc etc.

If you figure out the passwords, let me know. If you're the site owner and you want people to figure out the passwords, maybe make it easier to guess? elaboration below the cut:

There's a thing with passwords where, like, if you think the password is "sngol logns", you can write that out a LOT of different ways:

Sngol lognS

Sngol Logns

sngol logns

SNGOL LOGNS

SngollognS

SngolLogns

sngollogns

SNGOLLOGNS

sngol_logns

ETC...

and I worry that the password is like one of these things we've tried before but formatted in a slightly different way. This is your project and you should do as you like and possibly nobody has even hit upon it yet but I'm just telling you, I'm not going to try any more variations of things I've already guessed, I'm gonna be holding out for new information or ideas.

[ohnoitstbskyen]

Hihi Skyen :) I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the movement of bringing back old personal websites and webrings and rejecting the social media capitalistic hellscape

Last year I got into old websites and Neocities stuff, even getting into coding to make my own website there, and you come across as the type of person who could have some interesting thoughts on a subject like this :O

Such as being a content creator and being inebitably shackled to popular social media, for the lack of a better word.

I don't know, sorry if this is silly, I hope you're having a nice day :) Love your content, been following for years!

Oh I have a lot of thoughts about that actually, and not just because some of my videos are sponsored by Squarespace™

Squarespace™, build your online presence today!

In seriousness, though... I am first of all strongly in favor of the personal website (I should really get around to properly rebuilding my own). Platforms fundamentally cannot be trusted, and their amoral business interest is to homogenize their users as much as possible, the better to package them as product for advertisers, which is their business.

Personal sites are personal, they allow you to take back control of your online profile and online life, and of the things you publish. They are absolutely fantastic for any creative worker as a means of building a strong portfolio and brand, albeit at the cost of requiring upkeep and maintenance.

The thing they lack, and it is a critical thing, is discoverability. They lack the means to connect with an audience, to be found among the hundred billion websites on the global web.

It used to be Google took care of that, but its search results are increasingly bought and paid for and the scope and scale of the internet makes it functionally impossible to make it to the front page of any search result unless you have money to drop on serious SEO and, of course, advertising with Google. So now the platforms hold a functional monopoly on that feature. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr... at this point even TikTok serves that role.

I could make the videos I want, no significant number of people would ever have seen them if not for YouTube's recommendation algorithm. And because my audience is hooked to their platform, trying to get them to pick up sticks and come with me to a new one is... functionally impossible. Worse is that a vast majority of web traffic in the modern day exists on mobile, and the vast majority of THAT is locked in the ecosystems of apps, which introduce their own host of walled garden conditioning and barriers to drawing users to personal websites.

These issues can be addressed in some ways by old school means:

Mailing lists

RSS feeds

Webrings and other linkswaps

Old-fashioned networking

But it will almost certainly never reach the scope and scale of discoverability platforms can do by sheer dint of their size and resources.

Which is why I wouldn't necessarily recommend personal websites as a Content Creator's™ main form of publishing, for example, but as a supplemental way of building a presence online.

But as a thing to build for yourself, a means to stake your claim to a space on the internet that belongs to you, as a means to be creative, a personal website is a fantastic project.

[greatrunner]

So, I'm on Redfin trying to get a feel for the housing market and what kind of house I might get once I have the money for it, and there's a pop-up that will not close. It's got this little QR code and right next to that is "download the app so you can have new houses at your fingertips!" I think I'm clicking on the X for a minute before it finally disappears.

One thing about the constant push towards "download the app" is just how little control you have over an .exe program on your mobile phone.

You can't block ads, you can't stop trackers, and you can't alter the appearance of the site via the app. You're at the mercy of the company whereas on a desktop, which has similar issues (esp with the monopoly that Microsoft has on non-Apple PCs), a lot of those problems can be at least mitigated or minimized with browser extensions or .exe programs on your desktop.

Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram, and Facebook are a quagmire of privacy violations, particularly through ads, and their want to push you towards using their less-than-stellar apps says more about how much the companies dislike how much control the user can exert through their choice-of-browser with extensions. Extensions created by people who want a basic user experience and not one controlled by algorithms.

Fandom, formerly Wikia, continues to push the narrative that "we have more mobile users than desktop users!" to justify making the website, already bogged down and redesigned with invasive advertisements in mind, worse and worse.

And they know they can get away with it because, at the moment, it costs money to escape that void and create an Independent Wiki. There is no Paizo-type non-profit platform where people tired of Fandom (dot com)'s shit can migrate away from them, and vibe as a fan-run Wikipedia. (And when there was one, it got consumed by the Fandom monopoly.)

I wouldn't be surprised if the push towards "download the app" was just the start of retiring desktop computers (among consumers) in the same way Video on Demand (digital downloads and purchases), and the practical death of Special Features (BTS Documentaries, and Audio Commentary), has become another tool for minimizing the necessity of physical media like DVDs and CDs.

None of this was at the request of the consumer, but damn if corporations and companies don't want people to accept that as the true narrative.

[crimeronan]

imo tumblr having an algorithmic for-you page for people who don't know who to follow yet is literally fine and good. you shouldn't need an in-depth tutorial to figure out where the content on the site is and even if you disagree, it's honestly inconvenient as Fuck and always has been. the most active users here rarely have tagged archives that can be easily discovered & the for-you page limits the barrier to entry for new people. unless you came here specifically FOR an artist/writer/creator who ACTUALLY POSTED THEIR TUMBLR URL over on twitter or reddit, you can't figure out who's active in your fandoms or how to talk to people or how to populate your dashboard with content very easily. i get being biased against people who specifically seek out algorithmic content but staff is NOT wrong that this site is inaccessible to get started with. and they're not wrong that that's a bad thing. let people have fun on the internet instead of forcing them to get frustrated and give up????

i'm mainly posting this because i DO disagree with a major part of staff's proposed plans, which are the plans to update their advertising techniques to mirror other social media. that does suck. they're doing it because tumblr users do not have enough money or dedication to keep the app afloat ad-free with in-app/website purchases, but it Fucking Sucks. that's a business decision that has nothing to do with attracting/retaining users or making the user experience better, and everything to do with Make Dollar Sign Go Up At All Costs.

showing new users content while they figure out who to follow is good, that's a good change, that introduces people to the different fandoms and communities on here n gives them a place to start. i know it's annoying for popular tumblr users to have their content prioritized in this way but the people who use the algorithm weren't gonna fuckin' figure the dashboard out to see your posts anyway?? it's a change that's sorely needed and will improve the user experience and it wouldn't surprise me if reasonable staff members have wanted to do it for A While, & are couching it in corporate language so that it can be prioritized. it is FINE.

please for the love of god don't get lost in the weeds here. it's important to understand why different marketing decisions matter and how they impact the userbase. tumblr updating their signup streamlining to retain more new users IS FINE AND GOOD. PEOPLE SHOULD BE ABLE TO USE THIS SITE????

eta just in case: if you have a rebuttal to this that's along the lines of "but algorithmic content will encourage advertisers to ruin the user experience with their grubby greedy little hands" : yes, that's a valid concern. hence why i'm saying i don't like the proposed advertising strategies. i just don't think that the for-you page is in and of itself a bad thing.