Ask Lemmy

Personally I think advertisements should be banned.

Brought to you by Carl's Jr.

If you're asking me, I'm banning all advertisers and karma-fishers on the spot.

Out of sight, out of mind.

I like the way /r/3DPrinting handled ads. Their mods put it like this,

"It's okay for a Redditor to have a business and share it. It's not okay for a business to have a Reddit account and do the same."

Basically, does that account contribute to the community outside of their business? If so, I don't take issue with it.

I would suggest that you censor the spammer's company name in the screen shot. They want to have more exposure and they don't deserve any.

It's spam. Report it.

The nature of spam is that it is parasitic. Spammers don't pay for the resources they use for advertising. They're not sponsoring the site or funding development. Instead, they're stealing from the commons.

It's important that spam be unsuccessful here. Multiple Internet services have been ruined by spam before.

Honestly if money has to be a part of it I would rather just pay some instance maintainer a monthly/yearly fee.

Yeet ads to the shadow realm, we didn’t flee traditional corporatized social media just to repeat the same mistakes of monetizing literally everything

Are these spam accounts? Then they should be banned. I could only see ads in the context of keeping the servers running. I think outside of that it doesn't make sense for this kind of platform. If lemmy.world can run entirely off of donations, then I don't see a reason for ads at all, especially if those ads don't even contribute to keeping the lights on.

Rules are only as effective as the mechanisms enforcing them - I don’t think anyone wants ads on Lemmy instances, but removal requires moderation tools and staff (volunteer or otherwise) to review everything that’s posted.

I imagine the problem we’ll see is as growth accelerates, post velocity will outpace moderation manpower - short version, you’re always going to have to do some blocking/filtering of your own.

Unless they're paying for the instances costs, they can get outta here, and even then, i'm gonna block them.

No, advertising is horrible and should not exist on Lemmy. But since it's federated, I wonder how we stop it. The only solution seems to be moderators with quick ban hammers. And what if some instances don't moderate for ads?

My dear, ~~religion is~~ ads are like a penis. It’s a perfectly fine thing to have and take pride in, but when one takes it out and waves it in front of my face we have a problem.

Ugh, fuck ads

I refuse to watch/read/hear any kind of adds.

One of the reasons why reddit app is trash.

Ideally like the nsfw option I would like a sponsored tag to filter on. Even a tickbox to avoid sponsored stuff like the hide bot posts.

I don't mind small businesses, creatives etc advertising themselves. When you're self-employed, marketing / promo is incredibly difficult (speaking from personal experience). Like you say, people are free to downvote or block these ad posts. I'd be sad if I made a post promoting a service I offer as a (very!) small business and it got downvoted to oblivion out of reflexive (and understandable) ad hatred.

Once advertisers realise there are eyeballs to be reached here, they're going to start posting. Imo it will be handled best on an instance-by-instance, or even community-by-community basis. I started a community for trance, and as an example I would not be happy if a massive multinational like Threads, or Nestle posted an ad there. I WOULD however, be happy if an event such as Luminosity, ASOT or small local club were to post an ad. There would probably have to be limits if it got out of hand.

I actually think its OK, its just like any other account. So simply block them and all is good. Businesses need platforms too. If you dont like that business advertising to you block them. The difference to the big social media giants is that you can't block them cuz they pay them. Also, a bad ad will have significant less reach in lemmy/masto.

I know ads are against the rules of sh.itjust.works, idk if Lemmy.world has similar rules

I don't concern myself with it.

At the moment, advertising is so rare and low key that I'd have to go out of my way to be bothered by it, and since there's no reason to go out of my way to be bothered by something, I don't.

I assume that as time goes on, there will be more advertising on some instances. I might not know sbout it, since I block any and all ads I can by default, but if I do start seeing them, then I'll just block the instances that run them.

And that's that.

💀

Reddit is far worse for it.

Companies will company, if there's an open door to spam things they will. SPAM in the email realm I recall seeing a stat that it accounts for somewhere around 90%+ of email traffic, so thus all the crazy hurdles of ip lists, dkim, spf, etc.

I've seen accounts created on Mastodon for just that purpose. They get a warning that such is not the platform's purpose, if ignored into the ban bucket they go. The problem is it's easy to create accounts unless the admins want to manually review and approve every applicant. External IP blocks work to an extent, but are always going to be reactive in nature getting banned after they've been reported. Ce'st la'vie (or however it's spelled)

If there's a plus side to it, their presence here means that someone thinks the network reach is enough to be worth the effort to post something here to get some kind of return.

I saw a couple from instances with no posts this morning so I just added those instances to my instance's block list. I don't mind corporate accounts being on Lemmy, I do mind them posting straight up ads.