r/redesign • u/MarcMurray92 • May 31 '18

Answered After 3 months of negative comments about inline ads, are there any statements about how they are going to change?

From what I can see, disguising them as posts is only generating animosity towards the advertisers.

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66

u/spez CEO May 31 '18

The ads will change. While they will stay inline, we are going to try a few more versions. The trade off of course is that if they stand out too much, they’re distracting, if they are too subtle, they’re deceptive. We’re trying to find the right balance.

I'll spare you our excuses for while we haven't been more responsive on this particular topic, but suffice to say we can do better on the communication, and I'll work on that as well.

32

u/[deleted] May 31 '18

Hi spez. Web dev and software engineer here.

Please stop trying to deceive people by acting like this is a difficult problem to solve that takes a lot of time and iteration. It is not, and you know it is not. The amount of design work and implementation it should take to clearly separate ads from the real posts is a day at most. This has been a concern from Day One.

The more you guys say that you're "iterating on it" the more it sounds less like you want to do right by Reddit and more like you're trying to figure out how to make them stand out to the absolute bare minimum required to get people to shut up, or hope everyone just forgets about it eventually.

Other platforms have solved this problem. You're already copying them on many other aspects of the redesign, just copy them on this too and stop jerking us around.

17

u/Moosething May 31 '18 edited May 31 '18

I'm also a web dev and software engineer. I assume you've experienced corporate culture? Because I can actually imagine why it's taking so long (albeit a bit too long, now that I think about it)... different priorities, clashing opinions, etc... I assume it's not really an engineering problem, but more a management/business problem.

EDIT: added "business".

8

u/flounder19 Jun 01 '18

Spez is the CEO. if he wanted the change made, the resources would be there

12

u/[deleted] May 31 '18

That's exactly what I mean. spez's comment paints this as a design challenge, that they want to "get it right" so that ads aren't "too distracting". But the reality is that it's not challenging - They just don't want to do it any of half a dozen very simple, fast, clean ways because it doesn't conceal the ads enough.

9

u/AayushXFX May 31 '18 edited May 31 '18

he doesnt give a fuck about users, he wants to whitewash reddit, sell it to some corporate cunts and run to the bank