this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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YSK: Condé Nast Parent Company is a Major Owner of Reddit, You Should Avoid their Publications (Wired, Ars Technica, GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue,...etc) as Much as Possible. (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted 3 days ago by Pro@programming.dev to c/technology@beehaw.org
17 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I started to notice some thing weird while using Reddit, every link post from Condé Nast owned news outlet was getting a high amount of upvotes and awards while other publications had a very normal rate of awards( usually zero, with the exception of the sponsored ones) and upvotes.

That when I started to investigate this matter till I found out about this.

They are boosting their publications on Reddit on the major subreddits. They are trying to give their publications a advantage over all the other news outlets.

They have the ability to kill the other news outlets if they keep doing that. Avoid them as if your freedom is dependent on it.

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[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 21 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I wrote for Ars for a brief period, on Linux topics. This was prior to the digg exodus. As a writer, I got a set rate for each page of content, with an expected average word count per page. I'd get a bonus anytime my story hit the front page of digg, slashdot, or similar aggregater. It happened a few times.

But that bonus incentive meant I was encouraged to specifically write stories that would resonate with those audiences. It wasn't fraud or a scam -- it was free market economic pressure. But the effect was the same -- I was tailoring my content to maximize aggregator exposure.

I began to submit my own stories to Slashdot and similar, because a minute of my time could pay me $100 or whatever.

I am not sure that reddit is biased towards these publications as much as they are likely intentionally gaming the algorithms, and encouraging their writers to do the same -- write content you know will hit the frontpage. I don't think it is wrong necessarily, but it certainly isn't organic.

That said, Ars generally has very high quality content due to some very good reporters. Eric Berger comes to mind. So it could be both effects: quality and gaming the system.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I probably read a few of your articles, unless you were covering Arch. Not sure if that was yet a thing at the time of the Digg fiasco.

It's sad that those were the incentive structures, but I find it unsurprising. By my final years in a newsroom, reporters had quotas for social-media posts. Guess what you're not doing when you need to tweet eight times a day? Actual reporting.

One might say, "OK, but it doesn't take that much time out of your day," which I'll grant, but it takes you out of the flow. If you're thinking about your next tweet, you aren't thinking about what other source you need to talk to that would solidify the story.

Corporate journalism is digging (no pun intended) its own grave in many cases. Longform is still going strong (e.g. Ars, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic), and I'm relatively certain Ars has cost me way more than just the subscription. I learned about Factorio on there, and a few weeks later, I got my life back.

[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Corporate journalism is digging (no pun intended) its own grave in many cases.

A feedback cycle where no one wants to pay for content, so advertisers are needed to fund their staff, which means clicks and engagement become the metric of success. But, the solution is either publicly funded news (largely unpopular), or regulating the open internet (more unpopular). So, yeah, the death of corporate journalism is coming.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 points 2 days ago

Ah, publicly funded news. Which the junta is trying to eviscerate.

I've honestly been pushing for the death of corporate journalism, as we're past the point where it can be rebuilt. Under this structure, there is no path forward, especially given the widespread fealty revealed last fall by LAT and WaPo.

We have a thriving propaganda community within journalism, but that's, uh ... not the goal here. It's not as though boots-on-the-ground reporters want to be doing this, but fucked-up motivators lead to fucked-up results in any industry.

But hey, a few more mergers can fix that before it's revealed as a house of cards, causing mass layoffs while executives sip mojitos.

I hate this timeline.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 23 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Shilling on Reddit is of course not a great look, but boycotting these publications will only hurt journalists.

The C-suite can always get nice golden parachutes when things go downhill, while writers and editors get a pittance if anything when layoffs and buyouts come down the pike.

Should corporations be able to have their fingers in so many pies? No. But the horses are gone, so debating the barn door is irrelevant.

[–] cygnus@lemmy.ca 15 points 2 days ago (2 children)

You really like metaphors.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, I realized after submitting that I'd written in majority idiom, which wasn't my intent.

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 5 points 2 days ago

It's hard to make an old dog forget old tricks

[–] Deceptichum@quokk.au 9 points 2 days ago

Like water to a camel.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 14 points 2 days ago

Having poured more idiom into three short grafs than at any time in my history of writing, I felt the need to come back and revisit other things.

Before I get to the issues with the title,

They have the ability to kill the other news outlets if they keep doing that. Avoid them as if your freedom is dependent on it.

... oh, no! Gannett and Sinclair will be marginally affected. News outlets have already been dying for decades. The solution to this is certainly not killing more of them.

But as an editor, that title really grinds my gears.

If you want to go upstyle, that's fine. But commit to it. As it stands, this is a bunch of Random Caps, making it look more like a Trump tweet. Why is "their" lowercased?

"YSK" -- already something that should never be used when making a breathless pronouncement -- is serving zero function here. Then we have the ... interesting style choice of a comma set solid with a trailing ellipsis, followed by no period on "etc."

I mention all of this not to be mean, but rather to show what decades in news editing turns one into. And decreased traffic to those sites would endanger editors before reporters. Readers have been lamenting the decline in editing since the buyouts began in earnest back in the aughts, but it's a vicious cycle.

Less revenue, fewer editors.

I'd hazard a guess that, on Beehaw at least, users are aware of Advance's holdings. Anyone who's been following, for example, Ars' coverage of Reddit has seen the disclaimer at the bottom of every story.

So, this is not news but rather, "Look what I ran into on Wikipedia!" Cool. If I posted every Wikipedia story I ran into, I'd likely get a vacation.

It's important to remember that people can do excellent work for shitty corporate overlords. Pointing at Ars (literally my only paid subscription) and other properties still committing quality journalism under increasingly fraught circumstances is tone deaf.

But more to the point, who the fuck is still getting "news" off Reddit? The goal here should be getting people to stop using Reddit (admittedly, I'm still on there for niche topics), not to punish the journalists toiling to create the stories that get linked there by marketing.

[–] glowing_hans@sopuli.xyz 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

The company's media brands attract more than 72 million consumers in print, 394 million in digital and 454 million across social media platforms.

This is not monopoly level, but certainly bigger than most, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications

[–] pasdechance@jlai.lu 2 points 2 days ago

You could use something like ublacklist to filter them from your search results

https://codeberg.org/bbbhltz/16CompaniesFilters

[–] Pro@programming.dev 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

My advice to people who see my post here is to spread awareness about this widely as much as they could.

They own the social media and they own the news. They are going to control people thoughts and fuck the whole journalism industry ( Bankrupt competitors) if they kept doing this.

[–] CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Perhaps if we get a sane and effective government one of these decades, they can open an anti-trust investigation into Conde Nast considering they're using their monopoly to give an unfair advantage to their own companies using your very example.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This particular setup is small potatoes. You want to talk monopoly? Gannett is a far better target (NB: I used to work for Gannett).

Sure, Conde Nast has a high MAU count, but they're still producing quality journalism. And I fail to see how putting a finger on the scale -- driving readers to good stories -- is really a problem.

Given current trends in journalism overall, this is corporate overreach, to be sure, but this is a competition for eyeballs that goes all the way back to Twitter and Facebook killing local journalism by training readers to not click through to the original sources, thereby depriving them of ad revenue.

This is simply advocating for further erosion of the industry. Case in point: Gannett was already, 10 years ago, producing generic wire pages for scores of local outlets. One guy in Austin (Adam) read the AP News Digest, and without so much as a budget meeting, we were replicating it nationwide, just cutting stories (usually badly, since the business model at the hub was to hire new grads and pay them shit until they burned out) to fit each paper's ad stack.

Algorithms Being Manipulated is in no way unique to Advance. This is a red herring. Journalism is in crisis, and any way to keep the lights on is fair game.

[–] CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I think it's different than you describe since they own the publisher(s) and the distribution as well. This is no different than some famous examples like movie studios buying theaters and only showing their movies or Microsoft forcing people to use Internet Explorer. The quality of journalism should be irrelevant since the law is supposed to apply equally. Your example of Twitter killing journalism is different since they have no association with those other companies.

I agree the industry is eroding but I think that has more to do with the internet as a whole and people not wanting to pay and less to do with regulations. This situation can't help the industry if it's killing off a bunch of companies since they can't get fair representation on a major platform like reddit. That just leads to further consolidation and more of what we're currently dealing with.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

While I largely agree with graf 2, graf 1 does a fair amount of question-begging.

Not to beat a dead horse, but for those using Reddit for news, it's undeniable that media literacy has not been imparted. The theatre and IE comparisons fall flat because you can always just go to the website. Reddit has no monopoly here.

If one uses Reddit as though it's an RSS feed, well, that's not an Advance problem. Not trying to victim-blame here, but come on. It's not a site for serious news. I've not been subscribed to any of the news subs in years because it's people sharing shoddily written stories and then having useless debates that ignore the central thesis.

It's fine for entertainment, but entertainment is not news. "Look at that cute cat" is the target demo, not, say, "I'd like to know about the latest developments in the Ukraine war." It's akin to going to Harbor Freight for ice cream. You can't blame the tool store for not selling food.