It is all Apple, all the time in techland this week. Except at Reddit, where the social news site’s users spent most of yesterday obsessing about something else: A rogue ad.
Reddit is a Digg-like community-powered news aggregation/curation service that Conde Nast bought a few years ago and has more or less left alone. The publisher has made a very cautious attempt to introduce some advertising into the free site, but so far it’s just toe-in-the water stuff. Because Reddit users really, really hate advertising.
Here’s proof: The deluge of angry commentary that dominated the site Thursday after visitors started seeing a pop-up ad that wasn’t supposed to be there.
The short version of the story is that Reddit says this was an honest mistake that wasn’t really their fault — they lay the blame on other Conde sites and Google’s (GOOG) DART ad-serving service. But the say they’re sorry anway, because “we would sooner bludgeon ourselves to death with keyboards than run pop-over ads.”
You can find a longer version of the tale via Reddit engineer Mike Schiraldi’s blog post, which is pretty entertaining. And you can get a sampling of Reddit users’ reaction here, but be warned that some of them use salty language to complain about seeing advertisements.
Oh, and the ad in question? Tangentially related to Apple (AAPL), after all — they were for iPad carrier AT&T (T). But they were promoting the carrier’s relationship with competitor Research in Motion (RIMM).
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