I just said this yesterday or two days ago when they announced they were going to start paying people for content, but it truly is amazing how Reddit can find another significant thing that will hurt them as a business and move forward with it.
It seems like they'd run out of things that could significantly hurt their business, they just keep finding something else.
Soon they're going to be down to basic features, And they'll be like hey look so hyperlinks don't work anymore. And then that'll be the end of the press release.
Their "business decisions" are insane right now.
It's very difficult to see this procession of self-mutilation technologically in another light other than deliberate corporate suicide. Like is someone going to benefit if Reddit goes bankrupt? Is that what's happening?
It's truly shocking. Like all the Twitter stuff that musk is doing, seems in some way connected to his ego and they seem like genuine mistakes that he's making because he's completely out of touch and an a******.
But with Reddit, it's like I can't follow the logic of these decisions at all, I can't tie back these obvious blunders to any sort of logical troubleshooting decision making process for their company.
Regulatory Capture is when corporations install favourable politicians and former employees into positions that enact policies and regulations favourable to the goals of industry (profit).
I think what we're saying here is Corporate Capture, where malicious players have captured major corporate entities in an attempt to neuter platforms that are used by the masses in an effort to control the messages given to the population.
People start talking about revolution, and suddenly the mediums used to enable free communication are removed.
It’s all going to plan. A wealthy investor has paid a lot of money to shut down popular platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Knowledge is power and they can afford to, and have the incentive to keep us in the dark. Can’t have us poors rising up against inequality if we have no soapbox to stand on.
I've played with this idea in my head on several occasions. It does seem rather insane how all social media sites are self destructing and making business decisions that are questionable at best. Given all the uprisings across the globe in recent years, it would not surprise me if there were various investors and governments who would pay good money to destroy those platforms. Also the sudden and complete self destruction of both Reddit and Twitter right as we're about to head into the 2024 US presidential elections, seems rather suspect as well.
The other idea I've been considering is that both Musk and Huffman are raging malignant narcissists who are throwing a massive childish tantrum and burning it all down simply because the users on their sites made fun of them.
I'm leaning into the theory it's someone in power in Saudi Arabia. A member of their royal family is heavily invested in Twitter, owns shares and fronted Elon a big chunk of money for Twitter and they would surely like to crack down on social media in pretty much every middle eastern country, what with those pesky women protesting by not wearing their hijabs and protests and riots happening over there in the past decade. The first thing they do when there is trouble is shut down twitter, shutting it down permanently makes things easier for them.
People keep laughing at how dumb execs are. Like they are dumber than the average person. They aren't. They pay lots of money to very smart people who tell them what will happen. It's just much easier for them if people think they're dumb instead of malicious. Because again, they have smart people telling them how to play this.
Didn't they come out and say early on when they firsr introduced rewards that they'd made enough money to cover their server costs for many decades? Whatever happened with all that?
Reddit is overall quite left leaning, with a lot of its communities being some of the biggest hubs for lefties on the internet (antiwork comes to mind, all the LGBT subs, majority of the big politics subs also heavily lean left).
I don't think it's that crazy a "conspiracy theory" to say that this could be intentional sabotage. IMO it's what's happening with Twitter also, I think the alt right is paying big to take down left leaning social media so they can control the flow on information. I know Musk and Spez are profoundly stupid but I don't think they're stupid enough to genuinely believe in their recent business decisions. I think these decisions make a lot more sense when viewed through that lens.
They got officially fact checked a few times and that put the fear of god in them, since their whole schtick relies on ignorance.
Yeah, actually. This has completely derailed what has historically been a powerful platform for progressive and leftist movements going into a US election cycle. Same with Twitter. Meanwhile, the MAGA propaganda machine at Meta chugs along unfettered.
I can't see any other motivation. There is certainly no economic incentive to run either business as they have been, but running the companies into the ground as a means to control or destroy opposition communication platforms definitely makes sense.
To be fair the awards system was complete dogshit and just became a rich man's upvote and a way to financially brigade comments.
I remember the days when /r/the_donald gilded hateful comments/posts to game Reddit's frontpage.
Awards well and truly jumped the shark when the admins took Reddit Silver, a meme pic that people would often post to mock the act of gilding, and make that into an award that offered the recipient nothing other than a silver crudely-drawn emblem by their comment.
Normally I'd support the removal of this feature, but it's blatantly obvious they did it because Reddit's top payers abandoned the site and because they were fed up with watching "fuck u/Spez" posts getting gilded.
Someone always benefits when public companies go bankrupt or lose value, so yes.
Honestly, the part I don't get? That they didn't wait to start self sabotaging the business after the insiders had been able to offload their positions in an IPO.
Like, the usual way to do this would have been:
IPO at status quo
Redditors buy shares
Insiders sell shares and open shorts
Reddit begins to implode itself
Redditors hold bags, insiders laugh from their yachts
Who, at this point, is going to buy into reddit's IPO?
Remember the legitimate threat to the status quo of capitalism that came from the GME/robinhood/etc moment, not to mention antiwork/fuckwork. Think about how prevalent discussion of the remote work/4 hour work week/UBI have been on Reddit's front page.
If a general strike was every close to happening in the last decade, it would have been organized and circulated on Reddit.
Pretty crazy about the paying people for content, hadn't heard of that. Seems like a great way for content to get dumbed down to appeal to the lowest common denominator and fish for free money. Oh well, I'm sure reddit has honorable intentions and is doing this solely to benefit its average user.
I don't understand how this change hurts them. Is it that it makes their premium subscription less enticing? I never had premium or used awards, so I don't get it.
Ha, yea, like the producers, except that they were working toward tanking the show for a defined payday, and Reddit it's killing itself before the IPO to give itself a smaller payday?
Paying their users for content is actually a good thing on paper. In fact, it counteracts the largest argument over API charges that I had: That they were gonna make more than per MDAU via ads, but have the audacity to keep all of it, while not even giving the users that provide it nary a crumb.
The problem with this is: What is a fair price for user generated content? What is a fair redistribution based on DAUs and activity? Is there even a fair model? How could you guarantee it when there will be cabals to provide content at a certain level, as was seen when blogrings tried it in the late 2000s?
Unfortunately, there's no easy answer, because reddit will always give the least amount they can endure, especially as they are not profitable. And when they are, they will bargain down because they need cheap UGC to function. Such a system is probably going to be unfair by philosophy and design.
I think even on paper paying users for content without any sort of regulation, standards, or guidelines will rapidly lower the quality of that content.
There are already so many accounts, and I'm not even talking about bot accounts, that focus on saving front page posts, coming back in 3 or 4 days, and reposting those posts.
I can only see the low effort post situation deteriorating once Reddit starts paying karma farmers.
I just frantically searched for like 15 minutes trying to find what the hell I was talking about, haha.
My bad for saying "announced", there was no official announcement, there are actually lines of code in the reddit apk that outline a Contributor program that allows users to convert their karma/awards into real money:
"Fake internet points are finally worth something!
Now redditors can earn real money for their contributions to the Reddit community, based on the karma and gold they've been given.
How it works:
Redditors give gold to posts, comments, or other contributions they think are really worth something.
Eligible contributors that earn enough karma and gold can cash out their earnings for real money.
Contributors apply to the program to see if they're eligible.
Top contributors make top dollar. The more karma and gold contributors earn, the more money they can receive."
Seriously, spend a bit of time looking into Gamestop / superstonk. It explains all of it. And you may get some real money out of it.
DRSGME.org will work if you don't wanna use reddit, r/superstonk.
There is a lot to digest but it may change the world as we know it.
I didn't want to use Reddit, so thanks for providing the other site. Direct registration does make a lot more sense, I didn't even know there was a separate agency underwriting my stocks, but if the transfer agent at a particular company can transfer the stocks to your name, why is that not yet part of the system?
I know I'm not being super clear but that's because I buy my stocks through a third party brokerage and don't really understand the details.
I guess my question is why is direct registration not the norm (I'm guessing advantageous capitalism) and is direct registration a new movement?
I think that's actually closer to the mark than many realize. Awards are great when they are not directed at the company or it's rep in a negative manner as they show positive engagement and help the company with sales marketing. When awards and upvote/downvote counters are used to highlight that the users are having a negative experience then it hurts the platform image. Similarly to how YouTube removed the downvote tracker because their marketing team realized it hurt their sales revenue with business partners.
I support this! Then all the new folks will be hella confused with the award system, expecting something rewarding, when it's actually just arbitrary fun.
I don’t want to give Reddit any traffic so I’m reposting the content here:
Hi all,
I’m u/venkman01 from the Reddit product team, and I’m here to give everyone an early look at the future of how redditors award (and reward) each other.
TL;DR: We are reworking how great content and contributions are rewarded on Reddit. As part of this, we made a decision to sunset coins (including Community coins for moderators) and awards (including Medals, Premium Awards, and Community Awards), which also impacts some existing Reddit Premium perks. Starting today, you will no longer be able to purchase new coins, but all awards and existing coins will continue to be available until September 12, 2023.
Many eons ago, Reddit introduced something called Reddit Gold. Gold then evolved, and we introduced new awards including Reddit Silver, Platinum, Ternium, and Argentium. And the evolution continued from there. While we saw many of the awards used as a fun way to recognize contributions from your fellow redditors, looking back at those eons, we also saw consistent feedback on awards as a whole. First, many don’t appreciate the clutter from awards (50+ awards right now, but who’s counting?) and all the steps that go into actually awarding content. Second, redditors want awarded content to be more valuable to the recipient.
It’s become clear that awards and coins as they exist today need to be re-thought, and the existing system sunsetted. Rewarding content and contribution (as well as something golden) will still be a core part of Reddit. We’ll share more in the coming months as to what this new future looks like.
On a personal note: in my several years at Reddit, I’ve been focused on how to help redditors be able to express themselves in fun ways and feel joy when their content is celebrated. I led the product launch on awards – if you happen to recognize the username – so this is a particularly tough moment for me as we wind these products down. At the same time, I’m excited for us to evolve our thinking on rewarding contributions to make it more valuable to the community.
Why are we making these changes?
We mentioned early this year that we want to both make Reddit simpler and a place where the community empowers the community more directly.
With simplification in mind, we’re moving away from the 50+ awards available today. Though the breadth of awards have had mixed reception, we’ve also seen them - be it a local subreddit meme or the “Press F” award - be embraced. And we know that many redditors want to be able to recognize high quality content.
Which is why rewarding good content will still be part of Reddit. Though we’d love to reveal more to you all now, we’re in the process of early testing and feedback, so aren’t ready to share official details just yet. Stay tuned for future posts on this!
What’s changing exactly?
Awards - Awards (including Medals, Premium Awards, and Community Awards) will no longer be available after September 12.
Reddit Coins - Coins will be deprecated, since Awards will be going away. Starting today, you’ll no longer be able to purchase coins, but you can use your remaining coins to gift awards by September 12.
Reddit Premium - Reddit Premium is not going away. However, after September 12, we will discontinue the monthly coin drip and Premium Awards. Other current Premium perks will still exist, including the ad-free experience.
Note: As indicated in our User Agreement past purchases are non-refundable. If you’re a Premium user and would like to cancel your subscription before these changes go into effect, you can find instructions here.
What comes next?
In the coming months, we’ll be sharing more about a new direction for awarding that allows redditors to empower one another and create more meaningful ways to reward high-quality contributions on Reddit.
I’ll be around for a while to answer any questions you may have and hear any feedback!
Not surprising considering what it is. I've seen people claim that the API is quite bad, to say it nicely. Can't imagine the app's code to be much better :)
They literally bought out one of the best apps, brought it in house, and actively made it the worst app. It's almost amazing how consistent reddit's management failures have been.
They developed a GraphQL version of the API like 5 years ago... then marked it as "internal", obfuscated it, and didn't let anyone access it. Except the official app.
So did sync. You could hide awards completely, display them all, or have it just show that the post had been awarded, but no detail on what the award was.
It's good that Reddit did this today because the memes on the fediverse have been extremely good lately. Reddit Remainers checking it out will find a fun, active community
If I was more paranoid, I’d say that the fucking stupid bean meme bs that happened right when the Reddit api shut down was awfully convenient for Reddit.
You can always tell when a community is going downhill when they say they're "empowering users" with their latest changes. They're never actually empowering anyone but the shareholders to make more money.
What happened to them being so desperate to make money that they'd charge third party all devs $20 million a year for API access? Surely removing ways to give them money won't help that situation, right?
I know the API thing was all about control and not the actual money, but they're just being so blatant about not giving a fuck about the site or the users. What a dreadful company.
As an advertiser, I suspect they're trying to give us more groups of people to target. Ads are expensive, and generate a lot more money than Reddit gold
I have a serious question for you, if you have a moment. Do advertisers have any way of knowing what percentage of the views they're paying for are actual humans, and what are bots?
Because it seems to me that this is an excellent scam on a corporate level: Reddit ditches users and mods in favor of bots interacting with bots, the number of accounts and views don't dip dramatically, and Reddit, Inc. continues to pull in all that sweet advertising revenue because there's no way for advertisers to know the difference for sure, or the ratio of bot to humans on the site or in a sub with any kind of precision.
I'd appreciate your thoughts on this, because I've been pondering this for a while but do not have any knowledge of advertising metrics, or what would stop a dishonest/bad-faith board like Reddit's from doing this to some degree just because they can.
Are they that good per view(and hence per bandwidth cost) though? Everyone I've heard who knows more than I had been saying that internet ads have always only marginally paid the bills and that purchases for microtransactions make way more money.
Are they that good per view(and hence per bandwidth cost) though? Everyone I've heard who knows more than I had been saying that internet ads have always only marginally paid the bills and that purchases for microtransactions make way more money.
I see the "follow twitter" business model is proceeding.
"We're having cash flow issues? What should we do?"
"I know! Lets cancel the one thing that we're doing that people are just giving us money for!"
"Brilliant!"
If I was a VC, I would want a glut of ad-sensitive, lowest common denominator users. Think your Aunt on Facebook, or your sister on VSCO, or your young nephew on TikTok. I don’t think those people are necessarily attracted to the overall community attitude(s) currently on Reddit.
I would never call the ex-Hacker News/Digg Redditors smart. But.
Those users do have certain proclivities that make them EXTREMELY unattractive to investment dollars. Strong interest in anti-mainstream topics, including the 3Ps (Privacy, Piracy, and Pornography) doth not good ROI make. This exodus of users and elimination of features, outside looking in, seems like a misstep. I’d be skeptical.
I found Reddit Gold and Discord Nitro's gifting systems to be smart ways of monetization.
There are people who, despite what you try, cannot or will not pay you. Gifting allows you to keep the people that positively contribute on your platform while still earning money from elsewhere.
Amazing how swiftly they're progressing with their enshittification. Makes me re-think all those 9 years spent there.
Though we’d love to reveal more to you all now, we’re in the process of early testing and feedback, so aren’t ready to share official details just yet.
So they are killing cashflow at this crucial point and any possible replacement is "in the process of early testing and feedback"? WTF? Am I missing something?
I think they dont like the fact that these awards also grant reddit premium to the user who receives them. But they cant just remove that feature of the rewards without killing rewards otherwise they look really bad. So the new award system will just be a community highlight. Maybe something that changes the background color of the post to highlight it on the front page. Like gold background. Then they will allow advertisers to also pay to make their "paid advertisements" also have background colors to generate a dark pattern where they trick you into clicking ads because you think they are awarded front page posts.
There’s rumors that Reddit may launch some new cryptocurrency. Based on code in the Reddit’s Android app, Reddit appears to be working on a “contributor program” that would let users cash out gold or karma (basically, points you get for posts, comments, or giving awards) they receive into real money.
Awards were always super jarring when I accidentally ended up on "new reddit". I could never tell who actually liked them. But to just remove the feature, and take coins immediately (that people paid for) away with no alternative is shitty.
I guess management wants to get rid of those nasty ad free benefits.
Starting today, you will no longer be able to purchase new coins, but all awards and existing coins will continue to be available until September 12, 2023.
Thats a non existant notice period and frankly either a knee jerk or the plan from the start. Its also in line with the new "core vision" of reddit. Goodbye, reddit.
so this is a particularly tough moment for me as we wind these products down.
Products, ey? Their intentionally designed to not feel loke them.
we want to both make Reddit simpler and a place where the community empowers the community more directly.
redditors be able to express themselves in fun ways and feel joy when their content is celebrated.
You cant do that directly, you need to give people a reason to trust you. Trust your not twisting their words for your ends. This wouldnt be so bad if you didnt burn up all that trust. New Reddit, to be blunt, fake paridises are utterly disturbing to almost all humans. New Reddit, go ahaid, use tools to make users beleave there in a room of attractive people all giving you welcoming smiles, most are going to run for the hills
Note: As indicated in our User Agreement past purchases are non-refundable. (Fuck you)
We took your digital stuff that you paid for in actually useful green papers
If you’re a Premium user and would like to cancel your subscription before these changes go into effect, you can find instructions here.
Makes sense to remove things that people can boycott. They have a graph on someone's computer where income from awards points straight down. That looks really bad for potential buyers so it's better to remove it and claim the dip was intentional.
They can keep shooting their own feet all they want. I'm glad to be done with it. I thought I wouldn't manage to keep away, but Lemmy is an adequate replacement. In time, it may even come to be okay.
Same, Lemmy just seems less addictive but at the same time more enjoyable, with (relatively) friendly users and the ability to simply blacklist the posters and communities you don’t like from your feed, instead of having to lose brain cells scrolling past screeds calling parents “breeders” or cars “pedestrian crushers” that clearly indicate a lack of contact with monocot plants in the Poaceae family.
Reddit made its own competitor. There was none to really speak of, until the exodus. Enough people left that the new site was sustainable. They've created their own downfall.
Listen, gold was cute while it first happened, and the evolution of silver was hilarious, i believe a crappy Jpeg with a Microsoft paint style silver coin, hilarious. In my opinion it should have never moved pass this point. It was clutter, a quick visit to mlmym gave me a kick of nostalgia as its like Reddit used to be when i started 11 years ago.
They're just gonna push their stupid crypto, aren't they? The awards have been dumb, especially once it moved beyond the community and was embraced by corpo-reddit. But they are absolute morons so they HAVE to be pivoting to crypto in the year of our lord 2023, because of course, that's what an absolute moron would do.
Well I just spent the rest of my coins (7k) on promoting lemmy in that thread lol. I was done with reddit before, but now I know reddit is really done.
Gold was introduced as a way to help sustain server costs, then it was a money grab.
I know the timing lends itself to dogpiling, but honestly? Good for them. Throughout the fog, reddit made a solid choice - awards and coins were absolutely fucking stupid. I had posted regularly on reddit since 2011 or so. The coin shit distracted from the original sorting system - upvotes/downvotes.
Of course, hindsight belies that even that algorithm was bullshit the entire time. Alas, fuck reddit. Good riddance.
Why even involve users? Bots posting AI generated stuff. Upvote bots upvote, comment bots comment and repost bots repost. Its the ciiiiiircle of life...
Well, with many of the site’s top contributors having left, much of the more informative content can then be written by Reddit’s own AI. Throw in a few bot upvotes for visibility and watch the tips come in from the remaining people who don’t have a clue what’s going on.
I could see that bringing in revenue. That’s money straight from the users into Reddit’s pocket.
The worst part is that some generated AI looks exceptional, so bad actors posting it without saying it's AI art would trick most people, anything for engagement I guess..
Based on the language where they say there is something coming in the future, I would bet it's that system.
They want to invalidate all existing awards so they cannot be used to give people money under the new system and likely also remove the premium feature of getting awards for free.
People who want to reward content creators will pay for premium and awards instead of just premium now.
I don’t disagree. I’m not sure how that generates revenue for Reddit though. Unless it’s their attempt to capture content creators like YouTube. Or is it more like an onlyfans type idea where people pay the creator personally through the system and they system just takes their cut.
Eh. Whatever. I’m no longer on Reddit. It I’m mildly entertained by the drama.
In the coming months, we’ll be sharing more about a new direction for awarding that allows redditors to empower one another and create more meaningful ways to reward high-quality contributions on Reddit.
I wish I had some better alternatives for the Ukraine related content, because the magazines & communities here are definitely not sufficient, and I'm not going to get Telegram and dig through all of that garbage.
Sometimes people would buy me coins if I posted something they liked. It took me forever to find some sort of use for the coins, since I never did any of the shit that people might spend coins on. 15 years on the site and I never had an avatar or anything like that. THEN I finally figured it out. The only acceptable use for reddit coins. Buying cute teddy bear awards for people that hate you. It was fun, and it pissed them off. When they’re trying to have a vicious argument about “marvel movies” or something, and getting all worked up sending them a cute teddy bear icon that attaches to their name, whether they want it or not, is exactly the right thing to do with your stupid gold coins.
Never really was a fan of the copious amount of awards to begin with. Gold and Silver were fine enough, and they got a point across. If I saw them on a post or comment, I'd have an indicator that someone really liked it, and wanted to praise it beyond giving it an upvote. Silver and Gold were two tiers to this, which coupled with upvotes, was more than sufficient in giving users a metric by which to value posts or comments.
It turned to shit when I start seeing diamond-clad medals, seal heads, unicorns and rainbows, and shooting stars flying across my screen. It took the simple approach and turned it into a clusterfuck of visual noise because the people designing them had no clue about the basics of a user interface.
And then they kill the entire thing because (shocker) it just doesn't work. Typical.
We mentioned early this year that we want to both make Reddit simpler and a place where the community empowers the community more directly.
..and because that we took away the power from our communitys by banning moderators of communitys, closing down communitys, and forcing users to be our bitch who does everything we ask them to. also we didn't listen to our communitys at all and actively lied and ignored them.
As long as they honor what people have currently bought, honestly this is the first time they've made a change I agree with. Awards were usually used for trolling from what I saw
It doesn’t look like they will. It looks like you have until September to use or lose. Also, it looks like if you bought premium, you’re just losing that “feature” with no replacement value for your money
It also looks like they are going to implement some kind of “contriburor” payment scheme.
So Reddit is going to go from letting users pay them to put lil .gifs on a post and letting a user see more comments at once, to paying users for their content.
Yeah that sounds like it'll really increase profit, I can't see any way that math doesn't check out /s.
I have an annoying amount of coins still. What do you think would be the best way to use them? If they're not showing up at all, it seems moot to award the anti-reddit/changes comments or posts.
As long as they honor what people have currently bought,
From the announcement, this is a "yes, but also no" because any unused coins on an account stop being honoured after Sep 12, when there will no longer be awards to purchase with them.
After the API changes announcement, I cancelled my premium renewal. I'm still on premium.
The best feature was that I'd get coins to give away as rewards every month. There were other benefits I enjoyed, but the ability to gift someone gold on a whim from the coins I had gotten was very nice.
Now, all the coins I have stockpiled will be worthless.
Gg Reddit. I'm sorry to see it end this way, but you've done this to yourself.
Why is everyone so negative? Good on them for killing some stupid feature that nobody really liked. Yes, they'll bring another even worse feature but luckily no one here is impacted by that.
Man. What the actual hell is Reddit doing? They’ve been making the most suicidal business decisions this year. Blocking third party apps, they piss off a huge active portion of their user base but sure, you could say they weren’t paying anyway. But now they’re screwing over their PAYING users? I don’t even know what they expect at this point.
I'm not opposed to this, though I generally think that the move towards awards overcomplicated the site. It was better when it was just Gold and there was a simple tracker to say how many days of server time had been paid for.
Its such a shame that a once great platform is heading downhill. I'm still an occasional user of the site I'll admit, but i guess Lemmy is my goto these days.
I paid for Reddit gold back in the day, I really enjoyed the ability to selectively gift gold to comments.
When they replaced gold with coins I ended up unsubscribing. The coins felt like they devalued what gold actually was.
I think it's fair that they want to revisit the feature, but shutting off a revenue stream a month after they made such a big deal about charging for API access, it feels to me like they are lacking common direction and priorities within the company...
Maybe they hope that by disabling awards in September there suddenly will be a lot less premium users. Gold and platinum gave a week and a month after all. So there will be a sudden spike in ad revenue just before the planed IPO.
This is brilliant. Instead of advertisers making sponsored posts that are ignored or trying to sneak an ad into a community, they can outright buy engagement. Utilize subliminal advertising, then advertisers buy their own "tips" (or whatever they end up being called) and they get back a portion of the money spent. There's been an uptick in those types of posts lately and reddit's just leaning into market trends. Not to mention that bots can earn real money by reposting top/all time content!
I never knew how any of that stuff worked and never cared... until I made a dumb comment and someone gave me an award for it. Dammit, I was proud. But I still feel sour about the API changes, to the point where I don't care what they do. Maybe drive more people out to other platforms. I'd like to see some of my Fandom communities migrate to other places.
Oh yeah! News sites come out and say a reward system is found in the app code and a day later, they come out and say they are taking away features without really giving a replacement.
Another fantastic decision among all other fantastic decisions… if your goal is to destroy the brand.
I forgot that giving awards gave the recipient premium. I'm gonna have to use my old coin stockpile then... Hopefully on accounts that don't have premium but are active, to hit reddit in the wallet. 🤔
In the coming months, we’ll be sharing more about a new direction for awarding that allows redditors to empower one another and create more meaningful ways to reward high-quality contributions on Reddit.
Guess the datamined stuff about cashing out on karma and awards from others is true then. Makes me honestly glad I jumped off of that shit show. There's just no way that isn't going to backfire hard, if we can even call it that, because I guess it will just be by design.
I still visit a few subs that haven’t really built a solid community here yet, so I’m still on Reddit a good bit.
You can already see a change in the user base and they way people talk in the comments. Reddit has changed a lot over the years but man, it really seems like most of the interesting conversation has left the site; outside of very niche communities.
I use it for the Ukraine videos & reports but sometimes check how /r/all is affected too, but my accounts are poofed now. One thing I noticed is how toxic it is there in the comments. I'm not sure if it is an actual increase in toxicity or just me noticing it more because I'm not so exposed to it anymore, but it really stood out for me.
If anyone has any coins they want to dump, r/GoForGold has reopened for challenges.
If you want to get rid of them quickly, a challenge could be like "first 5 commenters get a platinum", you could award a community award. GoForGold have a 5,000 coin "Golden Bracelet Award" which gives 1,000 coins to mods to give out on behalf of the sub. (10,000 also gives them 1,000 so 5,000 is better value. same for the 40,000 coin award, only giving 4,000 to community). The GoForGold mods have a summer bonanza lined up and i think they'll find a way to make use of all community awarded coins.
If you want to get rid of them efficiently, the timeless beauty award gives the awardee 100 coins to spend and the community.
Giving a gold medal gives the recipient a week of ad-free browsing and giving a platinum gives a month of ad-free browsing.
On the new scheme, A while ago i had Reddit app installed and noted there was an option for a "vault" in the menu bar where you could share stuff with other people, it needed a sign up for something else and i didn't look further into it, but think it could be related.
Since all the 3rd party stuff kicked off, Reddit feels different. Also i noted they kicked up a stink saying that DNDMemes and NCD were both SFW when people joined and its unfair that mods changed it to NSFW. When i signed up i could award people coins and without a replacement scheme out for us to judge it feels a bit hypocritical.
Yep I just got my message from them saying if I don't use them by September, then they will take from me. I still have Reddit as a couple of subs I'm not happy to leave
I was given them by someone who gave me a gold award. I hardly ever bother with them, so do I start giving them out or let them steal them from me?
lol! Just tell me where in fedi you’re making the next app and I’ll be there and actually pay money for this time. Although I’ve tipped and purchased schwag, but I’ll buy the app.
There are some great comments on that thread absolutely ripping the piss out of Reddit. I almost wish I hadn't deleted my account, just so I could upvote them ;-)
I dunno. Part of me thinks they have a plan. I have no idea what, but if the entire boardroom is just going along with all the crazy, it makes me think there's a reason. Maybe there's a thing that happens if reddit just tanks. Or maybe they all just want it to end and just want to watch it burn.
I'm not saying this is the case, it just wouldn't surprise me that in a year or so, something comes out to explain all the batshit decisions.
Remember when people just said "reddit silver" to imply it was Reddit gold but they had no money, and then they made it into a paid thing and everyone stopped saying it. Now there is a bunch of meaningless icons on every front page post and reddit is removing them because??? Lol.
This should shock no one everything they are doing is to create a Facebook clone of sorts where they can easily feed people information and garner their attention in the form of ads. This truly marks the hour in which everyone needs to start looking for and at more open systems. When reddit went public and Tencent bought some of the company the writing was already on the wall.
Banning coins that people paid for, hmm something is fishy and since the announcement they just nuked all my accounts. For ban evasion on main page sub that I never visit. I said F it and I'm here now. I have a nasty feeling that they are going to ban all the porn pre IPO. Some of my accounts were mods on some NSFW subs that weren't too big. Start small and work your way up from there.
They can go the way of Tumblr/Digg/Etc I'm done.
I will be curious if they nuked my accounts at work. I have never cross pollinated between machines (no upvote/comments between work/home). If I do have bans then they might be using AI to look for common misspelling/writing patterns/ect
I hate to be this guy but isn't this a good thing? I mean fuck reddit to death and all that jazz. But getting rid of all those oversaturated awards does not sound like a too bad of a decision to me. At least not to the consumers.
I don’t understand why Reddit would do this, but this definitely feels like most users would appreciate it. I always hated awards and premium. Hiding awards was the best feature in Apollo.
Can someone explain why everyone is attacking Reddit for this awesome, user friendly decision?
I thought you had to buy awards to give out (or included as part of paid or “premium” Reddit). So they are killing a source of income or reducing the feature set?
Lol. Glad my only contribution to that site was shit posts and whatever ad revenue they can squeeze or get past my ad blocker.
This actually makes sense and I predicted this a while back. Having that type of stuff requires a much more complex database setup. It's very inefficient. I'm assuming that's the reason they're getting rid of it.
Reddit is dying, but only in the way twitter and Facebook "died" back around the early 2010's. User count will continue to grow, but the community will lose its identity.