Reddit Tries to Get Users to Pay by Making App Icon Ugly

This is getting so stupid, it’s beginning to sound like The Onion. Why don’t they just start charging for reading posts.

Here’s an idea: Every day you get 5 Reddit Emeralds for free, and you can use them to read 5 posts. If you want to read more, you can get more emeralds from Common Reddit Loot Boxes. You can buy those boxes with Reddit Rubies.

You can get Reddit rubies from Rare Reddit Loot Boxes, and in order to get those, you have to use Reddit Diamonds. If you have 19 Common boxes you can also craft 1 Rare Loot Box. Doing so will also require 10 rubies.

You can also buy Reddit Diamonds with Superior Crypto-Augmented Money (SCAM), and getting those coins requires real world money.

Ok, so now that you have all these gems, you can put them to good use. Emeralds are used to read posts. When you comment, there’s a 50% chance that it will be deleted within 30 minutes, but you can improve your odds by spending 1 Reddit Ruby. For each Ruby, the odds improve by 10%. Posts have the same mechanism, but you need to spend Diamonds instead.

/u/spez is violently taking notes.
Be careful or you might get a job offer from reddit
- Or EA.
Write that down! Write that down!
Dear God they'll have this implemented within a week. Why did you do this?
- Some men want to watch the world burn and use the resulting embers to make some popcorn. 🍿
Twitter only lets you read so many tweets without paying, so this is entirely possible
- OMG it happened again. Just say the stupidest thing you can think of, and you’ll find out that thing was already made reality some time ago.
Too plausible!
Why don’t they just start charging for reading posts.

They're already discussing this, believe it or not. I saw an announcement about it a few weeks ago.
- Going crazy with that scenario wasn’t enough since reality has already caught up with it. Need to up my game…
Got half way through your post and started to feel sick. Not because it's ridiculous, but because it sounds like actual other apps and this is our reality now.
- Sorry about that. That’s what tends to happen with literary naturalism, a style I find my self gravitating towards every now and then.
The onion wasn't wrong. He is ahead of it's time.
The onion wasn't wrong. He is ahead of it's time.

I wonder whether the average person is really as retarded as they are made out to be by large corporations.

Obviously yes. Reddit could change the app icon to a swastika and hide the real icon behind a $50 paywall and people would still use the app because of convenience.
- Don’t steal Elons ideas!
- "Don't want your friends to think you are a nazi? Simple, just pay us 1 bitcoin... every month"
- What? Redditors would pay MORE to change their icon to a swastika. Change the icon back, and charge $50 for a hate symbol and you got yourself a steady income, baby!
just look at election-results around the globe and how easily a lot of people are fooled by populists...
Remember a scary thing about average IQ: half of the people have IQ below that number, hence “average”.
- That's not really how averages work, that's the median, but I get your point. In order for that to be average there have to be scores lower.

VC money very likely dried up and the IPO was the opportunity to raise more funding. all they needed to do was put ads in 3rd party apps and they take a cut of revenue…

I honestly thought that after all these things they would spring back but I honestly now feel like they’re going to go the way of Digg

Or just require an account to have reddit premium in order to use the API.
- I mean I honestly don’t understand. I’m just going to assume that they aren’t actually retarded and want the best for the company, but this sounds like one person over there is making the decisions and everyone else is terrified of calling out the bad ideas. How else does a company just implode like this? I’ve worked in creative tech environments with super dominating bosses that was scary to even ask a question let alone call them out. So sad.
  
  I was a daily (hours) Reddit user for the past 15 years and I quit…completely. I have not gone back. The hour Apollo shut down I was done. I said I would leave and I keep my word. Been here ever since. It’s taken some time but this is filling my Reddit need.
  
  Only problem is looking up tips on video games always links to a Reddit discussion and I just refuse. Fuck u/spez
Well you see, finding a way to reliably deliver ads via the API would have taken far too much developer brainpower for a company that can't make a functional video player or a mobile app that doesn't annihilate battery with ridiculously excessive cpu use and keepalive requests...
- Well you see, finding a way to reliably deliver ads via the API would have taken far too much developer brainpower for a company that can't make a functional video player or a mobile app
  
  It honestly wouldn't be that hard at all. You deliver ads via the API alongside actual posts, as if they are an actual post, and forbid altering them in the developer ToS. If you want to be anal about enforcement, run popular 3rd-party apps in an emulator to verify that the JSON returned by the site is unaltered when it's rendered in the app. You could put this together in a weekend.
  
  Which really just speaks to quality of talent at reddit, or the management at reddit suppressing that talent. Or both.
- a mobile app that doesn't annihilate battery with ridiculously excessive cpu use and keepalive requests
  
  Speaking of which, how on Earth it's such a slug these days? I pretty much quit Reddit when the protest started and moved to Lemmy. I never used any other Android app since I was reasonably happy with the official app. However, when I launched it to check how my old subs fared, I was quite surprised at how slow, laggy and bloated POS it had come.
  
  I honestly don't remember it being this crappy just a few weeks ago.
There is still the free option of revanced, that patched the original reddit app so that you don't have any adds... You can also change the icon of you want.
They had a golden goose and rather than let it continue laying golden eggs, they cooked it for dinner.

I also hate the inclusion of the u/spez freakout about employees not wearing reddit colours in public for fear of physical harm. It is a full-on propaganda tactic, in the vein of Elon Musk or Trump's bullshit. It immediately puts shade on the userbase. These "journalists" should get their shit together and either write about how ridiculously stupid he was to say that or just not present it at all, it's barely relevant to the article. For anyone who has actually been following along, the way the article presents that tidbit is inane and completely false at best.

Cultish.

There's this super frustrating trend where instead of making the paid version of things better, they just make the free version worse. Like how you used to be able to do background play on the YouTube app. It's like they know these features are good so implement them to attract people to use their service, and then later take it away to force the subscription.

Oh it was so much worse than that. Google indirectly banned every 3rd party app on the Play Store from streaming videos in the background to push that feature. Seemingly overnight every app that could do it vanished or cut the feature. Sure you can sideload a fix but your average non-savvy users got screwed into paying up.
- Firefox can with a "Recommended" addon
I'm glad they do that, it makes people switch to open source alternatives, like NewPipe for YouTube.

They simply have better features and privacy.
- YMusic ftw. if you want to listen to music in background, it's the better alternative compared with newpipe. newpipe is the best for videos..but YMusic for music.
The problem with (almost) all social media platforms is they need a LOT of users. Because each individual users brings in such a small amount of revenue.

So these companies (running on investor money) go through a deliberate early “growth” stage, where their singular goal is to get as many users as possible. They usually do this by…actually making something people want to use. Plus some addictive tricks thrown in to keep people “engaged”.

Once they have their 100 million users, or whatever number they’re targeting, then the processor of turning it to shit begins. Because now they have the users they need to extract revenue from them. The problem is that growth stage often kills off competitors as well. So now you have a near monopoly tightening the screws on users, who have to just accept it because the cost of moving to an alternative is too high.

But eventually it hits a breaking point. Users jump to something new, and the cycle repeats. The users who stick around with a shit product are the ones who ultimately pay the debts that early users got to enjoy.
This is why so many apps and services have problems monetizing their stuff when they start out as free and/or ad supported as a means to pump the usage numbers fast for that juicy investor funding and sky high stock valuations.

Free/ad supported is essentially the "bottom" of race to the bottom when it comes to how to make money on a product or service. And it is hard to climb the ladder of convincing people to pay for something when the core product that provides most of the value has always been free. You can't exactly just paywall the core product or people will likely feel ripped off and leave. So that leaves increasingly sketchy "value added" options.
It takes innovation and creativity to make the paid version better. It takes nothing but greed to make the free version worse.

This title is exceedingly misleading. This icon is not “ugly” and is an obvious marketing stunt to bring awareness to the return of r/place. Wether or not you think r/place should come back is irrelevant to this discussion. Reddit didn’t “make the icon ugly” so people would pay to fix it.

Two things can be true at the same time.
The fact that there really is an icon named “Original” that is locked away does not help. The old icon simple isn’t there at the moment as far as I could see.
So even if they changed the icon for /r/places the fact that you won’t even see the old icon in the selection and that it’s nowhere mentioned that that is the reason for the (temporary) change will properly lead enough just buy premium. Hopefully users that forget to cancel once the normal icon is back.

Do iOS users not have free icon packs? I'm so confused by this...

You can’t change icons from the system/launcher settings. Individual apps can offer icon options, but they are internal to the app.
- What a scam...
Sort of, you can use the Shortcuts app to make a custom launcher and use any icon you want. It’s not very intuitive for the average user.
Maybe it's just a Nova thing but any image can be an icon, you dont have to change everything.
I found an article from 2020 that said it wasn't possible to use custom icons on an iPhone. Idk if that's changed, since I don't have an iPhone. I know customization is not something they are known for.
- It's more of a workaround: you need to make a shortcut (which you can set a custom icon to) to launch the app of your choice. This is still possible.

I‘m just glad seeing this place more and more active. Old stupid Reddit, you’ve made the Digg-move.

Reddit can go fuck themselves. I’ve been gone since Apollo stopped working. Have never & will never go back.

Sometimes I'll check Joey. Once, it actually worked for like 2 seconds then I refreshed the page by accident and it was down again. I did this like 3 days ago? Otherwise I'm here.
- I got a notification for new comments in saved threads today, in Joey, couldn't actually check them but somehow that got through.

Anyone paying for reddit premium has to just be the biggest sucker. Then again I don't understand anyone paying for a similar privilege on twitch either. Batshit insanity.

I pay for twitch turbo because I watch twitch for hours upon hours and keeping up with the latest ad block for twitch is more effort than it's worth to me. Especially when on devices where ad block is more challenging.
- I read this and was like that is a good idea, I watch an okay amount of Twitch and the adblock arms race is getting exhausting. I look it up, $12 a month???
Ah it’s a tight race with the Twitter blue check mark

Just more subscription hell. It's ridiculous anymore. I'll need a subscription to flush my toilet at some point. I mean how much of this are consumers willing to put up with. Anyway Reddit is well on the path of monetizing themselves to irrelevance.

I’ll need a subscription to flush my toilet at some point.

It's called a water bill. You pay it monthly, even if you don't use any water!
- Idk, I pay for my utilities based on usage, and there are fees too. The fees maybe could be argued are subscriptions, but they're not the majority of the bill
- I'm sure you get my point. Yes you have to pay the water bill to flush the toilet. There's lots of other "subscriptions" for utilities like power, garbage collection, sewer. We call those bills not subscriptions and they've been around as long as modern society. I think we can take those for granted. Not in the same league as the subscription hell we're seeing for online services these days.
- I'm from NL... Would be better if there was a subscription to use toilets instead of paying 50c or more every time. Always have to carry coins around just incase you need to pee. Super annoying.
anymore

That's not how that word works.

Edit: I didn't say I I've never seen it used that way, i just find that particular use of it to be wrong.
- The positive sense usage of anymore is a regional thing: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anymore
- I understood perfectly and I bet a lot of others did too. I bet you understood it. So, mostly or completely successful use of the word to inject the desired thoughts into others' heads. So, the word works that way, even if it sounds awkward to you.
- It's colloquial to the USA, it's an expression. My grammar is usually good except when I bastardize it to make a point like, "I aint gonna take that crap" or "grammar corrections are getting ridiculous anymore." In the USA you'd have to live under a rock to have never heard that expression.
- Leave that grammar nazi shit on reddit.
I mean you technically already do pay a subscription to flush your toilet by paying a water bill, just you get a lot more benefits
- It’s more of an a la carte situation but ya

£5.99 a month...

i cant believe people actually pay that for what is essentially a forum.

it'd probably be decades before they made that off me in advertising.

They could have had my money too if what they were asking were reasonable and i retained the ability to use RIF

Yeah if they made it so that you had to pay $5 per month or moderate a sub with >10k subscribers to keep using third party apps, none of this would happened and they would have been able to make more money off of it.
- $5 a month is still a lot imo. i'd do $12 a year ($1 a month billed annually or 6 monthly) which is still an order of magnitude larger than the amount they would get from advertising for me
RIF is still working (not using it but i have friends that showed it to me) i dont know why
- Boost still have access when I left. I read that it actually takes a while for the API changes to be implemented.
- Intermittently working for me, cannot log in though

I was expecting this was just OP making a dumb joke.

The fuck.

Well. That's a joke. The current icon is ugly but it's for the /r/Place event.
- still it's weird that they put the original logo behind a paywall
I know the feeling. Spent years on that app and it really hurts to watch it completely implode within two months.

Ok so this is just desperate right? Like chasing 3rd party devs off could theoretically force more people to use their app, the reddit gold thing could be them paving the way to put in something more abusive. But this? Hoping to annoy your users to the point that they'll pay you a ransom to make you stop? How is this anything other than embarrassingly desperate?

I agree, it seems like they're doing everything they can to force users into the mindset of "you're going to have to spend money here."

However... I don't think that's going to work. It's a tactic that relies solely on Apple not allowing the user to customize their icons, which combines into a double whammy of "give me money to fix the thing that I broke."

Why do I have to pay when Android users don't?

Why is Reddit being greedy?

This other site is free and doesn't make me feel like I'm being taken advantage of every turn.

Reddit is trying to capitalize on goodwill they already spent months ago. And the quality of the site is just going to get worse from here.

imagine paying for an app icon... what next ? paying for a ringtone like in the good old days?

Zedge comes to mind. A site for buying ringtones (among other things like notification tones and wallpapers) or at least barred you from downloading the "premium" ones without subscription.
- Oh my fucking god, memories of that scam service "Jamba" flooding back. It was like two years in a row of Crazy Frog ads for it.
- I don't understand how Zedge still exists, and is apparently doing relatively well too
Reverse it. Make it play an annoying sound without paying, only changeable with premium. Late stage capitalism in its finest.

Spez has already made it very clear that he has went full Elon and will stop at nothing to make the company profitable. I expect much worse from Reddit in the future.

Imagine spending money on reddit premium

Especially considering they're removing all coins and awards. So you're literally paying $60 only to make your home screen icon a little more pretty
- And not view ads right?

Spez is a fucking clown... I hope reddit dies soon.

“Dylanthedeveloper” on here apparently. He was spamming all over the other day about some drivel or another.

Yes! I definitely used to go to Reddit for their amazing icons! /s

Interestingly this may piss off more people than the real issues. Most people didn't seem to care at all about the API / 3rd party app support issues as long as they got their Reddit doom-scroll fix. But I bet whole bunch of these will be upset at having an ugly pixelated icon on their phone, muhawhaw.

what are you guys talking about? an r place themed icon wasn't put there to get people to pay money? it was put there because there is gonna be a new r place. this isn't some evil plan conjured up the criminal mastermind u/SPEZ that you just uncovered.

Yea, I was reading the comments here and people really think anyone gives a flying fuck about how ugly the app icon is? It's clearly for r place. Still, fuck Reddit for doing r place just to gather traffic again, but this article is just silly.

I can't believe they push third-party devs away and then try to make Reddit as unappealing as possible! Like, I used their stupid app and I CAN'T HANDLE how much that stupid app LAGS!! If they want people to pay, they better be a damn good app. Like, this is just evil at this point!

I'm just saying, but Reddit is just becoming a money grab. I appreciated third-party devs because they made Reddit more enjoyable. My favorite app to use Reddit on is no longer effective due to Reddit's changes. That's why I'm on Lemmy now :/

Insane that on iOS you can't just change the icons to whatever you want

You sort of can.

That is genuinely funny.

While we all hate reddit, them changing the app icon to make a reference to what used to be a fun event shouldn't be our main point.

Holy fucking shit, spez is really pulling out all the stops isn't he? Fuck that guy.

Wow. That’s just crazy.

They might get a few gullible suckers to pay up.

I would never pay for changing an ugly icon.

This won't work on android because changing icon is trivial lmao

Assuming people know how to do that, this is preying on those who don't.

It reminds me of all the nagging and lying that MS does, telling people who download other browsers that Edge is better for example. Almost everyone here with a bit of technical knowledge knows that is ridiculous. Now Edge already has 5% market share, more than Firefox though.

Anyone brain dead enough to continue using that awful app is probably brain dead enough to pay for an icon.

What's crazy is that there are hundreds of 5 star reviews for it on the Play store. People have no standards and obviously don't understand that you can pick a number of stars in-between 1 and 5.
- I think it was already confirmed that reddit paid for five star reviews a couple of weeks back.

Ahh the Free To Play playbook. Have to pay to not be frustrated. Ironically what Apple ushered in

They ushered it by providing the AppStore or is there something more direct?
- They welcomed constant payments, especially the exploitative ones. They loved their cut
  
  They could have restricted the amount you'd buy at once instead of absurd things like $99 options or games that blocked you from playing after every 20 minutes unless you coughed up more dough.
  
  They loved it and couldn't get enough.
  
  It just encouraged developers to track $/user or % paying users and other shitty metrics that if they were not hit they purposely made their game worse to frustrate users

This was honestly the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I used to check reddit every now and then, but after this I just couldn't justify it to myself to use it. I used to post a lot of stuff, and I modded a relatively small community, but it just feels wrong to use it.

My man, your camel has a strong back
- I don't like change that much, so I can tolerate a lot of stuff before changing.

Joke's on them I like retro logos

Lmfao burn that shit to the ground.

haha jokes on them, I never used the app, I just used the web view which also blows.

oh my god my bet with a friend that reddit will die within 5 years is going SO WELL! i never thought they would go this fast though

lol the implosion continues

Quick question... Using the jerboa app, if I click a link... What happens if I accept cookies?

With RIF I knew they wouldn't be saved.

What's the situation for me now?

I don't know but what I do know is without sending cookies, the server won't know it's you. If you login to reddit on the app, cookies are saved so you can login again the next time you load the app.
- They probably meant the in-app browser for browsing external links from Reddit.

Stable geniuses.

They should just buy the icons from Apollo if this is all their designers can muster up 😬

Glad I used a 3rd party app since March 2021

are you trying to show off that you are some kind of third party app veteran?

I saw this way before Reddit went batshit. I had the pride doge one, it was one of a couple of free ones.

Yes, Reddit is a shit show. But this isn't a new thing they've just done. So I don't know why it's being brought up as ammo now. It's been around for ages. Reddit are assholes, but bringing old stuff into this as if it's brand new, not cool.

Wasn't the original icon free though? Now you only get the pixelated one.
- Yeah that's the main thing, the original icon is now paywalled, with the idea being you get this crap looking one until you pay
This is new because they removed the regular free icon and replaced it with an ugly pixelated one.

They should pull a Howie, and do a prolapse icon.

Why would this matter to anyone? You can change any icon you want on your phone with a management app. I use 3K SR Black for mine.

On iPhone? I doubt it, I'm pretty sure that only applies to Android
- I’ve changed icons with shortcuts on iPhone, and it works pretty well. I can’t tell the difference.

Oh I love that every lemmy post is about reddit it's so new and cool to be part of this (NOT)

I would probably pay tbh. I hate my home screen looking bad. I'm on Android and use custom icons, but if I had no other options I'd pay for it.

that's the whole point of what they're doing, to get people like you that aren't bothered, to pay for something that could be easily fixed. they created the problem on purpose...
That must be great to have so much money to spend it on things so futile and unnecessary 🤔
- Necessary is a matter of perspective.
$50 per year to change an icon.
- It's not about the money. It's the stench of the thing.
So, 6 dollars a month just to unlock the original icon?

There's no way you can be serious about that one. What else does reddit premium offer? No ads and an icon? How can anyone justify the price for that. At least with youtube premium you get a music service as well as no ads.
- I am serious.
What you just described is called ransom.
- that doesn’t sound so bad
You are, what they call in the field, a "sucker".
- I'm just someone who will pay for something to look good. If that makes me a sucker then I guess I have too much money.
It's a subscription, you're telling me you're willing to keep paying just for the icon? And not a cheap one for what it's worth either.
- That is what I'm telling you.