I'm not sure if this is new, but when I clicked on the /r/pics protest post link from the frontpage here, I was redirected to this: https://old.reddit.com/premium
I'm not sure if this is well-known or not that they're pushing it now, but it's the first time I've seen it, especially on old.reddit.
The irony is that I was mentally prepared to have to pay for Premium to keep BaconReader. All they had to do was add an "API access" badge to that screen and none of this would have happened, plus they would have gotten a bunch more new sign-ups. I am at a loss to explain what Steve is thinking, nor why his decisions are better for profitability.
Yeah, I'd gladly pay the sub for Apollo if reddit had decided to charge a modest price for the API and Christian could make a buck off it and reddit could also make a few bucks off me.
Reddit could've probably 5x'd or 10x'd the money they make off me that way, but now they 0x'd it.
Same here. If they'd have just framed it differently and put the onus of paying for api access on the users (at a modest fee), almost none of the backlash would have happened.
Then I'd still be oblivious.
I prefer the world the way it was before all the consolidation. I like the ideals of the fediverse and want it to succeed.
The official app isn't a bad thing because it's buggy and has ads, that sucks but I've used much worse apps that offer less. The amount of ads and how easy they are to click accidentally is ridiculous though
It's bad because it's built to do what Facebook did - it always gives you something to see and a reason to keep going. Have a nice, curated mix of science and shit posts? Let's throw some crap from the front page in there along with the ads! No one responded to your comments? We'll make suggestions look like someone is interacting with you! Haven't used the app in a few hours? Here's some posts delivered in a notification to get you back in there
I left Facebook for Reddit because I realized I didn't really enjoy it and often ended up feeling worse after using, and when the experiments they were doing came out I payed close attention. It was a real slap in the face when I saw Reddit doing similar stuff, and I checked out alternatives like tildes but nothing else was scratching the itch so I put it on the back burner.
For those of us who aren't going back, this wakeup call was a blessing. It's a strong reminder that corporations not only don't care about us, they can't - they might act friendly sometimes, but they wouldn't hesitate to poison the water supply if they thought it would bring greater profits
Thats an interesting point, all that shit just turns me off and makes me disengage. I avoid Facebook for precisely this reason.
I have to interact with LinkedIn for professional reasons, but always do it from a PC and don't install their app. When I get a LinkedIn message, LinkedIn helpfully emails me to let me know it's there, but doesn't tell me what's in it. Then after I check on it, I get another email reminding me that LinkedIn is better on the app. They are constantly trying to get that app on my phone, which makes me wonder exactly what extra data these phone apps send that is worth so much.
It's worse than that, because the official app spams your phone with tracking requests. I know most apps do some tracking, but users with apps that track the trackers have reported as many as 500k requests in 24 hours.
This is not only an invasive breach of privacy from a link aggregator forum, but also straight up murders your battery life.
I just got a brand new Pixel 7a before this nonsense started. I installed the reddit app because Baconreader is like twelve years old and I'd figured I'd see if their official app had gotten any better since I last used it. It hadn't, of course, but I also noticed my brand new phone wasn't holding a charge at all. Like, 20% battery left at 5pm while I'm still at work and barely using it.
Reddit was using over 40% of my battery while fucking IDLE. I brought this up over there and a few other people looked at it. Someone reported it was using 60% of their iPhone's battery in the last week. It's repugnant.
I paid for premium every month for at least 5 years. I would have probably even paid a little more to keep using Apollo. Just pure greed running the ship over there.
Yes. I was paying for reddit gold just to avoid seeing ads. I don't understand why they couldn't just have passed this kind of thing on to the end users.
I mean, if they say "you have to pay 3 bucks a month to use 3rd party client" I would be annoyed but I would understand, and I would still be on reddit.
I would have gladly paid for a premium reddit experience, had it provided useful features. 3rd party app access is something I would have totally understood and paid for. RES features integrated, various styles such as old.reddit enshrined and protected, the option to opt in/out of various features, premium access to mod/admin subs that actually get a response, etc.
Instead they offered awards to give out. No value, no purchase.
Exactly. But they dropped exhorbitant cost on those apps and provided no runway for them to adapt their business model. So instead - I’m here on kbin and likely going to dive into an open source project to try to help get a mobile app for this out soon.
Premium’s been a thing for a long time, it used to be Reddit Gold several years ago. It also used to be cheaper, $3.99/mo but it went up multiple years ago.
They might be pushing it hard right now, though. Not sure. Maybe they’re trying to entice the people who were paying for 3PA features to pay Reddit instead or something.
I currently have premium, ad free is the only way Reddit is palatable even before all this went down and I bought it ages ago when I wanted to support a thing I used every day and also have had a couple awards that extended it, it expires in August. I won’t be renewing.
This would have been such a good idea, quite literally a win/win for both reddit and 3rd party apps however that would require Spez to actually be clever and willing to work with others instead of role playing a dollar store version of Logan Roy.
Yeah, I was an original buyer on reddit gold. Then I got 2 years free because of the Alien Blue shutdown, and I never reupped afterward, because it didn’t really add anything to the experience.
And by the looks of it “avatar upgrades” and “Custom app icons” ain’t really providing anything else of value still.
The other problem with Reddit premium, have multiple accounts because you want to keep something’s separate? Well you have to pay $50 a year for each account.
I was gifted Reddit gold a few times over the years for random comments I made, which gave access to the lounge subreddit. It's mostly nothing but dumb memes roleplaying as gilded age oil tycoons and the like. Definitely not worth paying anything for access to it.
Not much that I could tell, I got gold a couple times and it seemed like people there were just the same except "oh it's exclusive" but the memes werent any better.
Man, I signed up reddit premium in like April because I wanted to support the site that I'd been using for 13 years. Just two months later, I've got so much regret lol
I wonder how many Premium subscriptions they lost over this, and whether it's material to their business at all. If so, it could put Steve in hot water. Between losing ad revenue and losing paying members, he seems to be making awful decisions if his goal is to be profitable.
At what point does Reddit's board step in and make Steve go away? I know he is using Elon Musk as his spirit guide, but it's a poor move to suck all the value out of your company before you sell it to investors....
I tried to look at a reddit link via mobile web browser and it said something really stupid like.. we can't show you this on the web you need to use the app.
Dafuq? Hell no. I guess I'm not looking at it then. Jumped the shark, well and truly.
App icons were a big thing on Apollo.
They were however designed by the users and added to the app as a quirky tribute to the community. The difference was that the users were glad to give their money to the dev, because the app you got for free was perfectly usable and awesome.
100% agree. It’s so fucked that they are stomping out 3P apps. Even with greed and profit as the only motivation, financially it would have made more sense to charge reasonable API fees than die on this hill. I would happily pay for Apollo if it was necessary to keep it running.
I thought they were introducing something new among all this other bullshit but as soon as I saw it I realized that yeah, thats been around awhile.
As a fellow old.reddit user, none of this does me any good. My adblockers are sufficient, half the time I completely forget I have an avatar, and....i have no idea what the rest of that is.
So thanks, but no.
As a fellow old.reddit user, you probably also remember when buying/being gifted reddit gold was a big deal. One stupid little gesture, very few actual perks (beyond an "exclusive" subreddit no one used), but the money went straight to reddit and it was so popular it was a staple of reddit's early culture. Being gilded was a massive honor.
Now it's just one of a handful of paid reaction trophies you can give, and it's not worth paying attention to at all. Reddit was so money hungry it cannibalized the process through which people gave money to reddit for basically free
this just reminded me you could also send a post card to get a month of reddit gold too
I think I got gilded twice.
I barely remember that exclusive sub.
What I hate about those award crap is they basically gave you a paid way to highlight the fuck out of posts with changing the background, making it shoot rockets, or whatever else.
it's so evident that they're going to pump and dump the hell out of reddit, while some unknowledgeable investors are going to be left holding the bag. every move they make is a superficial show with no teeth. they're trashing reddit while dressing it up in designer clothes. it's blaring.
I don't think the street is that dumb in current year. This isn't 1999 where you could scream OMG LINUX and get a few hundred million. The VC purse strings are tight, the brand has been in decline for a decade, and all the political horse-picking won't help them.
Id rather pay for a subscription for a forum site or something. I know echo chambers are dangerous, but sometimes you just need a gated community. Money makes it really easy to keep the lunatics out.
A site you pay for has incentive to keep you on their site for ads and data collection. One way to do that is to keep serving data you engage with. So, keeping you in a bubble.
I will happily pay to keep a free and open service free for everyone. I do not enjoy paying for "exclusivity". I don't want to pay to use a service, I want to donate to support it. Fuck paywalls. Gatekeeping the Internet is not a good idea.
I don't really understand this sentiment, I'd rather pay a subscription for a service like fb / insta / reddit than have ads and my identity sold to the highest bidder.
Social networks are expensive to run, the idea they should be "free" is half the problem.
Though of course the enterprises behind them make far more money through advertising and mining user data than they would through a subscription model.
Delusional to think a paid subscription would keep them from selling your identity to the highest bidder. Even if you sued them on GDPR bases they'd gladly take that loss if you somehow won so they could keep abusing you.
It's just another revenue stream to make people feel better about their poor financial decisions.
The problem is that selling your data + targeted advertising is always going to be more lucrative than a subscription model. So even if you are willing to pay a subscription, it's usually only a matter of time before the social media company in question changes tack. Especially if they have shareholders and/or venture capital investors breathing down their necks.
If you run it like Wikipedia is run, I'm pretty sure you can operate a social media company on subscriptions/donations, but as a business model that doesn't make sense as it is not the least effort way to make the most money.
I have no problem paying an app developer to remove ads.
But I'm not going to pay an organisation that has just hiked it's API prices which means it's now going to be earning a fortune from the likes of Google/Microsoft.
Idk why you are getting down voted so much, the entitlement of the Internet to expect someone to host servers and write code for their entertainment for free is crazy.
Last I checked (when I deleted my Facebook and wanted to have an educated why are you leaving block, granted this was a long time ago) Facebook made roughly $20/year selling my data. I would rather have multiple different models personally. Let me pay you to not have ads and not sell my data, but have free tiers where you let them sell your data and show you ads for the people that refuse to pay for anything. This gives everyone what they want.
I was similarly confused when I saw a screenshot somebody had posted of another post in Jerboa. It was hard to tell where the screenshot ended and the app UI began again.
I think I ought to file a bug report/feature request that a thin border be added around images so they don't take up the whole screen width and you can distinguish them as images better.
Paying an optional subscription fee is a great idea. It helps pay for servers and personal.
Paying to give special rewards is a horrible idea. The wealthiest can now decide which opinion is best. Everyone wants to reply to the rewarded comments to be more visible for upvotes. It's terrible.
Avatars, coins, app icon im not interested at all. No ads isn't necessary as none ever appear on my feed. Literally zero need for premium. But but you have access to r/lounge! <
Wanking gesture>
Reddit gave a shit ton out to mods to give to inflate the appearance people were buying them to give out. And when you'd receive gold, you got coins to give others gold.
It's like a Ponzi scheme but without money...
I never paid a cent for gold, but had it at least 50% of the time on Reddit.
I kind of understand reddits problem with that part though, if they would have allowed third party apps with Premium, or added a "premium lite" API access tier for like $2 I think this would have gone over better
That exclusive avatar gear it probably NFT-based, so it can be traded independently of Reddit. (Alhough if you think navigating the Fediverse is hard, try navigating how to transfer and sell those NFTs on a marketplace).
There are certain subs where they have crypto-based community points, like r/cryptocurrency, based on participation. I have posted there, and have been give some of their token, which is inexplicably worth something.
Reddit's foray into crypto has been interesting to watch, and puts me in the position that if I decide to leave Reddit for good, they have given me a severance package. I will be sure to sell every bit of it before leaving, except for one token , which I will carefully monitor to see what Reddit does with community points from deleted accounts.
They rolled those out when new.reddit became a thing. Before that people with Gold/premium could customise their snoos but they weren't displayed on your profile anyway.
That's not new, they add this a few years ago after changing "gilded" to multi-tier award, which cost spez-buck, which you can get from either buying it like pay2win game or get this premium, and they will give you some spez-buck each month.
What infuriate me more is they didn't have regional pricing, so reddit premium cost more than youtube premium in my country, which provide better content and all of what i subbed is OG content.
I can't find myself paying monthly for internet regurgitator.
Reddit is so much an American business - screw that. But it's not even doing a proper business model - screwing the stupid Yanks and giving a better deal to people who don't feel the need to 'pay more for quality'.
You know, I bought a HP printer which takes HP cartridges which print out (officially) 1500 pages each, and they cost the equivalent of $8 - but only outside the USA... as an answer (I think) to well organised resistance to the 'maybe 300 pages or less' leading to people buying modified ink-tank cartridges locally made (in Thailand).
My last cartridge (not heavily used) lasted for 5 years before being replaced... so HP gets my money with a smile.
I'm just shocked at how bad that offer is, 6 dollars a month just for ad free browsing? Damn. All the other "benefits" seem completely worthless to me.
If Reddit wasn't going downhill I wouldn't mind paying to not see ads - if it helps keep the site running. But 6$/mo is very excessive for what is essentially a forum + link aggregator.
Disney+ for comparison isn't much more expensive and I feel that I get a lot more value out of that, not to mention streaming isn't cheap.
Same although the ads were blocked, apparently a basic feature I use a lot, saving/bookmarking posts, was locked behind premium. That should have been a big red flag lmfao
I was a premium subscriber, simply because I used Reddit a lot, I could financially bear it, and I generally liked how the place was run so I wanted to support them. Now I feel betrayed and my trust is violated, like when your friend borrows money off you and then never pays it back and just laughs in your face for being so naive.
So I went from 'I love Reddit' to 'fuck Reddit' in about a month. Impressive achievement.
I had a premium subscription for years. For as much as I used to use the site, it felt good to give a little back. Now they'll never see another cent from me.
Once upon a time, I thought Reddit had the best, least intrusive way of doing ads, since they are essentially just pinned post and you can upvote/downvote and comment on them like any other posts, so the advertiser had to actually try to make good content like anybody else.
But the advertisers don't want even a remotely level playing field, they just want to throw money at reddit to get eyeball on their product, and reddit obliged, thinking the most valuable about reddit to advertisers is the amount of info they can scrape from your profile to personalize your ads, not realizing the most valuable aspect of ads on reddit IS the human aspect of direct community engagement.
Which is one of the reason why TikTok started off so well, because they FORCED companies to make good content for their ads to be seen and engaged with. But now by having the companies close the comments on their ads they are slowing going down the same path as well.
I was listening to the interview with the dev of Apollo on John Gruber’s podcast and they brought up the idea that if Reddit wanted to monetize 3PA users, then force them to get a premium subscription. If all I needed to do was pay $50/year to surf reddit comfortably, I would probably do it in a heartbeat tbh
That's always the issue with whales right? They don't make your service any better, they just consume it. So you don't get the network effect that comes from having tons of people making your service great, where a lower barrier of entry is important.
The funny thing to me is that when Reddit Gold first became a thing, I happily joined because I wanted to help support the platform and help pay for the servers. They used to have a little meter on the sidebar showing how far we've gone towards paying server costs.
Gone are the days when they had enough good will to get away with something like that.
Could they be any more shameless? I know this has been a thing for a while but god they’re desperate. Granted I haven’t seen this yet since I’m riding Apollo for as long as I can
Their social media ads trying to convince advertisers to pay for Reddit ads have grown exponentially. Our company tried running ads on Reddit but the ROAS was so shit we abandoned after a month and reallocated budget back to decent platforms.
I had a premium account on there for many years, often through being awarded "gold" on posts and the rest of the time through just paying for premium because it was worth it to me to remove the ads (without having to use my ad-blocker) and have the other usability tweaks (as I preferred to reddit on desktop.) I cancelled the recurring payment at the start of this API debacle, because I don't need to be supporting a company which does that.
I'm terribly curious how the money which would be brought in by a user maintaining a premium subscription measures up against the money they'd be making forcing the crappy malware official client on that user and showing them ads.
This is a pretty shit deal tbh. Ooohh ad free browsing and some free pngs you can tack onto your avatar or comments.
It sure is convenient that the second they kill third party apps they push a subscription model for ad free service on their ad riddled, barely functioning app...
I was actually ok with paying them $50 a year for ad-free before they started de-modding people for protesting. Now they can go fuck themselves. I am sympathetic to their need to be profitable. But effectively taking over subreddits is totally unacceptable and Reddit is no longer Reddit.
I'm ashamed to admit I'm a former reddit premium member. I canceled my subscription after being a paying member for a number of years the day Spez started his bullshit. I just can't see myself going back. I just need to find an instance for my country that's actually active.
I was a premium member a while ago because I love reddit and wanted to support it + get rid of adds on the mobile app (I use their app) but I cancelled it during the last blackout (I think it was the 2021 one about hate speech).
I loved Reddit, and I still love Reddit. I love so many little communities. And although I am persuaded that the fediverse is the future, I would go back in a heartbeat if it managed to regrow a soul. I happily paid for premium back in the day.
Haha.
This is where the Fediverse can take over if people don't take the piss.
Some years ago, my favourite tracker (The Box) went kaput - and I've known many others go down due to various issues - one of which is usually financial strains.
So people can donate - for someone earning 300 a week, it'd be trivial to throw 30 in the pot just one time in a year...
So sure, To be valued by Reddit, you must pay $50 per year - and if you don't, then you're not a customer, you're a commodity. Creators do so because they feel compelled to create and share, Mods do so because they have a personal need to contribute whether they get paid or not.
So the ONLY answer is to say 'Sure, we'll carry on - but it's clear we aren't valued by Reddit - so we'll do it outside'.
Mods don't contribute financially to Reddit, or at least they don't have to. (I'd be less likely to trust a mod who did, actually, but that's me.) Mods are used and abused by Reddit. They provide value/work for which they are not compensated.
You've paid rent to every employer you've ever had in the form of surplus value. Surplus value is just the name for the difference between what your paid, and the actual value of your work.
Businesses call it "profit".
Every capitalist ever is trying to increase surplus value, both by increasing the value of your output, and also by paying you less. In the ideal form, you work for free making them, I don't know, solid gold diamonds or something.
can anybody please tell me why lemmy wont be regulated or commercialized like reddit in the future? which safety rules are installed in the lemmy ecosystem to guarante freedom and democratic rule changes?
Let's imagine you sign up for email service with GMail. You're happy for a while, but then Google announces that they'll be charging per email, or blocking emails sent to France, or displaying all your emails on a ticker in Times Square. You can just up sticks and move to another provider, because while Google owns GMail but they don't own e-mail in general.
Anyone can set up an email server and they don't need to ask Google's permission to do so and even with a home-spun email server you can send and receive message between [email protected] and [email protected] no issue. It probably never occurred to you that email between domains would ever be a problem.
This is because email - like Lemmy, Mastodon, PeerTube, BitTorrent and Matrix - is federated: no-one owns the network, because there is literally no network to own, it's just lots of servers that work on established standards. As long as your server, or the server you use, works to the established standards, it'll keep on working.
Good points, but we must not relax under the comfortable blanket of "standards", because the Big Boys™ are busily unraveling them.
A prime example is Google's "Chrome" browser, that's weaponized 'web-standards' in the most anti-competitive manner possible. Worse is their bullying of "web standards bodies". This is specifically aimed at neutering Mozilla and independent browser-extension developers who throw up obstacles to their dominance.
Google wants to eliminate the possibility of users avoiding their data-vacuuming, ad-
spamming and universal tracking. That's what's behind their endless propaganda
about 'speeding up your web experience'.
Once they "succeed", all 'unapproved' extensions, 'users' and browsers will just be "unable to connect" with what used to be the greatest communication and data-sharing system in human history.
Concerned users should become familiar with the politics of "international standards bodies" that affect our ability to use the internet.
I think the thing to stop this happening is for the user to own the identity they use on Lemmy - so if you do not like what gas happened on the instance you signed up on, you can easily move to another instance or social media.
Lemmy is open source. Lots of people run instances, so there are a lot of choices.
That is why I am supportive of something like self-soverign I'd
It probably will, but there could be a good few years where it's growing and can get investment as it grows it's user base because it's good. The push for profit will turn into advertising trash eventually.
I was using qx.reddit.com - who runs old and qx? are they different? How do they monitize? Tell me about this please. I thought they were reddit but easier for the plain.
This, they could have just said API access now requires premium. I'm sure some people would have been pissed, but not nearly as much as the current situation.
If it was just "Pay $50 per year and continue to use and enjoy any 3PA of your choice", I might have paid rather than jumping ship.
Agreed. RiF was my world. I literally took the news re: API changes worse than when my girlfriend broke up with me (shortly before). My stages of grief have centered more around reddit than her, lol.
Now Reddit have shown they are toxic. And I no longer wish to add value to their platform.
I miss some subs, but honestly this place is FUN. It's so old school! And it's great to see the activity increase daily.
If they'd handled it better, I'd definitely have considered it. Reddit has added a lot of value to my life. But now, after spez has personally insulted the 3pa devs and called the discussion "noise"? Now, you couldn't pay me $500 to make spez even $1 richer.
@millions sounds like it. lol here's the shovel spez. lol keep digging buddy. not that reddit was especially great sometimes. but fuck me running I want slap the living shit out of both you motherfuckers. 10million or something socially inept assholes having a god dam meltdown because of a fucking app, get the fuck over yourselves, book a hotel room get shitfaced and stoned into next centery then go at it like a fucking rabbit. playing dumb, dumber, then car wreck with trucks and dick fucking over inocent users? thats the defination of immature ass fart.
No, old Reddit is still working for me. Might be something r/pics came up with as a protest move. Right now they've reopened but are only approving posts of sexy John Oliver.