Reddit enrages users again by ditching thank-you coins and awards

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 1096 points –
Reddit enrages users again by ditching thank-you coins and awards
businessinsider.com

Reddit enrages users again by ditching thank-you coins and awards::Reddit, which is still dealing with the fallout from its last controversial decision, said it plans to phase out coins and awards.

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Amazing. Really does sound like they’re trying to sabotage the site now.

I was thinking about it; Lemmy could technically implement a system of gold on its own e.g can give one award a month after hitting a certain karma level or something to siphon more Reddit users.

But a lot of people on this site seem to not want normie Reddit users flocking here and my personal expectation is that people here would not care for awards. So whether they flock here or not will likely depend on how fed up they get.

Feels like Elon bought Reddit and we just haven't heard about it yet

I prefer to think that it's all coordinated by real life Bond villain (and Musk's old business partner) Peter Thiel. He failed at setting up competing Twitter platforms, so he got Musk to buy and tank it. After seeing how effective that was they roped in reddit's owners to undermine that as well.

Let's not forget the Saudi royal family. They really hate social media.

Definitely not. Here's the breakdown of the $44 bn purchase:

  • $5 bn from other investors, including a Saudi prince
  • $26 bn from Elon, underwritten by stocks in Tesla (which significantly dropped in value after the purchase)
  • $13 bn in a loan that Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk's behalf.

Twitter could hardly pay the interest on that $13 bn, even before Musk tanked the company's revenue. Either Twitter steps into line and gets more investment from right wing control freaks, or it dies - both could be seen as a win in the eyes of Peter Thiel or the Saudis.

don't you mean billion?

I did, thought I'd edited out all the "mil"s hah. Thanks, fixed now.

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I have no problem with Redditors flocking over here, but I just don't think online discussions should be "awarded". It just distracts from actual discussion and turns everything into a popularity contest. Leave the karma and point hoarding on Reddit IMHO.

I admit I like upvotes. They provide feedback on whether a comment was helpful. And awards highlighted the most helpful comments.

Did you mean awards? I haven’t found anyone who doesn’t like upvotes so I’m not sure why the distinction

The point I tried to make was: Awards are like an upvote on steroids. I like upvotes, so I like awards.

Sorry for wording it so badly.

I dunno, I thought your wording perfectly described Reddit comment experience 🤷🏻‍♀️

With how Lemmy works, it might be a little complicated. Especially since the payment information would need to be federated, and there would be a lot of complications depending on the region the server was hosted in.

Yeah. Giving awards would probably be limited to comments/posts that are on the same instance as your user.

Honestly I wouldn't want anything baked into the protocol, but I can see people donating small amounts to the instance hosting a worthy comment if there was a simple enough way to do it.

Cryptocurrencies were supposed to enable that, but I think we are still a long way away (no, lighting does not qualify).

Given the work by the guys behind podcasting 2.0 it would be interesting to see the fediverae adopt boosts backed by sats / the lightning network. It seems like they solve a lot of the same problems. You need a common currency people can freely transfer in small amounts to support content they like and the infra they are hosted on.

Here is an article by one of my favorite podcasts that have gone all in on boosts.

I think it would be a great system to easily donate to instance hosts if it was supported as an instance opt-in feature.

That was the original premise of reddit gold. You bought it to support the server costs. It used to even show you how much server time your gold had supported. I think at one point it even had a progress bar for monthly costs.

A lot of Reddit users have become more toxic over the years. Let them sink down with the Reddit failboat, we don’t need them here.

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