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?
Reddit’s incompetence is so mind-blowing it’s unreal. Even a crackhead can manage Reddit better than spez
You mean Musk? Because it seems that whatever insanity that Musk does, Spez wants to copy verbatim
All that needs to happen now is for meta to launch a reddit clone that steals away all of reddit's users
Maybe Elron can buy reddit and finish destroying it
Wouldn’t surprise me if he did buy reddit
If that's the case, maybe reddit thinks if they do the same things Musk is doing to Twitter, it will appeas the Musk and he will want to buy reddit. I mean soon it will have everything that Twitter has: more bots than actual users, more ads, more pointless shit to make crypto boys wet, and fewer eyes on the page due to required signups and logins.
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.
Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
Ad revenue down 70%, who wouldn't want to emulate that!
Fucking wat
Spez been sniffing gas straight from the pump or wat?
Please, the Speztic has been fighting to cram his rectum docking nose deeper into the Elongated Muskrat's anus every chance he's gotten. He's the epitome of every single one of Elon's cucked, arse barnacle followers, the only difference is he also had a world class platform to burn to the ground in retarded mimicry of his waste of a good wankstain idol.
The logic is to destabilise public forums ahead of upcoming elections, so the wealthy can consolidate more power.
I hate that this take seems like the conspiracy take but also is totally plausible. Just look to the example of the Arab spring and how instrumental social media was for organizing. By fragmenting all social media it’s a lot less likely you see a massive resistance if shit goes sideways.
We just don't have as much firsthand information about Splez because he doesn't try to make himself the center of attention on his platform and the news.
It's just Huffman, an Elon simp, deciding he wants IPO money and that the best way to make it is to blindly follow whatever Twitter does. Because, you know, Twitter's so hot and profitable right now.
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.
Thanks for putting my thoughts into easily digestible words. Enshittification isn't natural, it's deliberate. Any CEO 's who throw up their hands and say they're all of ideas are just trying to pull the rip cords of their golden parachutes, given to them by people who want us to believe it's unavoidable.
Was not breaking something that hard? No, but it doesn't pay as well.
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.
Any proof you can offer on this, except for your hunch?
It fits with existing patterns depressingly well. The issue is, it's generally very subtle.
E.g. Murdoch once even admitted on camera what he does. He "suggests" what he thinks should happen to politicians. Those that either agree, or follow his "advice" start getting negative stories about them dropped from his papers etc. Conversely, those that disagree get their positive stories dropped more. Once a few politicians have had their careers ended by it, most of the rest fall into line, it's only minor favours. Until it's not; and all the previous favours suddenly risk looking very bad in the press...
No laws broken, no overt threats given, but the more it happens the stronger it becomes. It eventually helped cripple BBC news, in the UK, among many other problems.
Reddits behaviour fits this pattern too well. Something has been offered in the background. Initially, it was for small favours, but it's now reached a tipping point. I suspect they are hoping that they can fire sale the whole user driven system (everything must go [at once]). People fatigue on the constant news, and there's nowhere new to flow and reorganize.
I doubt doubt it, but damn it makes sense
Hard to prove that type of stuff. It could just be incompetent leadership but it's starting to feel like it's something more given how many back to back missteps they've had recently.
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.
Whichever ends up being true Musk and Huffman are raging malignant narcissists regardless.
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.
To prevent score manipulation, voting is now a premium feature.
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?
They probably blew all of the money on Spez's pay and NFTs.
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.
Paying content creators, but not mods? That’s hilarious
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.
they'll be like hey look so hyperlinks don't work anymore
How much until all the links open on an internal browser like in LinkedIn?
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?
I bet they just don't like seeing all the awards go to fuck u/Spez posts.
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.
TBH, I don't think they care. It is monetization and engagement of their microtransactions...as smug as they may be, I think it's all about $
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!
thanks for posting here. I have no idea who the venkman01 is but the way they worded that post is borderline cringe
Yeah, "sunsetting" is such trash corporate speak.
Corpo scum are allergic to saying exactly what they mean, so they insist on hiding their intent behind flowery words that sound "good" to them. I guess they think that if they use weasel words, it'll soften the blow when they decide to strip out features and further destroy their platforms.
It’s not an allergy, it’s hiding punches. It’s concealing the fact that they’re fucking you in the ass by telling you it’s just a penis-based prostate exam, and that you’re the one being weird. It’s gaslighting.
It’s one of the things I hate most in our capitalist dystopia.
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.
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.
Keep bringing it up. It’s clear that Spez was annoyed and offended by Apollo and we shouldn’t let him drop the topic.
Apollo automatically refunded everyone for the money they had spent for a full year. Reddit isn't doing anything at all. It says a lot.
Not disagreeing but I hated the stupid awards. It was one the things I hated most about the official app.
Reddit has recently become allergic to taking Ws as well.
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.
I thought it was hilarious and made the community feel fun and alive, which Reddit hasn’t felt like for a long time.
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.
Although they're just taking an existing feature away here. Not sure how that'll create more money.
I feel like I'm standing on the shores of sanity while I watch Reddit sail off into the sunset.
Except the whole ship is on fire and everyone is fighting each other.
some of us exited, and are observing the madness while sitting comfy at lemmy. when the api stuff started, i was really stressed out about not having a place to call home. and now that i do, i need to buy more popcorn.
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
Oh definitely. Killing third party apps means everyone using Reddit gets served ads now, so they're going hard on that.
They though, "hey, we don't make money off these users anyways" and disconnected us. Not realizing many of us were mods, content creators, and active users. You know, the reason people go to Reddit.
I'm more than happy here and learning Mastodon.
They knew. They did some back-of-the-envelope math and concluded that they'd be fine. The IPO is the only thing that matters to them. They'll burn the site down getting there and then fuck off with their big payday.
You can patch a few third party Reddit apps with revanced. If that tickles your pickle.
It won't matter soon. The apps are now abandonware.
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.
Not an advertiser but they generally know % of views ("impressions") to clicks (called click through rate) and percentage of clicks that turn into sales (called conversion rate).
For that reason, I don't think they're trying to get rid of human users completely, just the "troublemakers".
I think they want to lead the "silent majority" users into a bot advertorial content hellscape where they control all the levers of power and everything is for sale.
Thank you, I think you're right. Interesting you mentioned click thru rate though, because another commenting advertiser here on Lemmy noticing weird shit with Reddit lately brought that up, saying his click through rate was good but then when he looked into there were many immediate abandons, and someone else explained that's because people were getting tricked by the ads that look like posts and immediately backing out once clicked.
I'd be happy to find the comment for you but I have no idea how to find shit here yet, lol. I'll look; if I find it I'll edit this comment with a link.
Ever clicked on a link and noticed that the URL ended in something like ?campaign=twitter or something? Advertisers regularly track which advertising campaign got a user to click on a link, and they'll also track what proportion of those users eventually lead to a sale. If Reddit eventually has no users and just bots, advertisers will quickly notice that ad spending on Reddit isn't producing profit and kill it.
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.
That 3P hits too hard haha
Very true. It seems like a solid plan to flush the current users and replace with more gullible ones.
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.
Dont worry... They are replacing this with almost direct monetary contributions.
There was a leak about how contributors will be able to earn money from updoots.
Lol. This venkman guy claims credit for creating the awards when it was reddit users who started the semi-ironic (and free) Reddit Gold shit.
but taking credit for others' work is how executives get ahead in the modern corporate hellscape! how else are they supposed to get promoted? working?!
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?
They want to allow you to monetize your karma. Gotta first start by removing the current currency people are used to.
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.
Thats my guess at least.
Probably, but that is a horrible business plan for Reddit. The awards system ended up being a great idea for Reddit to gain revenue; a mega upvote.
Honestly I don't think they care. I think they are only concerned about the immediate sale.
Each fiscal quarter, companies want to make more and more profit. If they aren't making more profit, they see it as a failure.
Eventually, a point is reached where you can't raise the price of your product or service any more without people leaving. You're draining your customers for everything they have, but you're still just barely beating out last quarter's profits.
So in desparation, you need to do whatever you can to see profits this quarter. Drop that feature, fire this team, and you've just barely beat last quarter. Phew.
But now we have this quarter to worry about, and we've burned a bit of goodwill with our consumers by removing that feature, and we're short-staffed because we laid off all these people.
And the cycle repeats, trading in long term longevity for short-term profits.
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.
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.
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.
Hell, most of the people using it were indeed trolls, I actually met many of them and they said that they really used awards to troll heartbreaking, nsfl, or depressing posts by giving them the wholesome, helpfull awards etc. And the other half was basically karma bots. But as much as it was a crap feature, It really did gain reddit server time and revenue
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.
I'm enjoying being able to watch that ship sink from far away.
I'd compare more to the Titan situation. Every day there is an expert explaining how they are doomed,
I'm not really watching anything because I don't visit reddit, but from time to time, news appear saying that it's sinking. Sometimes a starved seaman shows up talking about how the ship had split in half during a sunny day and they are currently attempting to use silver tape to glue it back together before a storm hits them. Then another one shows up a couple days later saying they no longer have food...
Rejecteddit - as that's what a good chunk of the former userbase has done by now.
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.
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.
Spez specifically said that he was impressed/inspired by what Musk is doing
Hey, you know the only perk you get with Reddit Premium that isn't available through a free browser extension?
Yeah that's going away in 60 days.
It will be replaced with something so awful we dare not mention it while people are still pissed off about the other popular thing we killed with little notice.
We here at the Reddit management understand you have concerns about the destruction of the global hub of collaboration, but you'll get over it.
I bet they replace awards with some NFT crypto bullshit
Pretty sure it's going to be some kind of "tipping" system, where it can be traded for real money.
Cue massive invasion by bot farms, this always happens when there is money to be made from posting/generating something. It's going to go downhill so fast.
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.
Gold was introduced as a way to help sustain server costs
Surely it was to reenforce the idea that Reddit is the online equivalent of the street corner where crazy people ramble on about nothing, with gold replicating the bystanders who toss coins into their cardboard boxes/hats out of pity?
They are taking a page out of Musk's book and making Reddit way worse for no good rea$on
Well spez did say he admired what Elon's doing with Twitter so...
I mean let's be honest, coins and awards were literally just a means to siphon cash out of their userbase willing to spend money on the platform. Their status in the community is rather mixed with some enjoying the flair of them and others seeing them as little more than microtransations for people with more money than common sense.
Their removal just means less revenue for Reddit, which probably isn't a bright idea at the moment.
Right but people paid a lot for them. Hell I had 5k coins stored before I left reddit.
I'd be pissed if I didn't leave
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.
I thought awards were fine. Though I used Apollo, and it tastefully displayed them and never had giant highlight boxes around comments or any other adornment nonsense.
In smaller communities they had symbolic value. In massive ones it was kinda just noise. But like I said, not really an issue on Apollo.
Describing the various ways in which you mitigated the intrusiveness of reddit's awards is not exactly corroborating your argument that the awards were fine. I'm also struggling to see the symbolic value of a badge that indicates you paid the administrators. The award system did not build upon the original sorting mechanism of upvotes in any meaningful way.
It was never intended to build upon the original sorting mechanism, it was intended to be a super upvote that granted the receiver elevated privileges. It used to get you into an exclusive subreddit, turn off the ads, and give you discounts at stores across the internet. But then people memed on it and the admin decided to indulge the memes.
Gold wasn't ever even supposed to be that. When raldi (iirc) wrote the original gold system, it was just supposed to be a donator thing. Buy the gold stuff, and you get an award in your achievements thing, access to r/lounge, ability to keep track of what you've seen previously (persistent, not just in a cookie), and "extended" pages (load a full thousand comments, etc). The XKCD merch stuff was just another goodie to sweeten the pile (reddit's original merch store was just hosted through XKCD).
Gold gifting started out fairly clunky; you had to go to someone's userpage, and then there was a tiny "buy gold" link in the sidebar. The post/comment upsells came later, but were still pretty minor
Then sometime in the middle of the 10s, it turned into a meme, along with other features like snoovatars, avatars, profile posts, bios, and then eventually all of the new reddit slop, which seemed to run counter to the original idea of reddit: the content is more important than who is posting it. This old, long dead ideal, was what really distinguished reddit from Digg. Digg would give higher "karma" users votes more weight, and would rank their submissions higher. Reddit, on the other hand, barely acknowledged users. Wasn't quite the full-on Anon of 4chan, but who made the post was never supposed to be the focus. There's a reason why old reddit, the bylines are rather small compared to the posts and comments themselves
I cannot image how shitty it will get with bot farms contributing and upvoting AI generated shit for people too dumb to know they’re being fed BS.
Why even involve users? Bots posting AI generated stuff. Upvote bots upvote, comment bots comment and repost bots repost. Its the ciiiiiircle of life...
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.
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.
This would just accelerate Reddit's plunge into "bots upvoting karma farming repost bots".
Reddit not announcing the replacement for awards/coins yet totally makes sense if it will be something like this or crypto related, though they're just uselessly kicking the backlash can down the road.
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.
I'd been subscribed since it was an option. They kindly reminded me today to cancel it before it renewed. Thanks for the reminder reddit!
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 think they are trying to, either, do an only fans type thing where people can pay the contributors directly and Reddit just takes a cut, or to try to draw more creators in and pay like YouTube based on traffic to them. Either way, I’m glad I’m no longer over there. It’s all too money grubbing for me.
Not honouring anything. Admin says that even the display of them will be gone. So everything people "bought" will be gone in an instant.
judy-funnie: "The visual awards themselves will go away, however any award karma from the award will remain."
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.
DISTRACTION TIME DISTRACTION TIME DISTRACTION TIME DISTRACTION TIME
What's reddit?
It's some shitty Lemmy clone
I heard it was some kind of community-based site that decided it didn't need the whole community part anymore. Kind of like Twitter but it didn't need to be bought out by the pettiest man in the world first.
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.
And wasn't their revenue/user something like $1.50 per month while gold is $5 iirc.... seems like they'd be making an extra $3.50 if a person was gifted gold
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.
Maybe we get a Kill la Kill-esque twist and it is all a coordinated effort on the part of Tech Bros to destroy the social media beast that is actually an interstellar parasite planning on literally eating all of humanity.
Its a good decision but man, the execution is horrible.
In a vaccum, yes but the way reddit is talking and acting makes me think that it's taken the same cyinide pill only fans almost took and the one tumblr and imgur took
Horrible execution seems to be the common definition in everything they do.
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.
I think the worst part is they are retroactively removing awards. If I spent money on a useless virtual award, I'd want it to stay there in perpetuity.
yooo it'd be neat if we could have our own community custom awards that can be used to help fundraise the servers the community is on
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.
Well, I never paid for Reddit, but this must suck for people that did it.
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.
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.
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!
So they're sunsetting current payment features, right now, just for the hell of it without having an answer to fix it for months yet?
Good God, they've gone Musk.
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.
Reddit is nothing but an another advertising platform now.
Lemmy chads just can't stop winning
Wonder if this is connected to that leaked contributor/paid karma thing that got leaked a few days ago
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.
Just my 2¢
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.
"thanks for gold, kind stranger" is no more
Its fine more users on lemmy then
I think the protest over this idiocy will eclipse the blackout.
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?
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 ;-)
TIL - I had been adding them all to the uBlock rules!
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.
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.
Lemmy is the new old Reddit, Reddit is the new new Twitter.
a new direction for awarding that allows redditors to empower one another and create more meaningful ways to reward high-quality contributions
Honestly, I'd be really happy with that. Be a good way to help pay for server/maintenance costs. I have no idea how it would be possible to make it work across instances.
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?
Reddit’s incompetence is so mind-blowing it’s unreal. Even a crackhead can manage Reddit better than spez
You mean Musk? Because it seems that whatever insanity that Musk does, Spez wants to copy verbatim
Nobody said musk was competent 🤷♂️
Sure but the crackhead part.
coke or meth?
Yes.
All that needs to happen now is for meta to launch a reddit clone that steals away all of reddit's users
Maybe Elron can buy reddit and finish destroying it
Wouldn’t surprise me if he did buy reddit
If that's the case, maybe reddit thinks if they do the same things Musk is doing to Twitter, it will appeas the Musk and he will want to buy reddit. I mean soon it will have everything that Twitter has: more bots than actual users, more ads, more pointless shit to make crypto boys wet, and fewer eyes on the page due to required signups and logins.
Pls no
Give it a few months
Considering how successful Threads has been, they'd be stupid not to try. So they probably won't.
I have a bad feeling Threads will turn into this. I mean it's literally called threads. Kind of up ends the "threadiverse" name.
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.
Perplexing
The logic is the same as Twitter, Spez said so: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-protest-private-ceo-elon-musk-huffman-rcna89700
Ad revenue down 70%, who wouldn't want to emulate that!
Fucking wat Spez been sniffing gas straight from the pump or wat?
Please, the Speztic has been fighting to cram his rectum docking nose deeper into the Elongated Muskrat's anus every chance he's gotten. He's the epitome of every single one of Elon's cucked, arse barnacle followers, the only difference is he also had a world class platform to burn to the ground in retarded mimicry of his waste of a good wankstain idol.
The logic is to destabilise public forums ahead of upcoming elections, so the wealthy can consolidate more power.
I hate that this take seems like the conspiracy take but also is totally plausible. Just look to the example of the Arab spring and how instrumental social media was for organizing. By fragmenting all social media it’s a lot less likely you see a massive resistance if shit goes sideways.
We just don't have as much firsthand information about Splez because he doesn't try to make himself the center of attention on his platform and the news.
It's just Huffman, an Elon simp, deciding he wants IPO money and that the best way to make it is to blindly follow whatever Twitter does. Because, you know, Twitter's so hot and profitable right now.
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.
Thanks for putting my thoughts into easily digestible words. Enshittification isn't natural, it's deliberate. Any CEO 's who throw up their hands and say they're all of ideas are just trying to pull the rip cords of their golden parachutes, given to them by people who want us to believe it's unavoidable.
Was not breaking something that hard? No, but it doesn't pay as well.
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.
Any proof you can offer on this, except for your hunch?
It fits with existing patterns depressingly well. The issue is, it's generally very subtle.
E.g. Murdoch once even admitted on camera what he does. He "suggests" what he thinks should happen to politicians. Those that either agree, or follow his "advice" start getting negative stories about them dropped from his papers etc. Conversely, those that disagree get their positive stories dropped more. Once a few politicians have had their careers ended by it, most of the rest fall into line, it's only minor favours. Until it's not; and all the previous favours suddenly risk looking very bad in the press...
No laws broken, no overt threats given, but the more it happens the stronger it becomes. It eventually helped cripple BBC news, in the UK, among many other problems.
Reddits behaviour fits this pattern too well. Something has been offered in the background. Initially, it was for small favours, but it's now reached a tipping point. I suspect they are hoping that they can fire sale the whole user driven system (everything must go [at once]). People fatigue on the constant news, and there's nowhere new to flow and reorganize.
I doubt doubt it, but damn it makes sense
Hard to prove that type of stuff. It could just be incompetent leadership but it's starting to feel like it's something more given how many back to back missteps they've had recently.
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.
Whichever ends up being true Musk and Huffman are raging malignant narcissists regardless.
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.
I don't know how you could more organically commit corporate suicide than the way they're going about running Reddit recently.
I'm willing to bet it is somehow connected to BlackRock.
To prevent score manipulation, voting is now a premium feature.
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?
They probably blew all of the money on Spez's pay and NFTs.
Did they? Do you have a link to that? I'd be very interested in that. The whole situation is so bizarre
Maybe it covered their costs for old school reddit pre built in image/video hosting when it was essentially just text and thumbnails?
Now that they're no longer relying on imgur (which is doing it's own thing) they have to host their own images which is EXPENSIVE.
Line must go up. Doesn’t matter if it’s sustainable or if a bag was gotten in the past
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.
Paying content creators, but not mods? That’s hilarious
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.
How much until all the links open on an internal browser like in LinkedIn?
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?
When an organization is collapsing, everything they do onward is and will be wrong, at that point, it's better to just get out as fast as possible.
I bet they just don't like seeing all the awards go to fuck u/Spez posts.
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.
TBH, I don't think they care. It is monetization and engagement of their microtransactions...as smug as they may be, I think it's all about $
That would fit with the Musk comparisons
I was going to post, "Do they understand their user base?" but after reading your post, I believe they do.
Most likely so.
That's where I'm putting my money. They don't want clearly shit dogshit admin posts to get poor awards
Pour one out for the OG.
I like how you didn't even bother to crop out the dot 😂
The less you try, the more authentic it is
It's as authentic as my very organic "Barbie" marketing campaign here.
Did you expect anything less from Margot Robbie, master digital artist?
Take my Lemmy Lemon 🍋
We need Lime so we can do Lemmyn Lime
We should make our own
Edit: I propose a Lemmy Green Bean Award
With hookers and blackjack.
Or beans and old ass memes.
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!
thanks for posting here. I have no idea who the venkman01 is but the way they worded that post is borderline cringe
Yeah, "sunsetting" is such trash corporate speak.
Corpo scum are allergic to saying exactly what they mean, so they insist on hiding their intent behind flowery words that sound "good" to them. I guess they think that if they use weasel words, it'll soften the blow when they decide to strip out features and further destroy their platforms.
It’s not an allergy, it’s hiding punches. It’s concealing the fact that they’re fucking you in the ass by telling you it’s just a penis-based prostate exam, and that you’re the one being weird. It’s gaslighting.
It’s one of the things I hate most in our capitalist dystopia.
Also he is using it wrong because "sunsetting" means a slow winding down. You know, because the sun doesn't instantly turn off.
But they basically literally just suddenly turned off gold today, without any pre warning.
They have basically sent a message to everyone telling them they've already done it.
Official reddit posts are always cringey. They unironically call people "Snoos".
Gesundheit?
Anyways, who has time and energy to read such a dumb, way too long post?
Of course it's cringe. Wankman can't even spell his own username correctly.
Lol no one knows or cares who you are
Sunsetting? Winding down? What are they? Dolores Ambridge? It sounds like they are sugarcoating a syrup.
"Hide Awards" in settings?
It's almost like they're allergic to working on their app.
They could have fixed the clutter and still accumulated money. They’re really bad at business
They could have fed ads through the API instead of shutting down clients. They aren’t very smart over there.
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.
Hate to beat the dead horse but Apollo had that
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.
Keep bringing it up. It’s clear that Spez was annoyed and offended by Apollo and we shouldn’t let him drop the topic.
Apollo automatically refunded everyone for the money they had spent for a full year. Reddit isn't doing anything at all. It says a lot.
Not disagreeing but I hated the stupid awards. It was one the things I hated most about the official app.
Reddit has recently become allergic to taking Ws as well.
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.
I thought it was hilarious and made the community feel fun and alive, which Reddit hasn’t felt like for a long time.
It's bean o'clock
(link)
I upvoted everyone I saw with PRIDE! It was dumb and hilarious. The things that modern internet silliness were founded on.
The beans lasted all of like three days. It was hardly a problem
Beans are a solution, never a problem.
If anything, it reminded me of early Reddit.
I agree. Early Reddit was pretty shitty though. A totally different kind of shorty than it is now, but best reddit was shortly after subreddits.
Here, please enjoy this lemmy lemon award 🍋
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.
Although they're just taking an existing feature away here. Not sure how that'll create more money.
Empowering users to give us money
Comments are saltier than expected
And these are the people who stayed...
At least the bots that stayed
Most of them still won't do shit about it.
I feel like I'm standing on the shores of sanity while I watch Reddit sail off into the sunset.
Except the whole ship is on fire and everyone is fighting each other.
some of us exited, and are observing the madness while sitting comfy at lemmy. when the api stuff started, i was really stressed out about not having a place to call home. and now that i do, i need to buy more popcorn.
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
Oh definitely. Killing third party apps means everyone using Reddit gets served ads now, so they're going hard on that.
They though, "hey, we don't make money off these users anyways" and disconnected us. Not realizing many of us were mods, content creators, and active users. You know, the reason people go to Reddit.
I'm more than happy here and learning Mastodon.
They knew. They did some back-of-the-envelope math and concluded that they'd be fine. The IPO is the only thing that matters to them. They'll burn the site down getting there and then fuck off with their big payday.
You can patch a few third party Reddit apps with revanced. If that tickles your pickle.
It won't matter soon. The apps are now abandonware.
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.
Not an advertiser but they generally know % of views ("impressions") to clicks (called click through rate) and percentage of clicks that turn into sales (called conversion rate).
For that reason, I don't think they're trying to get rid of human users completely, just the "troublemakers".
I think they want to lead the "silent majority" users into a bot advertorial content hellscape where they control all the levers of power and everything is for sale.
Thank you, I think you're right. Interesting you mentioned click thru rate though, because another commenting advertiser here on Lemmy noticing weird shit with Reddit lately brought that up, saying his click through rate was good but then when he looked into there were many immediate abandons, and someone else explained that's because people were getting tricked by the ads that look like posts and immediately backing out once clicked.
I'd be happy to find the comment for you but I have no idea how to find shit here yet, lol. I'll look; if I find it I'll edit this comment with a link.
EDITED TO ADD I think this is it: https://lemmy.world/comment/644214 (see the other posts by the same guy also if you're interested, like this one https://lemmy.world/comment/652045 and https://lemmy.world/post/837198)
So basically Reddit sucks at ads too 😂
Ever clicked on a link and noticed that the URL ended in something like
?campaign=twitteror something? Advertisers regularly track which advertising campaign got a user to click on a link, and they'll also track what proportion of those users eventually lead to a sale. If Reddit eventually has no users and just bots, advertisers will quickly notice that ad spending on Reddit isn't producing profit and kill it.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.
wish me luck :) I'll keep you updated.
Just do a chargeback from your bank, reddit will never ever reply
Who cares. reddit has killed reddit. Just be here now. Ready to move on.
Uh, sir, I think you wandered into the wrong place. This is /c/Reddit>
You keep your reddit memes in a folder on your harddisk on an MS DOS machine? /s
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!"
Next: Subscribe to /r/Pics - $.89/month!
Then where would I go to look for cat pictures?
Trick question. Everyone knows cats invented the Internet to put their pictures in.
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.
That 3P hits too hard haha
Very true. It seems like a solid plan to flush the current users and replace with more gullible ones.
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.
Dont worry... They are replacing this with almost direct monetary contributions.
There was a leak about how contributors will be able to earn money from updoots.
Lol. This venkman guy claims credit for creating the awards when it was reddit users who started the semi-ironic (and free) Reddit Gold shit.
but taking credit for others' work is how executives get ahead in the modern corporate hellscape! how else are they supposed to get promoted? working?!
And then stole silver, too, replacing gold with it and making gold more expensive.
Either they are dumb or I am.
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?
They want to allow you to monetize your karma. Gotta first start by removing the current currency people are used to.
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.
Thats my guess at least.
Probably, but that is a horrible business plan for Reddit. The awards system ended up being a great idea for Reddit to gain revenue; a mega upvote.
Honestly I don't think they care. I think they are only concerned about the immediate sale.
Each fiscal quarter, companies want to make more and more profit. If they aren't making more profit, they see it as a failure.
Eventually, a point is reached where you can't raise the price of your product or service any more without people leaving. You're draining your customers for everything they have, but you're still just barely beating out last quarter's profits.
So in desparation, you need to do whatever you can to see profits this quarter. Drop that feature, fire this team, and you've just barely beat last quarter. Phew.
But now we have this quarter to worry about, and we've burned a bit of goodwill with our consumers by removing that feature, and we're short-staffed because we laid off all these people.
And the cycle repeats, trading in long term longevity for short-term profits.
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.
remember dogetipbot?
well it's back, in shittier reddit form!
Oh, if only it was that.
Zero percent chance this isn't a cover to launch something more predatory for monetization reasons.
It'll be crypto. I guarantee it.
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.
Products, ey? Their intentionally designed to not feel loke them.
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
We took your digital stuff that you paid for in actually useful green papers
Now, NOW!!!! KILL YOUR TIES TO REDDITEDIT: Yes, do chargebacks instead
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.
☺️🙃😲😇😎🌜🤎💓💝💛😹👄👄🦿💪🦶🦴🚶🧍🏌️🧑🌾🧑🌾🧑🌸🏖️🏖️🏜️🌋🌌🌕🙊🦮🐸🦕🐣🦔🦩🫒
Yeah, awards were definitely jarring.
Hell, most of the people using it were indeed trolls, I actually met many of them and they said that they really used awards to troll heartbreaking, nsfl, or depressing posts by giving them the wholesome, helpfull awards etc. And the other half was basically karma bots. But as much as it was a crap feature, It really did gain reddit server time and revenue
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.
I'm enjoying being able to watch that ship sink from far away.
I'd compare more to the Titan situation. Every day there is an expert explaining how they are doomed,
I'm not really watching anything because I don't visit reddit, but from time to time, news appear saying that it's sinking. Sometimes a starved seaman shows up talking about how the ship had split in half during a sunny day and they are currently attempting to use silver tape to glue it back together before a storm hits them. Then another one shows up a couple days later saying they no longer have food...
What is next, I really wonder...?
Changing name to Fuckit?
Nah. It should be called Blue-it, which they have
Or Suckit, which spez definitely should.
Rejecteddit - as that's what a good chunk of the former userbase has done by now.
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.
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.
What is happening with reddit lol
They activated Elon mode.
They went Full Elon. Never go Full Elon.
Oof. This is now a thing isn't it?
Spez specifically said that he was impressed/inspired by what Musk is doing
Hey, you know the only perk you get with Reddit Premium that isn't available through a free browser extension?
Yeah that's going away in 60 days.
It will be replaced with something so awful we dare not mention it while people are still pissed off about the other popular thing we killed with little notice.
We here at the Reddit management understand you have concerns about the destruction of the global hub of collaboration, but you'll get over it.
Peace!
I bet they replace awards with some NFT crypto bullshit
Pretty sure it's going to be some kind of "tipping" system, where it can be traded for real money.
Cue massive invasion by bot farms, this always happens when there is money to be made from posting/generating something. It's going to go downhill so fast.
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.
Surely it was to reenforce the idea that Reddit is the online equivalent of the street corner where crazy people ramble on about nothing, with gold replicating the bystanders who toss coins into their cardboard boxes/hats out of pity?
I can 100% guarantee that the replacement system has already been designed and it's over the top scummy.
They are spreading out the negative news to leasen the PR impact.
They have no idea what they're doing. It's kind of hilarious but also really sad.
they are trying to do capitalism on a site that literally only exists because of crowd-sourcing
Mostly I don't understand why they are announcing this without sharing what they're doing instead
They are taking a page out of Musk's book and making Reddit way worse for no good rea$on
Well spez did say he admired what Elon's doing with Twitter so...
I mean let's be honest, coins and awards were literally just a means to siphon cash out of their userbase willing to spend money on the platform. Their status in the community is rather mixed with some enjoying the flair of them and others seeing them as little more than microtransations for people with more money than common sense.
Their removal just means less revenue for Reddit, which probably isn't a bright idea at the moment.
Right but people paid a lot for them. Hell I had 5k coins stored before I left reddit.
I'd be pissed if I didn't leave
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.
I thought awards were fine. Though I used Apollo, and it tastefully displayed them and never had giant highlight boxes around comments or any other adornment nonsense.
In smaller communities they had symbolic value. In massive ones it was kinda just noise. But like I said, not really an issue on Apollo.
Describing the various ways in which you mitigated the intrusiveness of reddit's awards is not exactly corroborating your argument that the awards were fine. I'm also struggling to see the symbolic value of a badge that indicates you paid the administrators. The award system did not build upon the original sorting mechanism of upvotes in any meaningful way.
It was never intended to build upon the original sorting mechanism, it was intended to be a super upvote that granted the receiver elevated privileges. It used to get you into an exclusive subreddit, turn off the ads, and give you discounts at stores across the internet. But then people memed on it and the admin decided to indulge the memes.
Gold wasn't ever even supposed to be that. When raldi (iirc) wrote the original gold system, it was just supposed to be a donator thing. Buy the gold stuff, and you get an award in your achievements thing, access to r/lounge, ability to keep track of what you've seen previously (persistent, not just in a cookie), and "extended" pages (load a full thousand comments, etc). The XKCD merch stuff was just another goodie to sweeten the pile (reddit's original merch store was just hosted through XKCD).
Gold gifting started out fairly clunky; you had to go to someone's userpage, and then there was a tiny "buy gold" link in the sidebar. The post/comment upsells came later, but were still pretty minor
Then sometime in the middle of the 10s, it turned into a meme, along with other features like snoovatars, avatars, profile posts, bios, and then eventually all of the new reddit slop, which seemed to run counter to the original idea of reddit: the content is more important than who is posting it. This old, long dead ideal, was what really distinguished reddit from Digg. Digg would give higher "karma" users votes more weight, and would rank their submissions higher. Reddit, on the other hand, barely acknowledged users. Wasn't quite the full-on Anon of 4chan, but who made the post was never supposed to be the focus. There's a reason why old reddit, the bylines are rather small compared to the posts and comments themselves
Wonder how that’s going to work with this
I cannot image how shitty it will get with bot farms contributing and upvoting AI generated shit for people too dumb to know they’re being fed BS.
Why even involve users? Bots posting AI generated stuff. Upvote bots upvote, comment bots comment and repost bots repost. Its the ciiiiiircle of life...
Sounds like my Facebook feed.
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.
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.
Is this self sabotage at this point?
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.
It looks like the brain drain from Reddit is now in full swing!
I have feeling that whatever ends up replacing them will almost certainly be worse.
Reddit's Contributor Program could earn you real money for your Reddit karma [Android Authority]. This mirror's Twitter's experiment to pay select top contributors [Washington Post].
This would just accelerate Reddit's plunge into "bots upvoting karma farming repost bots".
Reddit not announcing the replacement for awards/coins yet totally makes sense if it will be something like this or crypto related, though they're just uselessly kicking the backlash can down the road.
Reddit rewards program? https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/13/23794403/reddit-gold-awards-coins-sunset
My guess is they're wiping karma so everyone starts at 0 for the rewards program.
Ironically my karma is the only reason I didn't straight up delete my account.
I know it's just fictional internet points, but I had a long running dumb game with myself to see how fast I could hit certain amounts.
That, and I managed to create my account exactly one year before my son was born, so they shared cake days, kinda.
..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.
I'd been subscribed since it was an option. They kindly reminded me today to cancel it before it renewed. Thanks for the reminder reddit!
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 think they are trying to, either, do an only fans type thing where people can pay the contributors directly and Reddit just takes a cut, or to try to draw more creators in and pay like YouTube based on traffic to them. Either way, I’m glad I’m no longer over there. It’s all too money grubbing for me.
Not honouring anything. Admin says that even the display of them will be gone. So everything people "bought" will be gone in an instant.
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.
DISTRACTION TIME DISTRACTION TIME DISTRACTION TIME DISTRACTION TIME
What's reddit?
It's some shitty Lemmy clone
I heard it was some kind of community-based site that decided it didn't need the whole community part anymore. Kind of like Twitter but it didn't need to be bought out by the pettiest man in the world first.
Just resign spez
Tis a silly place.
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.
Reddit gold gives premium = no ads = no revenue. What theyve already failed to understand is no users = no revenue
Reddit gold gets rid of ads (for a month), but also costs money to offset the lack of ads...
Ublock Origin seemed to do the job for free well enough.
And wasn't their revenue/user something like $1.50 per month while gold is $5 iirc.... seems like they'd be making an extra $3.50 if a person was gifted gold
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.
Why are all these high profile sites making all the stupidest decisions to ruin their sites? It doesn't even make sense from a monetary perspective.
VC cash is drying up IIRC and they are FREAKING out and don't know what to do.
Maybe we get a Kill la Kill-esque twist and it is all a coordinated effort on the part of Tech Bros to destroy the social media beast that is actually an interstellar parasite planning on literally eating all of humanity.
Its a good decision but man, the execution is horrible.
In a vaccum, yes but the way reddit is talking and acting makes me think that it's taken the same cyinide pill only fans almost took and the one tumblr and imgur took
Horrible execution seems to be the common definition in everything they do.
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.
I think the worst part is they are retroactively removing awards. If I spent money on a useless virtual award, I'd want it to stay there in perpetuity.
the site used to be so good but now its just going downhill, welp it was fun while it lasted
I’m whelmed.
yooo it'd be neat if we could have our own community custom awards that can be used to help fundraise the servers the community is on
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.
Well, I never paid for Reddit, but this must suck for people that did it.
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...
Yes, please. The more changes Reddit makes that people dislike the more likely people will be to move to Lemmy.
A little crazy theory:
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.
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.
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!
Has it? 🤔
I remember back in like, 2013 when getting gold was actually really cool, or maybe it was just me so easily made happy at that point.
I've never followed the updated bullshit with the awards that came out thereafter. It was right around the time reddit really turned to shit.
Anyways, I guess it was inevitable.
"sunset".
two months time.
Longer than the warning they gave for the API changes!
But why?
If you got an award, you could get free premium for a month. Of course, that's a no go if Reddit wants you to pay them money.
So they're sunsetting current payment features, right now, just for the hell of it without having an answer to fix it for months yet?
Good God, they've gone Musk.
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.
Reddit is nothing but an another advertising platform now.
Lemmy chads just can't stop winning
Wonder if this is connected to that leaked contributor/paid karma thing that got leaked a few days ago
"Business as usual" lmao what is this then
I saw the writing on the wall when they dropped the occasional free awards.
But nothing would have gotten me to purchase premium so shrug
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. 🤔
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.
Just my 2¢
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.
"thanks for gold, kind stranger" is no more
Its fine more users on lemmy then
I think the protest over this idiocy will eclipse the blackout.
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.
I wonder what this means for r/cryptocurrency and their precious MOONS
peeks at comments
Mildly disappointed that no one mentioned leaving reddit for lemmy, but also mildly impressed at the level of commitment of these redditors.
I saw one! Another mentioned kbin
Maybe the people who would leave have already left?
Ahh if that’s the case, then I have no sympathy to those who choose to stay. They deserve whatever half baked idiocy reddit will throw at them.
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?
Edit :Giving them away on r/lemmy
... and no one cared
They are making it easy to move here.
Haha, I’m glad I wasted all my (gifted) Reddit Gold on Christian’s farewell to Apollo posts.
Obligatory fuck u/spez, as we used to say on that old site.
Most pepega move I've ever since since the APIcalypse
It hasn't been 2 months already lol
Probs so spez can bury the fact that he gave a bunch of fucking pedo mods from the jaibait subreddit custom awards
Just when you think the dumpster fire can't possibly burn any brighter, u/spez comes running with a barrel of gasoline.
NO WAY HAHAHAHA
I feel they're gonna replace it with some blockchain/crypto BS.
Someone in the reddit comments mentioned you can use awards/coins to bypass ads. That makes sense. In a stupid way. I guess
I've got 14600 coins to spend. What should I do with them? Don't want to benefit Reddit...
Do what others are doing in this thread, gift them to a comment promoting Lemmy in the thread and elsewhere
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 really wonder what @ChristianSelig thinks of this
TIL - I had been adding them all to the uBlock rules!
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.
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.
Haha
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.
Lemmy is the new old Reddit, Reddit is the new new Twitter.
Lmao wut
We should add awards to lemmy :,)
Honestly, I'd be really happy with that. Be a good way to help pay for server/maintenance costs. I have no idea how it would be possible to make it work across instances.