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Reddit is ending Reddit Gold and users are furious::undefined
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I can barely imagine giving a shit.
I don’t know why anyone would even care. I think this is actually a good change.
Idgaf. They don’t have to be there.
The worst part is they’re also removing all of the existing gold awards from old posts as well.
Jokes on them, I deleted all my gilded content.
Excellent. Fuck it every fucking way.
I just find that skeevy. It’s imaginary internet crap but someone intentionally went to the trouble and financial expense of putting gold on a comment and it should stay there.
I’m gonna make an outlandish prediction that Spez will no longer be CEO of Reddit Inc within the next six months. He’s made some incredibly bone-headed decisions and if the IPO does happen, Reddit are either going to be valued really low to the point where they could face a hostile takeover from a more competent tech giant, or Reddit’s existing shareholders are going to oust him in a revolt.
Either way, Spez has pissed off a lot of angel investors and has driven a good chunk of people towards Tildes and Lemmy. When this place (and other Lemmy instances) looks like an increasingly viable alternative to Reddit, it’s going to eclipse the main site once we get decent apps like Sync and Boost.
some execs get hired specifically to do all the negative stuff so they can be a lightning rod of ire
And then theres spez, who does it for no other reason than being a child molesting piss drinker
I still browse it occasionally through libreddit (private front end that still works with their anonymous API for some reason) and they’re still getting thousands of upvotes and comments on /r/doordash posts. People are hopelessly addicted.
In early June, there was like 300 users on Lemmy.
I don’t get it. Wasn’t the whole API thing supposed to be about money? Reddit is killing one of its sources of income!
That doesn’t even make business sense! What the hell is going on inside Spez’s mind?
I’ve seen rumors that api leaks have indicated that the new thing will be tipping posts directly.
Which is EXACTLY what that site needs - repost bots being financially incentivesed. I guess that’s one way to get your usage back - Reddit started as just two dudes posting links to each other and will end as ten thousand bots reposting those links.
Likely to each other by the very end
There’s a blockchain-based Reddit clone called SteemIt that I had a cursory glance at. The idea of it is that you can make money (specifically their cryptocurrency) from posts because of how site activity mints more stuff on their blockchain. Unsurprisingly, SteemIt is also unusable and has been astroturfed by spammers.
Reddit would kill their platform overnight if they allowed users to tip posts whilst simultaneously chasing away community moderators.
Remember kids, don’t let the news tell you how to feel. Watch out for words in the title like “outrage” and “furious”. Anger increases engagement and they know it.
Yeah internet “outrage” is a weird thing.
I scrambled 10 years of my reddit activity, which would appear to be outrage. But in reality it was more like “meh, well reddit sucks now, I guess I’ll go somewhere else. I’ll just remove whatever value I may have added to the site on my way out since I don’t want to reward a corporation for bad behaviour.”
I guess some people may be outraged, and they’ll be the most vocal ones. But most people are probably like “this kinda sucks, but meh whatever” and move on. You just don’t hear a lot from these people.
We could use AI to remove the clickbait from headlines automatically. 🤔
That’s a fun idea 💡
Honestly, I never liked all the additional rewards they added to the system anyway, seemed really superfluous.
I actually preferred it when it was gold only. No silver, bronze or any of the other 10+ “coins” they had.
You paid for gold to support their server time, you could also give others a month of gold as well - it had a similar feeling to subs and gift subs on a twitch channel. You gave others gold not only to support the servers, but to say, “I want to give you more than an upvote for what you said” it was a way of going above and beyond.
Sure the lounge was crap, but that wasn’t the point, that was an intended reward for donating.
I honestly don’t know why they’re killing it, as it’s a known fact that having a subscription system with the ability for people to pay monthly is a far better, more consistent source of revenue than ads, and it’s less invasive. It’s why musk is pushing twitter blue so hard.
Unless they’re only killing the awards part of it and still allowing people to subscribe to premium, I can kinda see some of the logic in that - by making it impossible to access premium features through gold gifts, you make it so everyone has to access those features by subscribing - the hope is more become willing people sign up to it after losing their free gold. Honestly I think they’re misjudging how much value Reddit premium actually has, especially given the recent alienation by Reddit staff, and therefore removing the ability to give awards is misleading. Sure if premium had more value than it does, it might actually have the intended effect, but I think it’s just gonna result in a precipitous drop in revenue.
Honestly Lemmy kinda does donations better, as it doesn’t turn donations into a fake award you can give other people. Instead it’s just that, you donate, the server stays running and we get to continue having this space. And the admins are actually careful enough to turn off registrations when growth starts to increase too quickly.
It’s almost like spez secretly enjoys Lemmy. Doing the work for us.
Just looked and I have 1100 coins. Not sure what from, I’ve never bought any. Any suggestions for them?
Never mind, I decided I only go to Reddit now for one small, private sub, so I went there and gave awards to posts I thought were good.
Not sure what from
When other people give big awards to your posts/comments, you actually get some coins as well.
Huh, interesting. There were a few times it said I was gifted premium, but I never did anything with it. Well, doesn’t matter now, I guess.
You know, the thing that strikes me as particularly odd is that apparently they’re going to retroactively delete the existing awards. I’d imagine there are some people who feel tied to their Reddit accounts because the awards and karma were important to them, so stripping anything like that away seems like it would make those people feel less attached to Reddit and more likely to move on. They really seem to be scuttling the site.
He’s literally just doing whatever Musk tells him to. Get rid of all the people who cared about the site, then you can advertise your site as a walled garden for bigots and terrorists
Wait. Does Elon own Reddit as well as Twitter?
Nah, spez is just a fanboy of Musk.
I’d imagine there are some people who feel tied to their Reddit accounts because the awards and karma were important to them, so stripping anything like that away seems like it would make those people feel less attached to Reddit and more likely to move on.
Not only that, but they’ll probably be angry on reddit as well.
I have apparently 200 I never knew about.
Gild pro-Lemmy posts / tutorials
Gild all the ‘fuck /u/spez’ comments while you still can.
Gild the announcement announcing the end of reddit gold.
on one hand, reddit gold is useless and a waste of money imo
other hand, they just keep going for making the most controversial decisions with zero thought lmao
It might be that they’ve given up on the visuals and are now making all the changes all at once. They’re ripping off the bandaid overhauling their site and are banking that the damage will be recover in time.
With the current state of dissatisfaction from the community, now might be a good time to plow through and make all the changes that are already undesirable for the old user base.
Maybe even more of these big changes to come? More popcorn for the Fediverse I suppose.
Sure but they could have left the awards in place for a while even if no more could be added. And instead of making everyone lose all the coins they already spent money on, they could have allowed those coins to be used for whatever the next thing is. Just throwing out everyone’s money is never a good practice.
Like what if Minecraft decided they were going with a new monetization strategy and said everyone’s minecoins would expire in a couple of months and any skins, texture packs, etc., you bought with them will also be gone. And no refunds of course.
I don’t even know what the coins are, but if they did it this way, wouldn’t that cause a lot of people to want to sell accounts that still had coins and such? Maybe they wouldn’t to avoid a secondary marketplace. Either way, they really are tightening ship for the corpos.
I did not know minecoins were a thing
but in any case, I’m not saying that they’re making a good decision, just that I don’t see the point of reddit gold
reddit gold used to be how the community helped with server costs back when reddit had only a few employees
I still have my reddit account, only to malicously mod one community and update a secret community about a move to lemmy, but I only use reddit now to do a quick check in on those subs and then a glace at the front page.
Anyway, i saw the reddit post and a bunch of people were livid and said they were doing chargebacks now. I informed them that chargebacks cost reddit more money than they initally spent (spend $5 they have to return the $5 and pay a $20 fee), and if tok many users do a chargeback then credit card companies would stop paying them wink.
EDIT: in response to telling people that it would hurt reddit finacially I got a 2 gold and 2 platnium awards which i hope were paid for with chargebacked credits.
EDIT: in response to telling people that it would hurt reddit finacially I got a 2 gold and 2 platnium awards which i hope were paid for with chargebacked credits.
They were probably just throwing leftover Coins they had in your direction.
I know. I’m just saying I hope
Didn’t Reddit gold start as just a user-run bot, that kept a tally of how many times it had been invoked for any particular recipient?
And then Reddit forced the bot to retire so they could offer a paid version. And now they’re retiring their mandatory replacement. Good job Reddit.
That story is so common. They destroyed Secret Santa that way. User-run thing that got some traction so they built redditgifts around it, then decided redditgifts wasn’t sufficiently profitable so canned it and took the user-run part down with it.
I will continue to be bitter about them killing secret Santa. It was such a great tradition, killed off far too soon because it “wasn’t profitable enough”, nevermind that the point of the event is to celebrate the holiday season and the spirit of giving
Didn’t it also start off as an entirely user run thing before Reddit admins took over it?
Yes it did. And then they ran it for a handful of years. And then they killed it. Brutally.
That’s what’s great about all these companies. They take credit for, and try to derive value from, things they didn’t actually create. Reddit keeps on talking about “their” data that was created by users, for free, and moderated by other users, also for free. Yet it’s somehow theirs and they can sell it?
Twitter didn’t invent hashtags. They were user created annd eventually incorporated in to the service.
These services add very little value, but they believe they add it all.
What they’re good at is seeing trends kind of late and then making everyone believe they invented them. They’re quite good at that. Most would call that a grift.
What they should be is platforms and tools for people to interact, with some controls to prevent Nazis and MRAs from ruining things for everyone.
Capitalizing off the backs of Community
Hashtags were invented by the Twitter community. And the @ sign account linking was invented by Twitter third party apps, which Elon musk killed
Lol twitter didn’t even invent calling it “tweets”, @ mentions, retweets, etc. Like reddit, most of product development past the very basic idea came from the community.
There was at least reddit silver that worked this way.
I thought Reddit silver was just an image a user would post if they were too broke to afford gold.
It also came with a bot
There was also eventually a bot, before silver became an award.
Well I learned something today.
Are people really upset about it? To me it was always pointless, and the few times I got gold and was allowed to peek into r/lounge it was just full of the most insufferable users (just people that thought they were special because they got gold).
I think the point is more that it’s something people paid real money for just to have them rip it away with basically no notice and no replacement.
The benefits of receiving it were meh. But it was a way to show recognition for people and supporting the site. One of the few ways they would even receive revenue, for little to no effort. I don’t know why they didn’t just lean into it harder.
Waiting for the Lemmy lemon bot so we can award lemons 🍋
oooh lemon party
When life gives you lemons, just say fuck the lemons and bail.
But I like lemons!
If you get three lemons then you get to have a Lemon Party!
What about combustible lemons? 🍋🔥🔥🔥
I understand that lemon essential oil is flammable.
What a great idea. Here’s a lemon for ya 🍋
Don’t lemonade it all in one place 😉
Dude, this is just laughable. For those who are left, what are you sticking around for?
Also, here’s my theory: these idiot product managers, fresh outta b-school didn’t think to interview their most engaged users. Instead, they randomly polled people. That’s the only way I can fathom their takeaway from users was “it’s too much clutter” instead of, “this drives engagement”.
I have 3 reasons I still visit… But I am cutting back.
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My local subreddit is still way more active than the equivalent here in the fediverse (but I do get to interact with some familiar usernames in the local Lemmy community)
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It’s still a decent news aggregator, IMHO, ahead of Lemmy for keeping up with what’s going on in the world at a high level
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NSFW content is still lagging behind on Lemmy, as well … I’m using a revanced app and I’m a mod of my own private sub so it still works but I fully expect this to be killed in the near future… In fact, I fully expect that by the time a reddit IPO happens they will have completely killed all the NSFW subreddits (even on the official app and desktop browser)
The site is definitely in a death spiral but, as of today, I still find it useful for certain things.
Fuck them though… They won’t get a dime in ad dollars from me and the demise can’t come soon enough at this point.
Myself, I still see reddit when I’m googling for something (e.g., I used it yesterday to find where to go next in a game I was playing, as I was stuck and it seems many people got stuck in the same spot). Reddit is useful as an archive of information in that way and Lemmy isn’t active or searchable enough for that yet (plus I didn’t want to ask a question and wait – I wanted to get my answer immediately).
As well as to read discussions of stuff like the ending of a video game or movie. Again mostly because reddit has dozens of threads for basically every single video game, movie, TV, etc (including those that predate Lemmy). I love reading user discussion after I finish something. But I am trying to start conversations about that here, too. If anyone wants to discuss Horizon Burning Shores or Final Fantasy XVI, I made threads about them (which… I was gonna link to, but I can’t find – the posts section of my profile is empty and I can’t easily find them when searching…).
EDIT: the FFXVI post is https://lemm.ee/comment/940061
That #1 is close to my own reason - a few small communities I’m part of, with very little fediverse activity.
Always using an adblocker of course, having one is basic internet safety, and it reducing reddit’s profits is a nice bonus.
I only stick to subs that have utility on reddit now such as setting up a rss for gamedeals and buildapcsales.
But, anything that falls under entertainment like gunpla, sports team subs, show discussions, and memes I cut ties with. I do miss them, but even if I haven’t completely cut reddit off those I could at least do. Since scrolling for entertainment is not one I found vital.
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I am there only because I feel obliged to finish my artwork series for people- but after that, bye bye reddit.
I said this in another thread - I bet they’re going the YouTube route and are going to start allowing content creators to make money.
Might sound good on the surface but it’s absolutely going to shred what Reddit used to be. Goodbye discussion forum and hello new social media.
I can’t think of a single good reason for anyone to actually want that. Reddit isn’t a site for content creation, it’s an aggregator. It works for YouTube because, well, it’s YouTube. It’s practically synonymous with content creation. But exactly zero people are on Reddit for that.
Also its a forum and its appeal is asking questions to real people. Paying users will destroy that appeal.
The company doesn’t care. They don’t actually understand what reddit is/was and have decided they want it to be something else that they can squeeze money out of. Whatever they end up with is going to be bland and nothing like what it was before. Doubt it will get them what they want in the end.
They don’t seem to realize Reddit isn’t that special. It’s a forum… Digg and Slashdot thought they were special too Myspace before that…
They’re just where most people are at the moment. That can and likely will change. Whether it’s Lemmy or something else entirely.
Yeah it’s not like Facebook where I need all my friends to move. I just need a few thousand people to move to Lemmy and I’ll never need Reddit again.
And since Lemmy is already at, iirc, the 200,000 mark, and is only part of the greater fediverse… I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t feel lonely here.
Same. Honestly I’m getting more responses and conversations than I do in Reddit. And they’re way more positive
Real people who don’t expect something back in return from you is what made reddit special. Advice is given because someone wanted to help as opposed to wanting a like, subscribe, notification bell, patron, merch store, etc. Now they want to turn into into some influencer platform full of people trying to sell shit whether it’s themselves or some crap.
Exactly. People on Reddit usually don’t have any incentive to lie about e.g. the quality of a fridge brand. Give them an incentive and it immediately becomes as useless as Google seo spam
But how few people actually buy gold?
I thought every gold was bought, with points, which were bought with money. So if you see a gilded post, someone paid for that - maybe not the person who awarded it directly if they were gifted points, or received points as part of an award (which cost more points to cover that).
So basically all those awards were a good indicator of how much was being spent on Reddit and in which forums that financial engagement was being valued.
So if some ‘popular’ forums suddenly stop being gilded, then it is a good indicator that the forum has now been abandoned by the most commercially valuable participants. Which looks bad when selling the site.
So Reddit took its ball back, so noone can tell where the money is but them.
