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

    • trashcan
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      2 years ago

      I can’t identify with giving reddit money but I can sympathize with people who were saving monthly coins they paid for. Seriously, it has to be deliberate now. Why piss off your most loyal, paying customers? Is it a test?

      • @[email protected]
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        72 years ago

        Yeah, it’s a mystery to me how much money they got from these types of things. It’s a company that is supposedly not profitable, yet there is online rage about something some people bought. It makes me wonder about so much. First, I had no idea so many people payed money for these things. Second, Reddit wants us to believe, through legal loophole magic and accounting, that it is not profitable.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 years ago

      i used coins basically as a bookmark feature for great posts; it was nice to give a treat to a good poster as well. so incredibly stupid they’re destroying the site like this

        • @[email protected]
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          32 years ago

          Sometimes prepaying is the more frugal option, since there’s usually a discount for buying in bulk. As of January of this year, I wouldn’t have believed you if you had told me that Reddit was going to do something so egregious that I would permanently stop browsing there.

          • @[email protected]
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            02 years ago

            Any kind of paying for this kind of junk, whether it’s prepay or not, is a waste of money and people should just stop doing it. There are far better things to do with money than to buy some digital thing-a-ma-bob that is useless and can disappear any old time at the whim of the web site owner. I mean, I could make the same argument about knickknacks, because they’re silly and collect dust. However, a web site can’t remove them from your house. So, even a knickknack that collects dust is a better purchase than digital coins and awards and all that other bullshit.

    • @[email protected]
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      302 years ago

      I hated the “coin culture” with a passion (hey, look, it’s Bill Gates, let’s give him tons of paid emoticons he won’t care about!), but it’s clear this move is part of Reddit’s further enshittification. You can bet whatever replaces coins will be even shittier, and I think Reddit’s users know it.

    • @[email protected]
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      162 years ago

      Yea I think the outrage is or should be directed at removing the already given awards. Just to go and wipe everything is not a great idea

      • SSTF
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        62 years ago

        Especially gold. The other awards were arguably bloat, but gold was iconic to reddit. All those classic posts now missing their gold seems wrong.

    • @[email protected]
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      322 years ago

      As someone who would never pay for reddit coins or premium, it’s still pretty easy to identify with them.

      They paid for a product and now it’s being removed with no compensation or refund. That’s total bullshit regardless of what the product was.

      • @[email protected]
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        32 years ago

        It’s hard for me to identify with them because it’s just not very smart to pay money for that kind of crap. I don’t buy stuff that can be taken away like that. It is true that nothing lasts forever, but digital doo-dads only last as long as the web site you bought them on. I hope they learned their lesson. I doubt they did. People pay for this stuff every day on web sites. Cosmetic stuff for avatars, special edition avatars, little award thingies, blah blah blah. It’s all a waste. It’s very easy for people to say, “eh, it’s only a dollar” or “eh, it’s only 50 cents” or “meh, it’s only 5 bucks” but if you repeatedly spend money on those things it adds up. So, do I feel bad for these outraged people? No, I don’t. They should smarten up and stop wasting money.

      • @[email protected]
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        32 years ago

        sounds like an easy chargeback claim if that’s the case, “service not rendered/doesn’t exist anymore” might lose the acct out of it but who really cares at this point

  • @[email protected]
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    422 years ago

    Is spez trying to beat Musk’s record for number of strategic blunders made while running a tech company?

  • @[email protected]
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    122 years ago

    they just want to become as generic as possible lol. “Let’s see how much fun we can drain from the lives of our zombies”

  • @[email protected]
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    482 years ago

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

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

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

    • @[email protected]
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      22 years ago

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

    • @[email protected]
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      52 years ago

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

      • @[email protected]
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        12 years ago

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

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

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

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

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

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

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

    • @[email protected]
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      52 years ago

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

      • @[email protected]
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        82 years ago

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

    • @[email protected]
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      262 years ago

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

      • TWeaK
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        52 years ago

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

          • TWeaK
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            2 years ago

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

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

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

      • @[email protected]
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        72 years ago

        Sort of feels like spez made a bad decision, went all out on it, and in order to drown out the consequences he decided to snort some crack before deciding what to do.

        • chrishazfun
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          52 years ago

          @InternetTubes @phx He did the Jerma joke “Do so much dumb shit that people have problems trying to figure out why people are mad at you” but unironically and irl

    • @[email protected]
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      232 years ago

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

      • @[email protected]
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        52 years ago

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

        • @[email protected]
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          82 years ago

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

          Sorry for wording it so badly.

          • @[email protected]
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            32 years ago

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

    • @[email protected]
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      72 years ago

      I’m with you, but judging by the number of upvotes this post got, apparently we’re in the minority on this.

    • @[email protected]
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      1222 years ago

      While I agree that user-generated reddit topics are best left to a dedicated community, I also think that published articles discussing the platform are appropriate for any Technology community; no different than Twitter, Threads, or other social media platform news coverage.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 years ago

      i was hoping with lemmy people would stop caring about something completely arbitrary like this

  • @[email protected]
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    162 years ago

    Wasn’t that one of the exclusive “features” of the official app. I guess there’s no point for exclusive features now.

    • @[email protected]
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      172 years ago

      that used to be what i though would be my queue to exit…until i realised that my reddit experience was basically RIF… so yea if they want to get rid of another great chunk of users, do get rid of old reddit, do it spez!

      • mintiefresh
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        32 years ago

        Same here.

        I didn’t think old reddit would outlast me lol

      • @[email protected]
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        82 years ago

        Haha same. “Oh I will just use old reddit” forgetting that 95% of my internet usage is mobile and old.reddit is nearly impossible to navigate on mobile. I have been 94% Lemmy since July.

      • @[email protected]
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        32 years ago

        It’s funny whenever this is brought up on a reddit admin post. They always come with some stat saying a tiny % of users use old.reddit.com like that means people barely use it and therefore useless. But I see a lot of active posters talk about it which means those are probably the users you want to keep around lol.

    • scytale
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      122 years ago

      That’s gonna be the final nail in the coffin for me. As of now I only go there for my city’s subreddit as the fediverse equivalent isn’t quite active yet.

    • @[email protected]
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      62 years ago

      It’s the obvious answer, but I wonder if it would implode in their face in some interesting ways.

      Reddit has been the epicenter of a lot of crypto communities over the years. They’ve been there for plenty of projects to rise and fall, and most importantly, the wholesale evolution of the market. The remaining crypto market is not a place where you can hope to launch a new, lasting project on hope, enthusiasm, or promises of future utility. For anything outside a few very narrow cases (actual CBDC or related projects), the announcement of a new project is little more than starting the count-down to the inevitable rug-pull, technical collapse, or financial meltdown. All this is documented in huge detail across their communities.

      Launching a new crypto-based product in 2023+ would be like Airbus saying “we’re going all in on propeller triplanes.” It’s sketchy, and they have full knowledge that it’s sketchy. I sort of wonder what promises and stories they’ve tossed towards their existing investors, who I imagine are frantically Googling the phrase “breach of fiduciary duty” already.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          I suspect we’ll see products that end up getting branded CBDC (e-yuan, e-rupee, e-dollar), but it may look nothing like blockchain hype projects.

          There are plenty of real world problems that a natively digital transaction system can mitigate. The obvious use case is “I’m in Los Angeles, how can I pay someone in Edinburgh three pounds without spending days for settlement, worrying about inter-bank communication, or dealing with private firms that have turned it into a rent-seeking space that adds huge fees”. Note this can be done without some elaborate blockchain system. In fact, a centralized service operated by the state has the right incentive alignment: they are more beholden to the social and political goal of “efficient commerce helps economic growth” rather than the private-enterprise mindset of “if I can get people to consume the tokens I already own, I can be a kazillionaire.”

    • SSTF
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      22 years ago

      I raise you this inanimate carbon rod.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    This reminds me of the youtube dislike button thing. When a popular majority opinion pops up against the rich, it usually brings lots of gold and platinum awards which drives engagement and visibility. It is not very advertiser/owner class friendly and gives too much power to the masses.

    Any new system they create, if any, will not allow this kind of behavior.