Reddit is ending Reddit Gold and users are furious
3 years ago by L4sBot to c/technology
Reddit is ending Reddit Gold and users are furious::undefined
The highest honor in all the fediverse
Awwww shit son, a Lemon-Egg! Fucking wild! Top tier shit, A+ lad. Well done.
🍋🥚
That makes me feel all curdled inside.
Capitalism is fine as long as people aren’t complete scumbags about it. Rare, I know. It’s a human morality proposition.
Capitalism is great, but it absolutely must be tempered by regulation.
The problem comes when the capitalist gains influence over the regulator, aka, regulatory capture.
To be a little more exact, capitalism is great, but only if each person has roughly the same amount of money, no matter what they do. That is what you're trying to achieve with regulations.
Capitalism could be amazing if the psychos of society didn’t constantly rise to the top then again the same could be said for communism and just about every other system we’ve tried.
Want to say, "Communism" is democratic control of the economy. So ideally there is no "top".
So does any other economic model.
Everything is perfect if the premise is that there are no problems
Capitalism is awful. It's madeup unequality
I kind of agree, but it's also shitty he's involved with the PGA/Saudis now
Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and married to Serena Williams.
What do you mean?
OP mentioned how badly the company was managed. So yea, 2017 saw them take a lot of money, go in a hiring spree… and do jack shit to improve the platform.
Fast forward to now and mods used 3rd party apps to do the job that they do FOR FREE, all while Reddit made… NFTs?
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.
It also came with a bot
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.
Capitalizing off the backs of Community
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.
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.
When life gives you lemons, just say fuck the lemons and bail.
But I like lemons!
What about combustible lemons? 🍋🔥🔥🔥
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.
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
Reddit hurt itself in its confusion
You don’t belong in this world
But enough talk. Have at you! wine glass shatters
DIE YOU FILTHY BACTERIAAAAAAA
My belief is that they want to tokenize Karma and any other reward/currency will compete against their new tradable currency.
I believe they had already said years ago that the r/CC moons was a test run for something site-wide.
Personally I made $300 after moons first tanked, just from some lame comments in the subreddit that was ruined by the scheme.
I will likely use my 150k+ Karma account for profit if this happens and it won't be for the benefit of the community like the last decade of my activity used to be.
Lemmy is now where I participate in a positive way.
Precisely, karma whoring was already rampant and detestable.
reddit's oldest profession
Talk on the main post on Reddit that discussed these changes is that some of the API change documentation included information on what change will actually happen now that they're sunsetting coins. Tipping replacing coins and karma having monetary value. If thats true Reddit is truly dead. Read that post and made a Lemmy account!
Yeah, I have a feeling, just based on the fact that I've had a lot of posts do really well, that I could make some money from Reddit if they do that.
But I'm not greedy. I'm not rich either, but fuck them, I wouldn't participate if they asked me.
Take the money and donate to Lemmy? Idk, the way I see it, money in your hands is better than money in Reddit's hands. Your karma is going to be there anyways, the difference is merely deciding whether Reddit gets to keep the money or not.
It won't be retroactive, I'm sure. In order to do that, I would have to go back to being an active Reddit user, which I will not do. I am done with Reddit.
I think that they're going to tie it to corporate sponsorship. Instead of some generic "take my energy" token, they'll charge companies for their logo to go into a karma award, and so instead of a generic award you pay for, it's an award that another company paid reddit for as a form of advertising (probably with some terrible logo or slogan attached to it) AND they'll make you pay for it to give it to others. Why have something they get paid for once when they can have something they'll get paid for twice?
Welcome. As you can see lots of room for growth, but there is a lot of positive effort being made.
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.
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.
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.
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
You know the company and the users are completely divorced when you read something like that. Redditors have spent years telling each other that awards are useless and a waste of money - then the admins touch it and everybody flips their lid. I for one am glad I'm no longer part of that toxic relationship.
There was that confessional reddit mod post that admitted some mods were blowing thousands of dollars on bots to boost the popularity of their own sub. I've also seen people complain that they blew hundreds to thousands on shitty avatars.
I'm in awe at the sheer lunacy of some people. These are people that don't even know the concept of "touching" or "grass".
The problem is treating an entire community as some sort of singular entity. People do this shit all the time and make claims like "redditors are so hypocritical" when in reality you have two completely different groups of people saying different things but are both users in the same community.
That was a cool thing to do. You're a nice person!
I was subscribed to reddit Premium for a long time (at the old, grandfathered in price), because it gave me ad free browsing, the ability to sort saved posts into categories and filtering subs from r/all before that was available to everyone.
Premium also gave you 700 coins per month, so now I have 20000 coins saved up.
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.
Jokes on them, I deleted all my gilded content.
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
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
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 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
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.
Oh I guarantee you there are plenty of sunk cost people who won't leave but hate everything about it.
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.
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.
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
Gild all the 'fuck /u/spez' comments while you still can.
Well, Spez did say he admired what Musk did with Twitter...
Glass onion, mate. There's a human psychological blindness to see the rich as fundamentally competent and smart. To believe there are layers to it. But fundamentally, it's transparent. It's just incompetence.
I definitely subscribe to Hanlon's razor, as well as the idea that for every rich person who earned it there's a hundred, or a thousand, that were given it.
I was just being sarcastic though. I don't know anything about spez either. I just like to joke about everything.
Here’s what I received today… first time I’ve visited Reddit in over a month:
Hello from Reddit,
We're reaching out because you have Reddit Premium and/or Reddit Coins on your account.
TL;DR: We're making updates to awards and coins on Reddit that we'll complete by September 12, 2023. As part of this, we made a decision to move away from Reddit coins and awards. This includes the 700 monthly coins* and Premium Awards, which are currently part of the Reddit Premium experience.
You'll still be able to use your Reddit Coins until September 12, after which they'll be removed from your account.
Note: all other current Premium perks will still continue to exist, including the ad-free experience.
As we looked at our current awarding system, there was consistent feedback from redditors that stood out – particularly around the clutter from awards and all the steps involved with awarding content. We also learned that redditors want awarded content to be more valuable. With that, we are reworking how great content and contributions are rewarded on Reddit. We will have more updates to share soon.
If you have further questions please check out our announcement post to read more about the update.
- This perk is part of the paid Reddit Premium experience
I got this message too... Guess maybe I'll look and see what the hell coins i could possibly have .. I've only had people give me gold like twice over 15 years though and never even really knew what the hell to do with it.
I ended up with a fairly sizable pile of gold after ten years of drunken shitposting and never really got the appeal of the gold lounge sub. I just went around and threw random shinies at people saying especially vitriolic things about Huffman before nuking my account.
They have like 500 various awards so just pick some that look fun and decorate funny comments I guess.
Actually useful? Nah
I'm just gonna let mine die. I don't want to use the site any more than necessary. The kinds of posts I'd want to draw attention to at this time are those that would appear hypocritical to give rewards to. I don't want to give the impression of having given Reddit money (even though I've never bought a reward and all my coins are from receiving).
I've also got 300, no clue what to do with it. Maybe give out 3 random silvers? Not that it does anything.
It’s almost like spez secretly enjoys Lemmy. Doing the work for us.
I just gave away 26 Reddit golds to everyone I liked in /r/RedditAlternatives
Never paid for gold but somehow had like 10 years of it on my 16 year account.
No compensation? Seriously?
If people were a premium subscriber they got a certain amount of coins each month. I can understand being pissed if you were saving them with the intention of using them later.
Luckily I never gave reddit money.
Man, they already managed to piss off their tech savy users, then their moderators, now their paying users. All thats left is pissing off the content creators and the site is basically done.
Do they? I used RIF and honestly don't recall a way to even see or use coins on there. If there was I never touched it.
if they continue using reddit
are they actually furious?
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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
I am there only because I feel obliged to finish my artwork series for people- but after that, bye bye reddit.
“Mind Your Business,” Declares Man, Seen Repeatedly Throwing Himself Down Up Escalator
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.
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
In early June, there was like 300 users on Lemmy.
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.
My account is just gone. I wasn't a big time poster or anything, but 10 years of use and my account doesn't exist. I only went back on to delete it.
Honestly, not furious. But I guess I don't count as a reddit user any more. Still, did anyone ever care about these features?
For me these already came in after I wished the reddit devs would just do maintenance.
This just feels like the inevitable next step of Reddit becoming a 'monetizable' platform for influencers. It's annoying but it's a tried-and-true method of getting paid engagement; get influencers(marketed/advertised personalities) to engage and build a following.
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.
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.
Likely to each other by the very end
That is what pushed me to Lemmy- Why the hell would you do that? There is no reason for it.
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.
It think they're mad because some of them already paid for a year and the awards and gold were part of why they got premium. Now awards and fold are disappearing mid-september and they feel they aren't getting what they paid for anymore.
I paid for coins a while ago because I liked giving people reddit gold as a reward for good content. I was just told to go spend it on something that they will remove anyways (awards). That is is why I'm furious. I paid real money for them to just remove them. They don't even convert it into premium for myself. I would have to go to a subreddit and give gold awards to someone else to in turn get them to award me premium. I'm just done.
So new user here. Someone got a link to all the cat subs here on lemmy?
Here are some cat communities for you: !illegallysmolcats@lemmy.world !cats@midwest.social !aww@lemmy.ml
There is !aww@lemmy.world
There is also another site that I've found to have lot of cat content with squabbles.io which is another alternative people have turned to.
https://squabbles.io/s/aww https://squabbles.io/s/cats https://squabbles.io/s/Blackcats https://squabbles.io/s/CalicoCats
Also !cat@lemmy.world
I would have to go to a subreddit and give gold awards to someone else to in turn get them to award me premium
There did used to be a hacky way to gild your own posts, I don't know if it ever got patched
I can barely imagine giving a shit.
Idgaf. They don’t have to be there.
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While reddit makes further enemies, I laugh because I know the #fediverse will benefit from their outflow. The fediverse will become even more diverse.
save