Reddit kills awards and coins
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Comments791https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/14ytp7s/reworking_awarding_changes_to_awards_coins_and/?context=8Open linkView original on lemmy.world
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.
First one, then the other
that explains both the elogated moskowrat and the ex-mod of r/jaibait.
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.
He said a few months ago that he was interested.
Good ol' Elon... delivering the coup de grâce.
Give it a few months
Pls no
Considering how successful Threads has been, they'd be stupid not to try. So they probably won't.
Threads is horrible. Aside from being "not twitter," it's a waste of time.
I have a bad feeling Threads will turn into this. I mean it's literally called threads. Kind of up ends the "threadiverse" name.
Not with a 500-character post limit, it’s not. If it decides to change from Instagram in a Twitter suit to Instagram in a Twitter suit in a Reddit flying saucer…?
That's kind of how instagram has worked... went from Photo Twitter with filters, to video, then to a Snapchat rip-off, then to a TikTok rip-off. Each time they pretty much forgot about the previous functions and promoted the new style and penalized the old one in the algorithms.
I'll have to take your word for how Instagram has developed, since I have used Instagram for a total of about 15 minutes, and found it confusing and unpleasant. And it's definitely a good argument for expecting them to shift ground and go for what's left of Reddit, (maybe after they've mopped up what's left of Twitter, which might not take long, since Twitter is busily mopping itself up).
When I say "Instagram in a Twitter skin," I'm going off articles saying that Threads uses Instagram's algorithm, which seems a little less likely to change than the user interface/general style...? I can try to find my exact sources, if you like. It seems like Meta might have business justifications for adding a separate Reddit-replacement service, though there could be equally strong reasons to morph Threads for that purpose. I'm morbidly interested in seeing how it develops.
Penn and Teller, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Musk and Spez
Hey, Penn&Teller are really good at what they do, and have been doing it for longer than either Twitter or Reddit existed.
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.
This might be the top-down view, but the bottom-up is Telegram forums, Mastodon, Lemmy, and similar distributed hard to close down spaces.
"Divide and conquer" is a valid strategy when one can conquer each part separately, "guerrilla warfare" is the aftermath of failing to conquer the divided parts.
If this is the case, I guess it makes sense why these bad, seemingly "money-losing" changes aren't going to be felt by the company or CEO. Soon as they go public, the elite that pushed these changes will buy up the amount they promised, spez will take his payout, and they will have "union-busted" another prominent social media platform used for progressive ideas and discussion.
Fun fact, most of the money Musk spent on Twitter was underwritten by stocks in Tesla, which have drastically shrunk in value since the purchase.
TSLA has mostly recovered though.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this r/conspiracy-tier theory is really the only explanation for this beyond ‘spez is dumber than a rock with brain damage’.
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.
If only his common sense applied to running reddit.
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.
Haha, right. Insane.
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.
And Threads shows up right on cue with a stated deemphasis on news and politics. Meanwhile politicians are pushing to ban TikTok.
Well, TikTok has China, who would love nothing more than to destabilize the US further to increase their global power. Had it not been for COVID, they only needed to wait since tRump was doing his best to help them out. I suspect this is why it's only TikTok they want to ban anymore; it's the only social media platform they can't directly control.
This has been happening to reddit over the last decade and was only accelerated when reddit was used to facilitate a short squeeze on the market and caused a bunch of "market makers" to lose a lot of money. They couldn't control reddit back then, but they sure can once it's public and they fulfill their fiduciary promises to reddit.
I don’t use TikTok but it seems like young people use it to get the word out whenever they are treated unfairly. Huge portions of Reddit, IG, and YouTube are TikTok reposts now.
Agreed that Threads is sinister, but I think a lot of the reason politicians dislike Tik Tok is that it’s exporting massive quantities of American users’ data to China. US politicians don’t really take it seriously enough to believe that teenagers could use it to start a revolution, but they are pretty sure the Chinese government can use it to spy on Americans.
Depends on the country. All over Europe politicians are using TikTok to promote their political views...
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.
But seriously, why aren't we talking about this more? We've seen some fairly significant mass movements gain real traction on Twitter and Reddit in the past few years and, simultaneously and nearly instantly they are both quickly scrambled and made completely useless for that purpose.
Take a look at the Hong Kong protests. Twitter was a huge way to show the world what was going on. But also full of shills and bots sewing discord
Honestly at this point I can't tell if I'm happy or sad about things like Twitter going away. It was full of horrible discourse and bots and misinformation, but also helped a lot of people. Back in the day it was insanely helpful for directing large areas affected by disasters.
I just don't see the good uses of these platforms ever coming back from all these primadonna CEOs
That's interesting, but there's one problem: are they really that coordinated?
Not to divert too much from your point, but Reddit was a progressive and intelligent community? Thanks for the laugh haha
Reddit is 1000's of communities. It's just as wrong to say that it isn't progressive and intelligent as it is to insinuate it's all one big community in the first place.
However, it's really not a secret that reddit's majority (at least used to) lean left harder than any other social media. Intelligent is maybe subjective and not accurate, but they were at least more progressive than most other social media sites.
Any proof you can offer on this, except for your hunch?
I mean, Twitter? Dude (may as well have) lost 45 billion dollars and is still a hundred -billionaire now with a circle jerk site of "supporters" rather than people talking about how much his cars suck and how unethical his business practices are.
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.
Everything is a Machiavellian drama nowadays and some people are determined to be the rebel heroes.
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.
Musk would've had to agree to making himself look bad, which I don't think he would've done.
I don't know how you could more organically commit corporate suicide than the way they're going about running Reddit recently.
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.
They'd be arrogant and stupid enough to call for it, that's for sure
I'm willing to bet it is somehow connected to BlackRock.
laughs in tencent
This.
People keep laughing at how dumb execs are. Like they are dumber than the average person. They aren't. They pay lots of money to very smart people who tell them what will happen. It's just much easier for them if people think they're dumb instead of malicious. Because again, they have smart people telling them how to play this.
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 selling NFTs (avatars), not buying them.
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.
In other words, they digg their own grave.
I think it used to say on people's profiles something like "This user's gold has paid for x hours of server time"
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.
You can't convince me spez if alt-right. He is what led to reddit becoming so left leaning.
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.
I never used the awards, did awards actually affect the prominence of a post?
Orange checks.
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?
Oh right, that is definitely how they should have done it.
This is exactly what I mean,, this route of self-destruction makes zero sense.
Maybe the same investors who bankrolled Musk’s takeover of Twitter?
It wouldn't surprise me if the investors behind the scenes aren't already interviewing spez's ouster without his knowledge.
Remember the legitimate threat to the status quo of capitalism that came from the GME/robinhood/etc moment, not to mention antiwork/fuckwork. Think about how prevalent discussion of the remote work/4 hour work week/UBI have been on Reddit's front page.
If a general strike was every close to happening in the last decade, it would have been organized and circulated on Reddit.
Billionaires do each other favors.
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.
Pretty crazy about the paying people for content, hadn't heard of that. Seems like a great way for content to get dumbed down to appeal to the lowest common denominator and fish for free money. Oh well, I'm sure reddit has honorable intentions and is doing this solely to benefit its average user.
could be coke-fuelled manic behaviour. or maybe meth. Whatever it is, spez is coming unglued.
It's very Animal Farm-esque watching them degrade in real time, and continue to destroy what they built
It's pretty entertaining to watch though, like a train wick in motion
I'm definitely enjoying it, the self destruction of both Twitter and Reddit.
I don't understand how this change hurts them. Is it that it makes their premium subscription less enticing? I never had premium or used awards, so I don't get it.
It's what's coming next.
Like Mel Brooke’s The Producers yet with more to lose and even more stupid.
Ha, yea, like the producers, except that they were working toward tanking the show for a defined payday, and Reddit it's killing itself before the IPO to give itself a smaller payday?
This is what happens when you outsource your strategic management decisions to ChatGPT
There's no way that chat GPT could make decisions this outlandish and nonsensical though, could it?
Still not using LLMs yet myself
Get out of my head man!
I must have missed this. Do you have a link?
I just frantically searched for like 15 minutes trying to find what the hell I was talking about, haha.
My bad for saying "announced", there was no official announcement, there are actually lines of code in the reddit apk that outline a Contributor program that allows users to convert their karma/awards into real money:
"Fake internet points are finally worth something! Now redditors can earn real money for their contributions to the Reddit community, based on the karma and gold they've been given. How it works:
Here's the link to the article:
https://www.androidauthority.com/reddit-contributor-program-3343397/
Paying their users for content is actually a good thing on paper. In fact, it counteracts the largest argument over API charges that I had: That they were gonna make more than per MDAU via ads, but have the audacity to keep all of it, while not even giving the users that provide it nary a crumb.
The problem with this is: What is a fair price for user generated content? What is a fair redistribution based on DAUs and activity? Is there even a fair model? How could you guarantee it when there will be cabals to provide content at a certain level, as was seen when blogrings tried it in the late 2000s?
Unfortunately, there's no easy answer, because reddit will always give the least amount they can endure, especially as they are not profitable. And when they are, they will bargain down because they need cheap UGC to function. Such a system is probably going to be unfair by philosophy and design.
I think even on paper paying users for content without any sort of regulation, standards, or guidelines will rapidly lower the quality of that content.
There are already so many accounts, and I'm not even talking about bot accounts, that focus on saving front page posts, coming back in 3 or 4 days, and reposting those posts.
I can only see the low effort post situation deteriorating once Reddit starts paying karma farmers.
Seriously, spend a bit of time looking into Gamestop / superstonk. It explains all of it. And you may get some real money out of it. DRSGME.org will work if you don't wanna use reddit, r/superstonk. There is a lot to digest but it may change the world as we know it.
https://www.drsgme.org/
I didn't want to use Reddit, so thanks for providing the other site. Direct registration does make a lot more sense, I didn't even know there was a separate agency underwriting my stocks, but if the transfer agent at a particular company can transfer the stocks to your name, why is that not yet part of the system?
I know I'm not being super clear but that's because I buy my stocks through a third party brokerage and don't really understand the details.
I guess my question is why is direct registration not the norm (I'm guessing advantageous capitalism) and is direct registration a new movement?
That is the perfect question. It should be the norm for long term investments.
I don't know when it was but the large banks/brokers lobbied and made it against the law for companies to tell (or even suggest) there investor to DRS.
The only down side I know of is that when selling, shares have to be paired with a buyer, which isn't instant (may even take a couple days).
But the up side is they cannot lend your shares to short them against you. Also, if the price was to go brrrrrrrrr and be in the hundreds or more (cough cough millions) brokers can sell your shares for you, at any price, and say it was for your safety as the stock was volatile.
Wait a tick. if I buy 100 shares of Microsoft from a brokerage, the brokerage can still short those shares that I have bought?
Yes! Or more accurately "lend" them to someone who will.
Even if you have a broker that promises not to there is minimal regulation to stop them and if they get caught the fine is a (small) fraction of the money they make on that transaction (which is just a cost of doing business). I believe this was shown in r/superstonk just by someone looking at the sec filing.
That's crazy, it feels a lot like the fractional reserve scheme or also when banks can lend the money out and you get a ridiculous interest rate back on the money they're making off of your money.
I'm going to look into shorting the stock you buy though, since I don't know about that one yet. Thanks!
I bet they just don't like seeing all the awards go to fuck u/Spez posts.
Pour one out for the OG.
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!
"Hide Awards" in settings?
It's almost like they're allergic to working on their app.
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
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.
Comments are saltier than expected
And these are the people who stayed...
At least the bots that stayed
Bots would just say it's great.
Did you see that thread with LLMs telling us what they thought of Reddit? They didn’t say it’s great.
Most of them still won't do shit about it.
Eh screw it, thine to break the redditless streak.
It's always hilarious watching a group of people getting fucked over and over and still doing nothing about it.
It's also very sad because watching mad redditors is like watching spousal abuse.
Sad but accurate comparison
good.
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.
Who cares. reddit has killed reddit. Just be here now. Ready to move on.
wish me luck :) I'll keep you updated.
You dare link me to that vile place?!
Next: Subscribe to /r/Pics - $.89/month!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Zero percent chance this isn't a cover to launch something more predatory for monetization reasons.
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.
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
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.
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.
What is next, I really wonder...?
Changing name to Fuckit?
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.
I bet they replace awards with some NFT crypto bullshit
They have no idea what they're doing. It's kind of hilarious but also really sad.
Mostly I don't understand why they are announcing this without sharing what they're doing instead
What is happening with reddit lol
They are taking a page out of Musk's book and making Reddit way worse for no good rea$on
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.
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.
Wonder how that’s going to work with this
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.
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!
..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.
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.
I have an annoying amount of coins still. What do you think would be the best way to use them? If they're not showing up at all, it seems moot to award the anti-reddit/changes comments or posts.
I do too. I was given premium because alien blue and something else so I have tons and tons of coins. I don’t think it’s worth giving Reddit the traffic to give them out, especially if they are all going to disappear in a. Couple months anyhow. My account is still active I just haven’t been to Reddit since the 11th June.
I had premium for maybe a year or two, back when it was first implemented. Coins just piled up because of it and Sync didn't have the ability to award so I just forgot about them. (Or maybe it did have the feature and I'm a dum-dum)
I very much enjoyed ripping out all of the award code in Sync for Lemmy.
Love Sync! I think I've purchased it like, 5 times across two Google accounts and the pro/dev/beta or whatever versions over the last 10 years.
I did have a question; if Lemmy were to introduce flairs, would you want to reimplement them? I absolutely loved being able to see which team someone supported on r/cfb so I knew whether or not I could respect their opinion.
This is very important to me.
I need to judge people based on their favorite teams...
If Lemmy devs add it sync will support it
Heyyy! Thanks so much for all the work you put into Sync (pro) over the years! Hopefully the transition to Lemmy hasn't been too much of a hassle. Apologies for not seeing the award feature in the app - I'm clearly a dum dum :-D
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
Ah I could only show awards, Reddit never allowed 3P apps to give / buy awards.
Give them to me so I don't have to see ads 😂
How many? I have some too, but not many, just 800.
I'm showing 19.9K coins. So... a lot to give away.
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
Tis a silly place.
What's reddit?
Just resign spez
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
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.
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.
Its a good decision but man, the execution is horrible.
the site used to be so good but now its just going downhill, welp it was fun while it lasted
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
Reddit is nothing but an another advertising platform now.
Lemmy chads just can't stop winning
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.
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.
But why?
Wonder if this is connected to that leaked contributor/paid karma thing that got leaked a few days ago
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
"Business as usual" lmao what is this then
Its fine more users on lemmy then
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. 🤔
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¢
"thanks for gold, kind stranger" is no more
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 think the protest over this idiocy will eclipse the blackout.
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.
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
... and no one cared
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.
They are making it easy to move here.
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
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
Lmao wut
Just when you think the dumpster fire can't possibly burn any brighter, u/spez comes running with a barrel of gasoline.
I've got 14600 coins to spend. What should I do with them? Don't want to benefit Reddit...
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 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
NO WAY HAHAHAHA
I really wonder what @ChristianSelig thinks of this
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.
Lemmy is the new old Reddit, Reddit is the new new Twitter.
TIL - I had been adding them all to the uBlock rules!
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.
Thats a great thread to get people to move to lemmy lol
Especially now that the Memmy app is on the app store and its so similar to Apollo
Killing awards, after killing awards, is bloody stupid. Like ffs.
We should add awards to lemmy :,)
Awards are nothing in value. Awards could be used for harassment.
Twitter and Reddit seem bent on crashing popular social media sites. If they vanished completely tomorrow along with Facebook, what would be left?
As much as I hate these awards cringey bullshits I have to say it is indeed a bad implementation
Wow, and pretty shitty of them to still be selling those coins for months ahead when they very well know that they are useless.
It’s like the API thing didn’t piss off enough users, so now spez is switching to Plan B.
If he isn’t trying to destroy the company, though, I have no idea what the goal is.
As we saw with Reddit gifts, anything that could help develop an audience or good publicity is not destined to last forever.
At first I was all "I dont care. Nothing to do with me" and then I noticed a new email.. fuck off reddit!
Banning coins that people paid for, hmm something is fishy and since the announcement they just nuked all my accounts. For ban evasion on main page sub that I never visit. I said F it and I'm here now. I have a nasty feeling that they are going to ban all the porn pre IPO. Some of my accounts were mods on some NSFW subs that weren't too big. Start small and work your way up from there.
They can go the way of Tumblr/Digg/Etc I'm done.
I will be curious if they nuked my accounts at work. I have never cross pollinated between machines (no upvote/comments between work/home). If I do have bans then they might be using AI to look for common misspelling/writing patterns/ect
W
Could be worse, could have gotten exit scammed on a shitcoin!
I hate to be this guy but isn't this a good thing? I mean fuck reddit to death and all that jazz. But getting rid of all those oversaturated awards does not sound like a too bad of a decision to me. At least not to the consumers.
Never really liked the clutter anyways.
That's seriously surprising, what of reddit is going to still be reddit by the time their IPO starts?
I don’t understand why Reddit would do this, but this definitely feels like most users would appreciate it. I always hated awards and premium. Hiding awards was the best feature in Apollo.
Can someone explain why everyone is attacking Reddit for this awesome, user friendly decision?
and now premium is even more useless than it already was
not even surprised, just sitting here watching spez's dumbassery slowly kill off the website
I thought you had to buy awards to give out (or included as part of paid or “premium” Reddit). So they are killing a source of income or reducing the feature set?
Lol. Glad my only contribution to that site was shit posts and whatever ad revenue they can squeeze or get past my ad blocker.
They can't remove awards from a particular comment without people noticing.
Somebody make an image merging Spez and Musk faces please.
I am actually okay with this. Now what are all of the gilding farmers going to do? Oh no...anyways.
I’m imagining a future where redditors award each other with nfts and crypto coins
Interesting how I can’t find this anywhere on /r/all
So they're taking away Awards without a replacement already to go... What could possibly go wrong?!
They’re just straight up making shit up about excuses for getting rid of awards.
Sounds like they're actually going through with the leak saying they'll pay high karma users much faster than I thought.
Can we pay for a blue checkmark yet?
I don't care about awards that much but Redditors certainly do so it will have a negative impact.
Just used the last of my coins to award a piracy post lol.
I’m very curious why they would do this. Curiouser and curiouser.
Seems like an overall bad change. Feels like these platforms are trying to drive themselves into the ground all at once.
This actually makes sense and I predicted this a while back. Having that type of stuff requires a much more complex database setup. It's very inefficient. I'm assuming that's the reason they're getting rid of it.
tldr: they're trying to implement more expensive awards and coins
Comments on Reddit about people unhappy. Yet, they’ll still login again tomorrow. Nothing will change. Like the protest that did nothing.