Reddit is going to let you turn gold into money
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23887226/reddit-gold-system-contributor-programOpen linkView original on lemm.ee135
Comments97https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23887226/reddit-gold-system-contributor-programOpen linkView original on lemm.ee
They’re getting desperate to get people back on their site. It’s such a shitshow that they need to bribe users to post.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. I peeked in on Reddit yesterday, the first post was some creep trying to find his step aunt’s Only Fans site. Advertisers are sure to love that.
I think its time bring back all the horrible subs and upvote them to the front page.
/jailbait, /coontown, and all the rest.
I mean, there are still groups that actively brigade the fediverse with AI-generated CSAM. It has actually been a big problem on several instances. And since instances are usually small and only run by a few people, the response can be slow, as all the admins are asleep/not active when it’s happening. It doesn’t get much worse than that.
r/watchpeopledie
r/mmc
What was mmc?
I miss that one.
Damn did he find the only fans? Thats horrible. What was it so I can avoid it?
It was on only fans.
Only fams.
Yes they did
was it even his step aunts OF, or was it an advertisement of that OF account?
I know some people left reddit, but are we sure they actually lost more users than they gained from all the noise?
I haven't used reddit or even visited the site since the policy change, which was the last drop for me. So I only know what I hear and read from other people, and I never see any solid data.
It doesn't matter if they had a net gain, they lost their power mod squad and a ton of regular contributors and they're trying to make up for it with bots and crypto.
Anyone else smell a corpse?
Reddit will persist, but it will be a shell of its former self.
I absolutely agree on your logic, reddit has lost a lot of valuable contributors, and should therefore lose in the long run. But sometimes reality is weird, and doesn't behave according to even the best theories.
No doubt reddit has become worse, but to really suck apparently doesn't preclude success. Let's for arguments sake say reddit is now full of people with a certain level of intelligence. But maybe people of that like to stick together? And there are a lot of them!
Depends on what we call success. Is Facebook a success? If yes, the I agree, reddit could "succeed," but personally I'd call Facebooks track record a huge failure if we compare it's social standing circa 2010 vs now.
Good point, I guess I meant success financially as in surviving. From a content quality standpoint I think reddit had already been declining for years when the API debacle started.
Debates are generally better here on Lemmy despite being probably only 1% the size of reddit.
I've been pissed off at reddit for years now but only now has there been a viable alternative.
I think they might be better because they're only 1% the size of Reddit. It's impossible to have a meaningful conversation with everyone, all at once. And a smaller website means less social pressure, less corporate influence, etc.
Just from casually checking traffic stats on various websites it doesn't seem to have changed much, though I have no idea how accurate those sites are. This is more likely just Spez copying Elon's dumb ideas in an effort to increase monetization
Spez copying more of Elons dumb ideas can only make it worse. but I'm not surprised if they have traffic about as usual, although IMO reddit has become steadily worse since Ellen Pao was fired in 2015, after banning revenge porn.
I'm guessing that is the shitstorm Spez was referring to, when he claimed those blow over. The difference obviously being that the shitstorm against Pao was lead by crazies, and the shitstorm now is way more legitimate.
Overall users? Probably not. The casual lurker does not know or care what an API is.
But the vast majority of content is made by a tiny fraction of the user base, and that fraction are the ones they pissed off. The quality of posts on large subs very much went down, with repost bots becoming even more prominent than before.
Yes, I agree that's a crucial point, question is if there are enough left to allow reddit to stay relevant. They are still a huge forum, that is valuable to have an influence on.
As long as they can maintain traffic, they may still recover.
Which makes it important to bomb old accounts' content. Adding "reddit" to a search term often lead to better results from search engines. It's better it shouldn't anymore.
Yes I agree, I deleted my account a few years ago, and only visited a few subs through bookmarks in my browser.
When the API shit show started, I deleted my bookmarks too, and haven't visited reddit at all for 4+ months. Not even for curiosity.
I have occasionally checked my former favorite sub since leaving - the stats are still the same (~900k users) but the content has gone downhill in a very obvious way. Each time I checked, the sub was filled to the brim with lazy, unfunny shitposts, extremely obvious t-shirt scammers and repost bots, offtopic content, conterfeit merch and sometimes an actually interesting post with like 12 upvotes or so, and you would have to dig quite deep to reach it.
And the sub creator seems to have abandoned it entirely. The description still says that the sub has gone private due to spez' decisions and that you need to use discord instead (the sub has been public again since the initial protest, just the description was never updated) and they haven't touched their own sub in 3+ months.
PS: I just checked again and they have a 2 day old screenshot of a dead frog with 2k upvotes as the current top post.
Wow, I don't like reddit anymore, but that sounds sad. I still remember good times there a few years back. 😐
Just adding to the testimony of others: overall quality of both posts and comments have dropped very noticeably. I visit occasionally on my desktop but there isn’t much to keep me there. I find more good content here.
it's SO bad -- they're delineating 'eligible' content now, which, as of Sept 2023 can't involve 'mature themes', such as NSFW, alcohol, gambling, probably weed.
it's gonna get as bad as youtube, mark my fucking words. cReaToRs building careers out of posting and losing income because reddit changed a rule or enforced a rule in a shitty dumb way. how long until you can't swear
sick, sick people
Waiting for the next Spiff video
me and my 100 bots are excited.
fuck you
fuck you
fuck you
So Reddit is actually moving away from NSFW, I guess it changed significantly over the last decade with OF ads.
Someone probably figured out that the optics of allowing minors on a site which has a massive onlyfans ad presence (like, most of the NSFW now) miggggghtttt appear as if the site is creating a "high school to porn" pipeline, and that's going to be a bad look if the media ever takes notice.
Honestly, I'm shocked this hasn't happened yet. It was creepy enough to have minors on a site which was half porn before most of that porn was legitimately "now that I'm 18 I can finally show you my butthole"
Don't forget the -military propaganda -alcohol -gambling
ads which CONSTANTLY showed up for me (though I am not interested in any of them). Reddit is really a sick site when you think about it. Targeting the youth with the worst bullshit like the tobacco companies used to do.
Wait, so buying more gold doesn’t even offer you a discount? Isn’t it usually the opposite so the devs or whoever can attract more people to buy pricier stuff?
What do you mean? You get a .75¢ discount per 25. VaLuE!
Bots and Spam for fake internet points,
Now going to throw real money at it?
I didn't think the bots and spam could get worse, but it will be.
You have earned $5.13 last month, bravo!
You can cash out when you have earned {roundup(earned * 2.0)}
Thank you {username}
Yeah exactly, this is just going to tank the quality even further.
Totally won’t be abused by people reposting gilded comments and posts.
*bots reposting gilded comments and posts in massive quantities
Yes. Adding a financial incentive to saying whatever everyone already wants to hear, is a brilliant idea that will definitely encourage genuine discussion.
(see Elon's twitter for recent example).
Works for tictoc and instagram. afaik.
Right, both platforms that algorithmically isolate people into echo chambers, only showing people content that offends them in ways that polarises them further, so as to keep them doom-scrolling forever.
My point is that this isn't conducive with a social platform that unites people and builds consensus, but one that extract's money at the cost of inflaming divisions even further.
I mean, thats the point and to pretend that any social media was ever anything but that is to either be a historical revisionist or delusional.
Reddit may have had a different point when Swartz was around, but anything that takes venture capitol money is eventually beholden to their moral prerogative. And that is the extraction of all possible wealth in the shortest possible timeline, even at the cost of the platform itsself. That final bit is key. and its a bummer that Reddit didn't go public before all this fucking around, because we could be making good money off their demise.
Wanting the world to be better is not "delusional".
Identifying something that exacerbates the problems in human society and arguing against it, is not "revisionist".
Just because humans tend to be tribal, doesn't mean the only way to benefit from being a facilitator of communication, is to cynically feed that trait.
If anything, that puts you in an even greater position of responsibility to design the system to do good. Give a system all that humanity creates, and you can make it make you feel whatever you want.
That we are choosing "whatever makes me money" again and again does not mean "whatever will make us grow as a species" isn't also an option.
Pretending that social media was ever meant for anything other than profiting is "revisionist", and you are being delusional if you think otherwise.}
There might be better ways, sure. But that was never the point. The point was always to make as much money as possible.
And to be clear "we" aren't "choosing" anything. You aren't reddit, or twitter, or facebook. You have no agency in this relationship other than to not participate.
Why are you acting as if meaningless defeatist comebacks are somehow successful one-ups?
I'm not pretending to believe anything, I'm fully aware of how current reality works, and has worked. You mistaking my optimism for what might be possible to mean I think that's how the world does work, is on your antagonistic starting point.
If you think profit is the only reason people set out to run companies, then you're the one who is delusional.
And any one of us might alone not amount to much, but even this discussion between you and me will sway at least two minds one way or the other. Scale that up a thousand times, and the direction we take as a species is determined by the ideas exchanged between people, exactly as we are doing now, averaged out among us all.
If all you have to say is nihilistic bullshit about how we should just curl up and die because we can't really ever do enough, then you can fuck off.
If you take VC money, you play by their rules. Its not nihilistic to be realistic about the context of things.
And I appreciate your optimism, even if I consider it to be delusional. But to me that kind of 'inactive hope' is equivalent to what you accused me of doing ('curl up and die').
Proceeding through this world on hopes and prayers that a system set up to do anything but exploit and destroy will do anything but that is deeply problematic and contributes significantly to the issues. Its a kind of toxic positivity that gives people the illusion that they are doing something when they aren't. I don't have time for that.
Is u/spez still there?
My intentions are to never go back to reddit. I'm never going to consider returning while he's there.
I stop by and check the place out once in a while. You're not missing anything. The place has become a dupsterfire filled with bots and spam. I have old comments from years ago getting new comments on them. They're all bot comments. IDK why they are commenting on old posts, but they're doing it a lot.
I got a reply to a 9.5 year old comment two days ago...
Nope, you done did shit the bed already you can't charge admission to the toilet bed now
if you thought bots were a problem before... wait till end of the week!
So Reddit is now a camgirl site, but instead of weird simps paying girls to show their tits it’s weird simps paying other weird simps to.. post shit?
This seems like a bad idea.
Its all part of the ensimpification of the internet
I wonder how much money laundering will occur because of this. I can also see any community discussing anything even remotely illegal that one could buy getting banned because of people using this feature to commit crimes and the shit admins overreacting because of it
oh great lets make reposting bullshit even more attractive by letting folks make money along with their internet points
All new scams!
Reddit paid me $400 for my scrap gold! Invest in Reddit gold today! I did and now my colonoscopy appointment was permanently cancelled! Thanks Reddit!
Man they are getting really desperate...
Christ...
glad I got kicked out of that platform. Admins (not mods) are getting way too trigger happy when it comes to bans, to the point where I was stating the obvious in a normal way and got hit with a ban for "hate". Other than that, I was getting bot messages promoting only fans accounts once every ~2 days
11+ years with no issue, run over with bans lately, second permanent ban. I'm out forever.
indeed, I quit for good after getting banned for telling off a shitty mod. "lol fuck off" is banworthy now. it's a high bar to make another account on a site I was barely clinging on to in the first place. content is still a little scarce here but I still vastly prefer it. even when I do end up on reddit researching ebikes or something it's without an account reading old posts. we're the future and the IPO will be really interesting to watch, since there isn't much worth buying
Ah nice.
Another Elon style pyramid scheme.
Spez worships Musk
Copying Xitter I see. Not that they are doing any better financially.
They must have some good shovels, to digg a hole so deep for themselves.
I can't imagine Reddit will ever recover. It's as bot plagued as twitter and lost all semblance or its former self.
What's with the trend of major corporations taking turns turning themselves to shit? Can't these CEO's see the public backlash and tell themselves "Shit, lets not do what they did"?
Money.
Every one of these companies has the exact same target, which is to make more money for their shareholders than the previous quarter at the expense of everything else.
When a company is small and not making as much it's easier to make little changes to increase capital, but as the company gets larger and they run out of avenues to extract cash from they start getting more and more desperate and their tactics get more and more obvious.
I've just left a company for this exact reason, as their little cash grabbing exercises were starting to impact employees and they were making cuts all over the place in order to keep up the illusion of growth.
These CEOs don't think about the impact that new policies make, they just see more money not being extracted.
This is not as bad as what Digg did way back, and then Digg very quickly became irrelevant.
But it's kind of in the same direction, and I suspect that this could easily have a negative impact. Creating desperate noise that will drown out meaningful content and debate.
Lmao what could possibly go wrong
What kind of idiots are in the boardroom or senior leadership meetings saying, "This is a great idea!" Must be some hella salesmen in there to convince people this won't run the site further in the ground.
Reddit is letting you to use its platform for money laundering.
Don’t worry though, any kind of payment (including gold) for moderating is still not allowed.
Oh great, a new way to launder money! /s
All I can think is "here come the drums". It will be a train wreck...
Someone tell Menendez.
LMK when they're desperate enough for karma conversion, I've got a half mil ready to go
Any old heads remember Living With style forums? This did not work out well for them.
How is this not going to increase the amount of bots, endless re-posts and in general FUD they get inundated with?
On the surface it sounds great and all, but to me it seems like it will accelerate the site being the shithole that it was headed to. Introducing money into anything like this typically brings out the worse in people.
Why do they care if it does? Creators get paid on a per-gold basis, which means people are paying reddit in the first place for gold. Whether bought gold is spent on bots or human users is probably entirely immaterial to the Admins. Reddit sees engagement and (ideally) spending go up.
Reddit could crack down on bots if they want to. It's almost entirely a separate issue. Adding money likely isn't going to change much since obviously bot farms already have a profit motive to spam reddit and the payouts aren't huge.
Fuck reddit but a broken clock is right twice a day. Advertisers pay reddit because there are eyeballs on their site. Eyeballs are on their site because of the things people post. Shouldn't the people making those posts be getting a chunk of that advertising money? Maybe some payment to mods for all their hard work? Do all the negative commenters prefer that reddit just.. keep all the money for themselves and their shareholders?
wHaT abOut thE BotS? Yes, the bots are a problem, they are a problem because reddit actively decides to let them run rampant. There are many tried and true solutions to this problem and with an incentive system they actually become easier to control. It's easier to control people with economic incentives. You can't stop every bot but you can stop most bots and you can make botting harder and more expensive to the point that it's not worth it for most would-be bot users.
All of the last 20 years of social media engagement on the internet has been companies falling for the Pepsi Challenge.
The Pepsi Challenge was an ad campaign by Pepsi to get people to blind taste Coca Cola and Pepsi side by side and decide which one they liked better. Pepsi won a majority of the time, which led to a disastrous reformulation of New Coke (before customer complaints caused a reversal back to Coca Cola "Classic"). Now the consensus is that the Pepsi challenge was given in the wrong quantity to measure: people preferred a sip of Pepsi over a sip of Coke, but the preferences shifted back the other way when asked to drink an entire can.
Modern internet feedback loops reward users for very short term bursts of preference, leading to an engagement loop where each step seems like the best step for happiness and engagement, but where the overall loop leaves people feeling shallow and disengaged. Clickbait works at getting clicks but people don't actually like or respect the sites that do it. Same with influencer accounts working the recommendation algorithm rather than user satisfaction.
Providing a monetary reward will speed up that disconnect, and I think places where influence is rewarded with actual money will bring out a downward spiral.
If the posts are somebody else's work with the watermark cropped off... probably not?
It sounds good in theory but look at how people behave just for the fake internet points. Every top comment in any reasonably large subreddit reads like a bot trying to input all the right words to make the hive mind reward them. It’s why subreddit simulator is so creepy.
I guess you could say that’s pretty much how all communication works but at such a large scale, it starts to get very homogenized and the site starts feeling like one person interacting with themselves. There’s no room for actual discussion because anyone deviating from the hive mind gets buried and attacked. I’m not even talking about politics, go to a guitar subreddit and imply that wood makes a difference in guitar tone. You will get downvoted and all the responses will be over the top indignant which shuts down all discussion.
If you can turn your pandering in to cash, this only gets worse.
Like others said, it sounds good in theory to let users profit as well as the site itself, though ultimately, I think the whole idea of profit in this context is antithetical to online discussion.
In my opinion, an ideal forum or discussion board isn't about farming karma, awards, or real currency. It's about speaking your mind about subjects or topics you are passionate about or have something you want to chime in on. Adding an additional monetary incentive only corrupts those involved, which includes Reddit as we've seen. But I also think this extends to the users as well. If people are compelled monetarily to post opinions that will gain awards or upvotes, discussion will become even more inorganic, for lack of a better term. In my opinion, the site will have lost sight of generating meaningful discussion, even more than it already has.
It's why I like how Lemmy doesn't have universal karma or awards. The incentive of using the site rests solely on the content of the discussions you have, save for the exception of moderators who want to coalesce power. I think monetization is just bloat and only serves to make social media more addictive than it already is.
While I'm not saying Reddit should go the donation-only approach, as I think it is too late for that, I do think keeping monetization to a minimum is in the best interest of any forum.
You should seek mental health services.
You're super paranoid, and hyper-focused on it, to the point of making it into a vast conspiracy theory (... about air purifiers?) with you at its nexus. I don't think I would characterize that as "great mental health."
I don't believe you.
That's not how this works. People who make claims are the ones who need to provide evidence.
You are making a claim. This claim centers on your being harassed by very many different reddit accounts. This, in itself, may be true, though not necessarily for the reasons you believe. This basic claim, standing all by itself, is not extraordinary. People harass other people online, and it's not out of the question that random internet trolls would pile on harassing someone who is making themselves an easy target.
You extend this claim by explaining that some guy who invented something on the iPhone in 2007(?) is himself making all of these accounts only to harass you. I do not believe this. This extension is extraordinary, and so requires an appropriate level of supporting evidence.
You could so very easily be completely done with whatever harassment the u/mustardman account receives (no matter the source) by simply abandoning that account. You haven't. Not only that, but the account you're using here is named exactly the same. You are actively putting yourself into a position of "fighting a just and noble fight against the scoundrel who unjustly attacks you." You are writing a story for yourself where you are the protagonist hero (who has connections to the FBI ... ?), and someone notable is the antagonist villain.
The solution here is for you to walk away, and not care about any of this. If you can - and do - do that, then you're fine. If not (and I predict you will have many explanations for why not), then this is a you problem.