Reddit kills awards and coins
Reddit kills awards and coins
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...
Reddit kills awards and coins
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...
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
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
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.
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.
Any proof you can offer on this, except for your hunch?
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.
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.
I don't know how you could more organically commit corporate suicide than the way they're going about running Reddit recently.
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.
Did they? Do you have a link to that? I'd be very interested in that. The whole situation is so bizarre
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?
guess we'll see blue checks on reddit too
Orange checks.
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.
they'll be like hey look so hyperlinks don't work anymore
How much until all the links open on an internal browser like in LinkedIn?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
they announced they were going to start paying people for content
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.
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?
I bet they just don't like seeing all the awards go to fuck u/Spez posts.
I think that's actually closer to the mark than many realize. Awards are great when they are not directed at the company or it's rep in a negative manner as they show positive engagement and help the company with sales marketing. When awards and upvote/downvote counters are used to highlight that the users are having a negative experience then it hurts the platform image. Similarly to how YouTube removed the downvote tracker because their marketing team realized it hurt their sales revenue with business partners.
TBH, I don't think they care. It is monetization and engagement of their microtransactions...as smug as they may be, I think it's all about $
That would fit with the Musk comparisons
I was going to post, "Do they understand their user base?" but after reading your post, I believe they do.
They had the good part of a month to understand.
Most likely so.
That's where I'm putting my money. They don't want clearly shit dogshit admin posts to get poor awards
Pour one out for the OG.
I like how you didn't even bother to crop out the dot 😂
The less you try, the more authentic it is
Did you expect anything less from Margot Robbie, master digital artist?
Take my Lemmy Lemon 🍋
I’m going to adopt this as an award lol
We should make our own
Edit: I propose a Lemmy Green Bean Award
With hookers and blackjack.
Or beans and old ass memes.
I support this! Then all the new folks will be hella confused with the award system, expecting something rewarding, when it's actually just arbitrary fun.
🏅
Sigh. Still not an Oscar.
I thought we all agreed on aLemmynium
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!
First, many don’t appreciate the clutter from awards
"Hide Awards" in settings?
It's almost like they're allergic to working on their app.
They could have fixed the clutter and still accumulated money. They’re really bad at business
They could have fed ads through the API instead of shutting down clients. They aren’t very smart over there.
Not surprising considering what it is. I've seen people claim that the API is quite bad, to say it nicely. Can't imagine the app's code to be much better :)
They literally bought out one of the best apps, brought it in house, and actively made it the worst app. It's almost amazing how consistent reddit's management failures have been.
They developed a GraphQL version of the API like 5 years ago... then marked it as "internal", obfuscated it, and didn't let anyone access it. Except the official app.
Hate to beat the dead horse but Apollo had that
So did sync. You could hide awards completely, display them all, or have it just show that the post had been awarded, but no detail on what the award was.
Keep bringing it up. It’s clear that Spez was annoyed and offended by Apollo and we shouldn’t let him drop the topic.
Not disagreeing but I hated the stupid awards. It was one the things I hated most about the official app.
Reddit has recently become allergic to taking Ws as well.
I browse on old.reddit and used unlock to block .awardings-bar a long time ago. It's amazing how much nicer it is not seeing all that junk.
I've never seen this be an issue for anyone.
I hated the clutter and many people mentioned it when they talked about 3rd party apps being killed.
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
If I was more paranoid, I’d say that the fucking stupid bean meme bs that happened right when the Reddit api shut down was awfully convenient for Reddit.
I thought it was hilarious and made the community feel fun and alive, which Reddit hasn’t felt like for a long time.
The beans lasted all of like three days. It was hardly a problem
If anything, it reminded me of early Reddit.
I thought it was very redditesque
Bean memes are a tradition in shitposting meme groups, its to be expected
Here, please enjoy this lemmy lemon award 🍋
You've been authorized to post on c/lemonparty 🍋🥳
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
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.
As an advertiser, I suspect they're trying to give us more groups of people to target. Ads are expensive, and generate a lot more money than Reddit gold
Oh definitely. Killing third party apps means everyone using Reddit gets served ads now, so they're going hard on that.
As an advertiser
I have a serious question for you, if you have a moment. Do advertisers have any way of knowing what percentage of the views they're paying for are actual humans, and what are bots?
Because it seems to me that this is an excellent scam on a corporate level: Reddit ditches users and mods in favor of bots interacting with bots, the number of accounts and views don't dip dramatically, and Reddit, Inc. continues to pull in all that sweet advertising revenue because there's no way for advertisers to know the difference for sure, or the ratio of bot to humans on the site or in a sub with any kind of precision.
I'd appreciate your thoughts on this, because I've been pondering this for a while but do not have any knowledge of advertising metrics, or what would stop a dishonest/bad-faith board like Reddit's from doing this to some degree just because they can.
Are they that good per view(and hence per bandwidth cost) though? Everyone I've heard who knows more than I had been saying that internet ads have always only marginally paid the bills and that purchases for microtransactions make way more money.
I cannot imagine that ads do not generate more revenue than me buying Reddit premium and buying coins for awards.
Are they that good per view(and hence per bandwidth cost) though? Everyone I've heard who knows more than I had been saying that internet ads have always only marginally paid the bills and that purchases for microtransactions make way more money.
wish me luck :) I'll keep you updated.
Who cares. reddit has killed reddit. Just be here now. Ready to move on.
You dare link me to that vile place?!
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!"
Next: Subscribe to /r/Pics - $.89/month!
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.
That 3P hits too hard haha
Very true. It seems like a solid plan to flush the current users and replace with more gullible ones.
Very often in such schemes the old users leave and the new ones never come.
With the collapse of social media, there's not going to be many new users to claim.
I'd have a hard time believing that anybody still on reddit isn't like that.
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.
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.
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?
Zero percent chance this isn't a cover to launch something more predatory for monetization reasons.
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.
Probably, but that is a horrible business plan for Reddit. The awards system ended up being a great idea for Reddit to gain revenue; a mega upvote.
There’s rumors that Reddit may launch some new cryptocurrency. Based on code in the Reddit’s Android app, Reddit appears to be working on a “contributor program” that would let users cash out gold or karma (basically, points you get for posts, comments, or giving awards) they receive into real money.
Maybe something that changes the background color of the post to highlight it on the front page. Like gold background.
They already look really bad. Fuck Reddit.
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.
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.
so this is a particularly tough moment for me as we wind these products down.
Products, ey? Their intentionally designed to not feel loke them.
we want to both make Reddit simpler and a place where the community empowers the community more directly.
redditors be able to express themselves in fun ways and feel joy when their content is celebrated.
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
Note: As indicated in our User Agreement past purchases are non-refundable. (Fuck you)
We took your digital stuff that you paid for in actually useful green papers
If you’re a Premium user and would like to cancel your subscription before these changes go into effect, you can find instructions here.
Now, NOW!!!! KILL YOUR TIES TO REDDIT
EDIT: Yes, do chargebacks instead
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.
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.
And, honestly, I haven't been staring at my phone nearly as long as I did with Reddit.
Same, Lemmy just seems less addictive but at the same time more enjoyable, with (relatively) friendly users and the ability to simply blacklist the posters and communities you don’t like from your feed, instead of having to lose brain cells scrolling past screeds calling parents “breeders” or cars “pedestrian crushers” that clearly indicate a lack of contact with monocot plants in the Poaceae family.
exactly. lemmy is fine but i really don’t use it that much. just enjoying my time not sucked into reddit anymore.
Reddit made its own competitor. There was none to really speak of, until the exodus. Enough people left that the new site was sustainable. They've created their own downfall.
What is next, I really wonder...?
Changing name to Fuckit?
Nah. It should be called Blue-it, which they have
Or Suckit, which spez definitely should.
Rejecteddit - as that's what a good chunk of the former userbase has done by now.
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.
Well I just spent the rest of my coins (7k) on promoting lemmy in that thread lol. I was done with reddit before, but now I know reddit is really done.
Gold was introduced as a way to help sustain server costs, then it was a money grab.
What is happening with reddit lol
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
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.
They are taking a page out of Musk's book and making Reddit way worse for no good rea$on
I bet they replace awards with some NFT crypto bullshit
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
I cannot image how shitty it will get with bot farms contributing and upvoting AI generated shit for people too dumb to know they’re being fed BS.
Why even involve users? Bots posting AI generated stuff. Upvote bots upvote, comment bots comment and repost bots repost. Its the ciiiiiircle of life...
Sounds like my Facebook feed.
Well, with many of the site’s top contributors having left, much of the more informative content can then be written by Reddit’s own AI. Throw in a few bot upvotes for visibility and watch the tips come in from the remaining people who don’t have a clue what’s going on.
I could see that bringing in revenue. That’s money straight from the users into Reddit’s pocket.
The worst part is that some generated AI looks exceptional, so bad actors posting it without saying it's AI art would trick most people, anything for engagement I guess..
Based on the language where they say there is something coming in the future, I would bet it's that system.
They want to invalidate all existing awards so they cannot be used to give people money under the new system and likely also remove the premium feature of getting awards for free.
People who want to reward content creators will pay for premium and awards instead of just premium now.
I don’t disagree. I’m not sure how that generates revenue for Reddit though. Unless it’s their attempt to capture content creators like YouTube. Or is it more like an onlyfans type idea where people pay the creator personally through the system and they system just takes their cut.
Eh. Whatever. I’m no longer on Reddit. It I’m mildly entertained by the drama.
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 wish I had some better alternatives for the Ukraine related content, because the magazines & communities here are definitely not sufficient, and I'm not going to get Telegram and dig through all of that garbage.
Doesn’t Al Jazeera keep up their content on Ukraine pretty well? I seem to remember they did. I could totally be imaging it too.
Have you seen this?
https://kbin.social/m/UkraineUA/t/201465
Let the Ukrainian mods know to get over here.
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'd been subscribed since it was an option. They kindly reminded me today to cancel it before it renewed. Thanks for the reminder reddit!
We mentioned early this year that we want to both make Reddit simpler and a place where the community empowers the community more directly.
..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 removed 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 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.
Not honouring anything. Admin says that even the display of them will be gone. So everything people "bought" will be gone in an instant.
judy-funnie: "The visual awards themselves will go away, however any award karma from the award will remain."
As long as they honor what people have currently bought,
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.
I have feeling that whatever ends up replacing them will almost certainly be worse.
Tis a silly place.
DISTRACTION TIME DISTRACTION TIME DISTRACTION TIME DISTRACTION TIME
Just resign spez
What's reddit?
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