Reddit is ending Reddit Gold and users are furious
The website has been knocking it out of the park for popular decisions lately /s
Reddit is ending Reddit Gold and users are furious::undefined
While reddit makes further enemies, I laugh because I know the #fediverse will benefit from their outflow. The fediverse will become even more diverse.
That company is so badly run it's laughable.
Didnβt Reddit gold start as just a user-run bot, that kept a tally of how many times it had been invoked for any particular recipient?
And then Reddit forced the bot to retire so they could offer a paid version. And now theyβre retiring their mandatory replacement. Good job Reddit.
Thatβs whatβs great about all these companies. They take credit for, and try to derive value from, things they didnβt actually create. Reddit keeps on talking about βtheirβ data that was created by users, for free, and moderated by other users, also for free. Yet itβs somehow theirs and they can sell it?
Twitter didnβt invent hashtags. They were user created annd eventually incorporated in to the service.
These services add very little value, but they believe they add it all.
Capitalizing off the backs of Community
Lol twitter didn't even invent calling it "tweets", @ mentions, retweets, etc. Like reddit, most of product development past the very basic idea came from the community.
What they're good at is seeing trends kind of late and then making everyone believe they invented them. They're quite good at that. Most would call that a grift.
What they should be is platforms and tools for people to interact, with some controls to prevent Nazis and MRAs from ruining things for everyone.
Hashtags were invented by the Twitter community. And the @ sign account linking was invented by Twitter third party apps, which Elon musk killed
Waiting for the Lemmy lemon bot so we can award lemons π
Are people really upset about it? To me it was always pointless, and the few times I got gold and was allowed to peek into r/lounge it was just full of the most insufferable users (just people that thought they were special because they got gold).
I think the point is more that it's something people paid real money for just to have them rip it away with basically no notice and no replacement.
The benefits of receiving it were meh. But it was a way to show recognition for people and supporting the site. One of the few ways they would even receive revenue, for little to no effort. I don't know why they didn't just lean into it harder.
That story is so common. They destroyed Secret Santa that way. User-run thing that got some traction so they built redditgifts around it, then decided redditgifts wasnβt sufficiently profitable so canned it and took the user-run part down with it.
My belief is that they want to tokenize Karma and any other reward/currency will compete against their new tradable currency.
I believe they had already said years ago that the r/CC moons was a test run for something site-wide.
Personally I made $300 after moons first tanked, just from some lame comments in the subreddit that was ruined by the scheme.
I will likely use my 150k+ Karma account for profit if this happens and it won't be for the benefit of the community like the last decade of my activity used to be.
Lemmy is now where I participate in a positive way.
Because the karma removed wasn't bad enough as is. What could possibly go wrong with a scheme like that?
But if they want to throw a bit of money my way to quit, I'm not going to say no either...
Talk on the main post on Reddit that discussed these changes is that some of the API change documentation included information on what change will actually happen now that they're sunsetting coins. Tipping replacing coins and karma having monetary value. If thats true Reddit is truly dead. Read that post and made a Lemmy account!
Yeah, I have a feeling, just based on the fact that I've had a lot of posts do really well, that I could make some money from Reddit if they do that.
But I'm not greedy. I'm not rich either, but fuck them, I wouldn't participate if they asked me.
I think that they're going to tie it to corporate sponsorship. Instead of some generic "take my energy" token, they'll charge companies for their logo to go into a karma award, and so instead of a generic award you pay for, it's an award that another company paid reddit for as a form of advertising (probably with some terrible logo or slogan attached to it) AND they'll make you pay for it to give it to others. Why have something they get paid for once when they can have something they'll get paid for twice?
Remember kids, don't let the news tell you how to feel. Watch out for words in the title like "outrage" and "furious". Anger increases engagement and they know it.
Yeah internet "outrage" is a weird thing.
I scrambled 10 years of my reddit activity, which would appear to be outrage. But in reality it was more like "meh, well reddit sucks now, I guess I'll go somewhere else. I'll just remove whatever value I may have added to the site on my way out since I don't want to reward a corporation for bad behaviour."
I guess some people may be outraged, and they'll be the most vocal ones. But most people are probably like "this kinda sucks, but meh whatever" and move on. You just don't hear a lot from these people.
We could use AI to remove the clickbait from headlines automatically. π€
That's a fun idea π‘
This finally pushed me to stop supporting the platform with a premium sub and now here I am, checking out lemmy!
Welcome. As you can see lots of room for growth, but there is a lot of positive effort being made.
Welcome aboard! We have beans! Also, I saw a fellow lemming giving out Lemmy lemons, so those, too. (Someone from kbin is going to have to help me out with their team's memes...)
I said this in another thread - I bet they're going the YouTube route and are going to start allowing content creators to make money.
Might sound good on the surface but it's absolutely going to shred what Reddit used to be. Goodbye discussion forum and hello new social media.
I can't think of a single good reason for anyone to actually want that. Reddit isn't a site for content creation, it's an aggregator. It works for YouTube because, well, it's YouTube. It's practically synonymous with content creation. But exactly zero people are on Reddit for that.
All those users complaining about their coins going to waste and I'm wondering why the fuck you'd ever spend real money on that.
That's like paying for porn.
Entire OnlyFans community furiously typing
Don't you get to keep the porn, though?
Not always. They might have a limited download, whether in amount or in time.
You know the company and the users are completely divorced when you read something like that. Redditors have spent years telling each other that awards are useless and a waste of money - then the admins touch it and everybody flips their lid. I for one am glad I'm no longer part of that toxic relationship.
There was that confessional reddit mod post that admitted some mods were blowing thousands of dollars on bots to boost the popularity of their own sub. I've also seen people complain that they blew hundreds to thousands on shitty avatars.
I'm in awe at the sheer lunacy of some people. These are people that don't even know the concept of "touching" or "grass".
The problem is treating an entire community as some sort of singular entity. People do this shit all the time and make claims like "redditors are so hypocritical" when in reality you have two completely different groups of people saying different things but are both users in the same community.
I paid for coins on reddit to give gold awards to people so they could enjoy reddit ad free.
You could have given them a link to ublock origin (or on mobile some other adblocker in form of an app) instead for $0.
It was still nice of course, but just so unnecessary.
That was a cool thing to do. You're a nice person!
I was subscribed to reddit Premium for a long time (at the old, grandfathered in price), because it gave me ad free browsing, the ability to sort saved posts into categories and filtering subs from r/all before that was available to everyone.
Premium also gave you 700 coins per month, so now I have 20000 coins saved up.
Wanna trade gold?
Paying for porn is a good way to get quality porn, IMO, because you support the people making what you like. But if you're not picky, I suppose it doesn't matter. Whatever floats your goat.
The worst part is they're also removing all of the existing gold awards from old posts as well.
Excellent. Fuck it every fucking way.
I just find that skeevy. It's imaginary internet crap but someone intentionally went to the trouble and financial expense of putting gold on a comment and it should stay there.
Jokes on them, I deleted all my gilded content.
on one hand, reddit gold is useless and a waste of money imo
other hand, they just keep going for making the most controversial decisions with zero thought lmao
reddit gold used to be how the community helped with server costs back when reddit had only a few employees
I still have my reddit account, only to malicously mod one community and update a secret community about a move to lemmy, but I only use reddit now to do a quick check in on those subs and then a glace at the front page.
Anyway, i saw the reddit post and a bunch of people were livid and said they were doing chargebacks now. I informed them that chargebacks cost reddit more money than they initally spent (spend $5 they have to return the $5 and pay a $20 fee), and if tok many users do a chargeback then credit card companies would stop paying them wink.
EDIT: in response to telling people that it would hurt reddit finacially I got a 2 gold and 2 platnium awards which i hope were paid for with chargebacked credits.
Sure but they could have left the awards in place for a while even if no more could be added. And instead of making everyone lose all the coins they already spent money on, they could have allowed those coins to be used for whatever the next thing is. Just throwing out everyone's money is never a good practice.
Like what if Minecraft decided they were going with a new monetization strategy and said everyone's minecoins would expire in a couple of months and any skins, texture packs, etc., you bought with them will also be gone. And no refunds of course.
I did not know minecoins were a thing
but in any case, I'm not saying that they're making a good decision, just that I don't see the point of reddit gold
I don't even know what the coins are, but if they did it this way, wouldn't that cause a lot of people to want to sell accounts that still had coins and such? Maybe they wouldn't to avoid a secondary marketplace. Either way, they really are tightening ship for the corpos.
It might be that they've given up on the visuals and are now making all the changes all at once. They're ripping off the bandaid overhauling their site and are banking that the damage will be recover in time.
With the current state of dissatisfaction from the community, now might be a good time to plow through and make all the changes that are already undesirable for the old user base.
Maybe even more of these big changes to come? More popcorn for the Fediverse I suppose.
Are they furious? Sure. But I feel like anyone still on Reddit just doesnβt care what they do, theyβll still be there scrolling.
Oh I guarantee you there are plenty of sunk cost people who won't leave but hate everything about it.
Just looked and I have 1100 coins. Not sure what from, I've never bought any. Any suggestions for them?
Never mind, I decided I only go to Reddit now for one small, private sub, so I went there and gave awards to posts I thought were good.
Gild pro-Lemmy posts / tutorials
Not sure what from
When other people give big awards to your posts/comments, you actually get some coins as well.
Huh, interesting. There were a few times it said I was gifted premium, but I never did anything with it. Well, doesn't matter now, I guess.
You know, the thing that strikes me as particularly odd is that apparently they're going to retroactively delete the existing awards. I'd imagine there are some people who feel tied to their Reddit accounts because the awards and karma were important to them, so stripping anything like that away seems like it would make those people feel less attached to Reddit and more likely to move on. They really seem to be scuttling the site.
Gild all the 'fuck /u/spez' comments while you still can.
Gild the announcement announcing the end of reddit gold.
I have apparently 200 I never knew about.
They are really trying hard to piss off all their users lol
Hereβs what I received todayβ¦ first time Iβve visited Reddit in over a month:
Hello from Reddit,
We're reaching out because you have Reddit Premium and/or Reddit Coins on your account.
TL;DR: We're making updates to awards and coins on Reddit that we'll complete by September 12, 2023. As part of this, we made a decision to move away from Reddit coins and awards. This includes the 700 monthly coins* and Premium Awards, which are currently part of the Reddit Premium experience.
You'll still be able to use your Reddit Coins until September 12, after which they'll be removed from your account.
Note: all other current Premium perks will still continue to exist, including the ad-free experience.
As we looked at our current awarding system, there was consistent feedback from redditors that stood out β particularly around the clutter from awards and all the steps involved with awarding content. We also learned that redditors want awarded content to be more valuable. With that, we are reworking how great content and contributions are rewarded on Reddit. We will have more updates to share soon.
If you have further questions please check out our announcement post to read more about the update.
- This perk is part of the paid Reddit Premium experience
I got this message too... Guess maybe I'll look and see what the hell coins i could possibly have .. I've only had people give me gold like twice over 15 years though and never even really knew what the hell to do with it.
Yea, my 29.1k coins aren't happy about this change
Itβs almost like spez secretly enjoys Lemmy. Doing the work for us.
I just gave away 26 Reddit golds to everyone I liked in /r/RedditAlternatives
Never paid for gold but somehow had like 10 years of it on my 16 year account.
Redditors care about their coins a lot. Not really a shock.
if they continue using reddit
are they actually furious?
Dude, this is just laughable. For those who are left, what are you sticking around for?
Also, hereβs my theory: these idiot product managers, fresh outta b-school didnβt think to interview their most engaged users. Instead, they randomly polled people. Thatβs the only way I can fathom their takeaway from users was βitβs too much clutterβ instead of, βthis drives engagementβ.
I have 3 reasons I still visit... But I am cutting back.
The site is definitely in a death spiral but, as of today, I still find it useful for certain things.
Fuck them though... They won't get a dime in ad dollars from me and the demise can't come soon enough at this point.
Myself, I still see reddit when I'm googling for something (e.g., I used it yesterday to find where to go next in a game I was playing, as I was stuck and it seems many people got stuck in the same spot). Reddit is useful as an archive of information in that way and Lemmy isn't active or searchable enough for that yet (plus I didn't want to ask a question and wait -- I wanted to get my answer immediately).
As well as to read discussions of stuff like the ending of a video game or movie. Again mostly because reddit has dozens of threads for basically every single video game, movie, TV, etc (including those that predate Lemmy). I love reading user discussion after I finish something. But I am trying to start conversations about that here, too. If anyone wants to discuss Horizon Burning Shores or Final Fantasy XVI, I made threads about them (which... I was gonna link to, but I can't find -- the posts section of my profile is empty and I can't easily find them when searching...).
EDIT: the FFXVI post is https://lemm.ee/comment/940061
I am there only because I feel obliged to finish my artwork series for people- but after that, bye bye reddit.
βMind Your Business,β Declares Man, Seen Repeatedly Throwing Himself Down Up Escalator
Reddit is trying to run up the down escalator though; it wants to get to the top and is trying harder than all those other businesses that attempted a different approachβ¦.
I'm gonna make an outlandish prediction that Spez will no longer be CEO of Reddit Inc within the next six months. He's made some incredibly bone-headed decisions and if the IPO does happen, Reddit are either going to be valued really low to the point where they could face a hostile takeover from a more competent tech giant, or Reddit's existing shareholders are going to oust him in a revolt.
Either way, Spez has pissed off a lot of angel investors and has driven a good chunk of people towards Tildes and Lemmy. When this place (and other Lemmy instances) looks like an increasingly viable alternative to Reddit, it's going to eclipse the main site once we get decent apps like Sync and Boost.
some execs get hired specifically to do all the negative stuff so they can be a lightning rod of ire
And then theres spez, who does it for no other reason than being a child molesting piss drinker
In early June, there was like 300 users on Lemmy.
I still browse it occasionally through libreddit (private front end that still works with their anonymous API for some reason) and they're still getting thousands of upvotes and comments on /r/doordash posts. People are hopelessly addicted.
Honestly, I never liked all the additional rewards they added to the system anyway, seemed really superfluous.
I actually preferred it when it was gold only. No silver, bronze or any of the other 10+ "coins" they had.
You paid for gold to support their server time, you could also give others a month of gold as well - it had a similar feeling to subs and gift subs on a twitch channel. You gave others gold not only to support the servers, but to say, "I want to give you more than an upvote for what you said" it was a way of going above and beyond.
Sure the lounge was crap, but that wasn't the point, that was an intended reward for donating.
I honestly don't know why they're killing it, as it's a known fact that having a subscription system with the ability for people to pay monthly is a far better, more consistent source of revenue than ads, and it's less invasive. It's why musk is pushing twitter blue so hard.
Unless they're only killing the awards part of it and still allowing people to subscribe to premium, I can kinda see some of the logic in that - by making it impossible to access premium features through gold gifts, you make it so everyone has to access those features by subscribing - the hope is more become willing people sign up to it after losing their free gold. Honestly I think they're misjudging how much value Reddit premium actually has, especially given the recent alienation by Reddit staff, and therefore removing the ability to give awards is misleading. Sure if premium had more value than it does, it might actually have the intended effect, but I think it's just gonna result in a precipitous drop in revenue.
Honestly Lemmy kinda does donations better, as it doesn't turn donations into a fake award you can give other people. Instead it's just that, you donate, the server stays running and we get to continue having this space. And the admins are actually careful enough to turn off registrations when growth starts to increase too quickly.
My account is just gone. I wasn't a big time poster or anything, but 10 years of use and my account doesn't exist. I only went back on to delete it.
This just feels like the inevitable next step of Reddit becoming a 'monetizable' platform for influencers. It's annoying but it's a tried-and-true method of getting paid engagement; get influencers(marketed/advertised personalities) to engage and build a following.
Honestly, not furious. But I guess I don't count as a reddit user any more. Still, did anyone ever care about these features?
For me these already came in after I wished the reddit devs would just do maintenance.
I don't get it. Wasn't the whole API thing supposed to be about money? Reddit is killing one of its sources of income!
That doesn't even make business sense! What the hell is going on inside Spez's mind?
I've seen rumors that api leaks have indicated that the new thing will be tipping posts directly.
Which is EXACTLY what that site needs - repost bots being financially incentivesed. I guess that's one way to get your usage back - Reddit started as just two dudes posting links to each other and will end as ten thousand bots reposting those links.
There's a blockchain-based Reddit clone called SteemIt that I had a cursory glance at. The idea of it is that you can make money (specifically their cryptocurrency) from posts because of how site activity mints more stuff on their blockchain. Unsurprisingly, SteemIt is also unusable and has been astroturfed by spammers.
Reddit would kill their platform overnight if they allowed users to tip posts whilst simultaneously chasing away community moderators.
Likely to each other by the very end
That is what pushed me to Lemmy- Why the hell would you do that? There is no reason for it.
Welcome!
Welcome aboard!
So? They've just proven that almost no one will truly react to their bullshit.
But how few people actually buy gold?
I thought every gold was bought, with points, which were bought with money. So if you see a gilded post, someone paid for that - maybe not the person who awarded it directly if they were gifted points, or received points as part of an award (which cost more points to cover that).
So basically all those awards were a good indicator of how much was being spent on Reddit and in which forums that financial engagement was being valued.
So if some βpopularβ forums suddenly stop being gilded, then it is a good indicator that the forum has now been abandoned by the most commercially valuable participants. Which looks bad when selling the site.
So Reddit took its ball back, so noone can tell where the money is but them.
Itβs like a domino effect.
Why would they be furious about not being able to spend money on reddit?
It think they're mad because some of them already paid for a year and the awards and gold were part of why they got premium. Now awards and fold are disappearing mid-september and they feel they aren't getting what they paid for anymore.
Oh that makes sense.
I paid for coins a while ago because I liked giving people reddit gold as a reward for good content. I was just told to go spend it on something that they will remove anyways (awards). That is is why I'm furious. I paid real money for them to just remove them. They don't even convert it into premium for myself. I would have to go to a subreddit and give gold awards to someone else to in turn get them to award me premium. I'm just done.
So new user here. Someone got a link to all the cat subs here on lemmy?
Here are some cat communities for you: !illegallysmolcats@lemmy.world !cats@midwest.social !aww@lemmy.ml
There is !aww@lemmy.world
There is also another site that I've found to have lot of cat content with squabbles.io which is another alternative people have turned to.
https://squabbles.io/s/aww https://squabbles.io/s/cats https://squabbles.io/s/Blackcats https://squabbles.io/s/CalicoCats
I would have to go to a subreddit and give gold awards to someone else to in turn get them to award me premium
There did used to be a hacky way to gild your own posts, I don't know if it ever got patched
Also !cat@lemmy.world
I can barely imagine giving a shit.
Wasnβt paying for Reddit Gold the only way currently to not see ads, or is that something else?
Idgaf. They donβt have to be there.
I don't know why anyone would even care. I think this is actually a good change.
