Reddit is ending Reddit Gold and users are furious::undefined
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. 🤔
That’s a fun idea 💡
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.
EDIT: in response to telling people that it would hurt reddit finacially I got a 2 gold and 2 platnium awards which i hope were paid for with chargebacked credits.
They were probably just throwing leftover Coins they had in your direction.
I know. I’m just saying I hope
Sure but they could have left the awards in place for a while even if no more could be added. And instead of making everyone lose all the coins they already spent money on, they could have allowed those coins to be used for whatever the next thing is. Just throwing out everyone’s money is never a good practice.
Like what if Minecraft decided they were going with a new monetization strategy and said everyone’s minecoins would expire in a couple of months and any skins, texture packs, etc., you bought with them will also be gone. And no refunds of course.
I did not know minecoins were a thing
but in any case, I’m not saying that they’re making a good decision, just that I don’t see the point of reddit gold
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.
It’s almost like spez secretly enjoys Lemmy. Doing the work for us.
They are really trying hard to piss off all their users lol
Well, Spez did say he admired what Musk did with Twitter…
What if Spez’s intention all along was to tear down the machine from the inside. Anyone who was on it 10+ years ago could see it had perhaps grown a little too big for it’s britches.
Glass onion, mate. There’s a human psychological blindness to see the rich as fundamentally competent and smart. To believe there are layers to it. But fundamentally, it’s transparent. It’s just incompetence.
I definitely subscribe to Hanlon’s razor, as well as the idea that for every rich person who earned it there’s a hundred, or a thousand, that were given it.
I was just being sarcastic though. I don’t know anything about spez either. I just like to joke about everything.
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 whoring 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…
What is better than karma whoring? Gallowboobs in industrial scale
The best part of Lemmy is that there’s no Gallow on here.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Precisely, karma whoring was already rampant and detestable.
reddit’s oldest profession
Talk on the main post on Reddit that discussed these changes is that some of the API change documentation included information on what change will actually happen now that they’re sunsetting coins. Tipping replacing coins and karma having monetary value. If thats true Reddit is truly dead. Read that post and made a Lemmy account!
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?
Yeah, I have a feeling, just based on the fact that I’ve had a lot of posts do really well, that I could make some money from Reddit if they do that.
But I’m not greedy. I’m not rich either, but fuck them, I wouldn’t participate if they asked me.
Take the money and donate to Lemmy? Idk, the way I see it, money in your hands is better than money in Reddit’s hands. Your karma is going to be there anyways, the difference is merely deciding whether Reddit gets to keep the money or not.
It won’t be retroactive, I’m sure. In order to do that, I would have to go back to being an active Reddit user, which I will not do. I am done with Reddit.
While reddit makes further enemies, I laugh because I know the #fediverse will benefit from their outflow. The fediverse will become even more diverse.
Yeah, I’m over here egging them on like push more people here let’s go!
In recognition of your egging them on, I’m pleased to present you with the coveted Lemmy Lemon-Egg award.
🍋🥚
Congratulations on your achievement!
The highest honor in all the fediverse
🫶
That’ll be $0.99 please.
🍋🥚
Awwww shit son, a Lemon-Egg! Fucking wild! Top tier shit, A+ lad. Well done.
This is what got me to commit.
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.
Didn’t Reddit gold start as just a user-run bot, that kept a tally of how many times it had been invoked for any particular recipient?
And then Reddit forced the bot to retire so they could offer a paid version. And now they’re retiring their mandatory replacement. Good job Reddit.
That’s what’s great about all these companies. They take credit for, and try to derive value from, things they didn’t actually create. Reddit keeps on talking about “their” data that was created by users, for free, and moderated by other users, also for free. Yet it’s somehow theirs and they can sell it?
Twitter didn’t invent hashtags. They were user created annd eventually incorporated in to the service.
These services add very little value, but they believe they add it all.
Capitalizing off the backs of Community
Lol twitter didn’t even invent calling it “tweets”, @ mentions, retweets, etc. Like reddit, most of product development past the very basic idea came from the community.
What they’re good at is seeing trends kind of late and then making everyone believe they invented them. They’re quite good at that. Most would call that a grift.
What they should be is platforms and tools for people to interact, with some controls to prevent Nazis and MRAs from ruining things for everyone.
Hashtags were invented by the Twitter community. And the @ sign account linking was invented by Twitter third party apps, which Elon musk killed
There was at least reddit silver that worked this way.
I thought Reddit silver was just an image a user would post if they were too broke to afford gold.
There was also eventually a bot, before silver became an award.
Well I learned something today.
It also came with a bot
Waiting for the Lemmy lemon bot so we can award lemons 🍋
If you get three lemons then you get to have a Lemon Party!
What a great idea. Here’s a lemon for ya 🍋
Don’t lemonade it all in one place 😉
What about combustible lemons? 🍋🔥🔥🔥
I understand that lemon essential oil is flammable.
oooh lemon party
When life gives you lemons, just say fuck the lemons and bail.
But I like lemons!
That story is so common. They destroyed Secret Santa that way. User-run thing that got some traction so they built redditgifts around it, then decided redditgifts wasn’t sufficiently profitable so canned it and took the user-run part down with it.
I will continue to be bitter about them killing secret Santa. It was such a great tradition, killed off far too soon because it “wasn’t profitable enough”, nevermind that the point of the event is to celebrate the holiday season and the spirit of giving
Didn’t it also start off as an entirely user run thing before Reddit admins took over it?
Yes it did. And then they ran it for a handful of years. And then they killed it. Brutally.
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).
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.
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.
That company is so badly run it’s laughable.
Removed by mod
Capitalism is fine as long as people aren’t complete scumbags about it. Rare, I know. It’s a human morality proposition.
Capitalism is great, but it absolutely must be tempered by regulation.
The problem comes when the capitalist gains influence over the regulator, aka, regulatory capture.
Capitalists love regulations and do a lot to make sure financial laws are in their favor and make great use of government handouts they help orchestrate for themselves.
Yes, this is called regulatory capture.
Yeah, Senator Whitehouse actually wrote a book awhile back, Captured, that covers the topic very well. However, that book is also depressing because he illustrates just how fucking rampant it is in the US now.
To be a little more exact, capitalism is great, but only if each person has roughly the same amount of money, no matter what they do. That is what you’re trying to achieve with regulations.
You’re putting the cart before the horse. Capitalism incentivizes people to be scumbags.
So does any other economic model.
That is an absolutely meaningless statement.
As is capitalism incentivizing people to be scumbags, as trendy as that perspective is.
No, the competitive nature of capitalism definitely incentivizes people to do very shitty things to each other for personal gain. Or have you not heard of the Gilded Age? Or our current climate crisis? Or strike breaking? Or the incredible wealth inequality we are seeing today?
[edit] The Irish Potato Famine? The Bengal Famine? Belgium in the Congo? Sweatshop labour? Coups in South America for the benefit of fruit companies? Wars in the Middle East for the sake of oil? Clear-cutting of the Amazon? Any of this ringing a bell?
Capitalism could be amazing if the psychos of society didn’t constantly rise to the top then again the same could be said for communism and just about every other system we’ve tried.
That’s because Capitalism rewards exploitative psychos, essentially by design
Any system has to give a group of people some authority to keep order the crazies will eventually work their way in and ruin it.
Doesn’t communism do the same? In fact why the fuck do the crazy psychos rise to the top seemingly everywhere? Is this one of those “nice guys finish last” kinda deals or some phenomenon I’ve never heard of?
Evil only needs to succeed every now and then, good needs to constantly win.
I like to think there’s a distinct difference, summed up like so:
Communism attempts to put the control and distribution of resources (capital) on the collective, ie everyone. Since everyone effectively owns it, it feels like nobody does.
Capitalism puts it on individuals. Nowadays, almost all of these individuals acquired their resource(s) by inheritance. If not, by dubious (morally questionable) means.
This is a simplification that may upset people on both sides, but it’s about as clean as I can think to make it.
Note: the following is from the perspective of a somewhat average person living in the US.
My personal thought is that the democratic republic political system would ideally be coupled with the communistic (I’d prefer federated unions, ie federations, but speaking broadly) economic one. They seem to be natural matches.
However, it seems the coupling of said republic with capitalism causes significant and repeated backslides on social issues and education. Capital owners, after all, are most interested in maximizing gains while minimizing losses; this has led to a fairly high number of people being convinced to think that education is bad, especially university level education. Which, in turn, makes them compliant voters and eager workers, often severely underpaid. Which they, of course, have no idea of knowing since they likely have never left their birth town.
That’s not to say that such things won’t happen with communism. They should happen a lot less, but only if we put controls in place to combat abuse and overreach. In other words, regulations. Capitalism…might be beyond hope at this point, given how capital owners have been acting lately.
I don’t know what will actually end up working, but I hope we try something new soon. Because this ain’t it. Preferably before we extinct more species. Hopefully before we extinct ourselves.
I keep ranting, sorry for the wall of text.
I don’t know what will actually end up working, but I hope we try something new soon.
Personally I don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all solution. Each problem needs a different approach. We need to figure out how to have all these systems work in tandem.
And socialism is the middle ground that apparently no one with the power to implement it wants.
It’s because of the concept of successful ambition correlating with the lack of morals or integrity. It just so happens that people ambitious enough to do whatever it takes to rise through the ranks often have to be necessarily immoral to step on people to get to the top.
People who have others’ best interests at heart simply don’t take advantage of the opportunities as often because a number of those opportunities would involve unfairly stepping on someone else.
So to answer your question, yes, ambitious assholes tend to ride faster and further than good people. Kind of like how a large portion of cops tend to be former bullies.
It’s because people are too focused on who controls the capital and not focused enough on what the capital itself is actually doing.
It doesn’t much matter whether it’s controlled by a Capitalist or a Communist if the person controlling the capital is a fucking idiot. Hell, it honestly doesn’t even matter that much if they’re smart, because the actual driver of growth has always been competition, which is only very indirectly connected to who controls the Capital, largely because it’s pretty much always been taken at the point of a gun for all of human history and likely will be for as long as we exist unless we somehow manage to decide on post-scarcity society rather than infinite growth society.
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Want to say, “Communism” is democratic control of the economy. So ideally there is no “top”.
Using some terms really loosely here to avoid a wall of political theory.
Everything is perfect if the premise is that there are no problems
You can say the same thing about many ideologies: socialism, communism, capitalism. All are great in theory. But humans exploit any system they can. That is their nature and purpose.
Capitalism is awful. It’s madeup unequality
i may get some flack for this but i honestly think reddit had it’s best years when alexis was most involved.
I kind of agree, but it’s also shitty he’s involved with the PGA/Saudis now
Who’s Alexis?
Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and married to Serena Williams.
From 2017?
OP mentioned how badly the company was managed. So yea, 2017 saw them take a lot of money, go in a hiring spree… and do jack shit to improve the platform.
Fast forward to now and mods used 3rd party apps to do the job that they do FOR FREE, all while Reddit made… NFTs?
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
Redditors care about their coins a lot. Not really a shock.
I mean, it’s less about the coins and more about something that has an equivalent monetary value being wiped without any compensation whatsoever.
No compensation? Seriously?
If people were a premium subscriber they got a certain amount of coins each month. I can understand being pissed if you were saving them with the intention of using them later.
Luckily I never gave reddit money.
Man, they already managed to piss off their tech savy users, then their moderators, now their paying users. All thats left is pissing off the content creators and the site is basically done.
Don’t forget the blind users
Blind users were spared having to see the redesign. They were on borrowed time
Ikr
Yes, seriously. In the announcement, they made a point to restate the fine print that says “no refunds.”
Do they? I used RIF and honestly don’t recall a way to even see or use coins on there. If there was I never touched it.
Yea, my 29.1k coins aren’t happy about this change
How the fuck did you get so many (☉｡☉)!
Reddit Premium gave me 700 per month while also enabling premium users to use a bunch of fancy awards for cheap. So I never used most of the monthly coins and they accumulated over time.
Thanks for supporting reddit when we loved it. And leaving when we hated it.
The worst part is they’re also removing all of the existing gold awards from old posts as well.
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.
Excellent. Fuck it every fucking way.
