Reddit enrages users again by ditching thank-you coins and awards::Reddit, which is still dealing with the fallout from its last controversial decision, said it plans to phase out coins and awards.

    • ConfirmingMoose@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      I think that reddit’s “going public” guru squad doesn’t want redditors to be able to have any control on what content is pushed to the top of the queue. That is just a guess, though.

      • itscountolaf@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Then why don’t they just alter the algorithm or remove any coin-related influence? The average redditor does not care/know that gilded posts reach the top.

        • ConfirmingMoose@reddthat.com
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          Because it causes engineering overhead that perhaps no one there wants to do. And when reddit gets its IPO it will no longer give a hoot and an half about the “average redditor” because profit suddenly becomes the only thing that matters to shareholderds.

          What I am saying is that the visibility that coins make is prolly not inline with the people that want to use reddit to push products, shows, and ideologies for profit.

          It is just about control.

      • BURN@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Upvote/downvote counts to be hidden next

        They’re already manipulated and dont show a true total, Reddit stops counting if they want to.

    • Corhen@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Giving someone a reward gives them some Reddit premium, including coins they can spend. Wouldn’t be surprised if they relaunch it, in a way where everyone loses

      • TechnoBabble@lemm.ee
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        I got a message saying I apparently have premium and/or coins, and to use them before they expire.

        But, even before the Reddit plague I had no way of even knowing that, because I used old Reddit and RiF.

        Anyway, my point is that this change only affects official Reddit app users, and new Reddit users.

        So Reddit found a way to take stuff away from the users who weren’t directly affected by the third-party app shutdowns.

        It’s a genius way to make sure everyone is pissed off all at once.

      • Wrench Wizard@lemmy.world
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        Exactly, I liked getting free premium sometimes. One of the very few, possibly only things I’d see in my inbox and feel happy about.

        Oh, an award? On what comment? That one! Who gave it to me? Let’s thank them! Oh, free premium for a month? Awesome!

        Funny they’d do away with them bc those were almost the only things in the inbox that brought joy. All of the rest was:

        1: you have been permanently banned from participating in r/Everything-Ever because you made an innocuous comment on a sub that differs from our ideology. You can appeal this but we’ll probably just ignore your Nazi ass.

        2: Reply from u/NothingBetterToComplainAbout: “Um, okay, so you said that you “Spazzed out”. Glad you’ve outed yourself as an ableist prick that hates people with epilepsy!”

        3: Reply from u/Sensitive: “What a fatphobic fuck you are. Completely ignoring that the majority of obese people are that way due to genetic factors? It has NOTHING to do with diet or exercise and they were born this way!”

        4: Reply from u/beatingAdeadHorse on AITA: Bruh, she had NO obligation to call an ambulance when her mother was having a heart attack. I don’t care if she did beg for help, that doesn’t magically bestow responsibility! (Clap) NO (CLAP) ONE (CLAP) HAS (CLAP) ANY OBLIGATION (CLAP!) TO HELP (CLAP!) ANYONE ELSE!! (CLAP!)

        5: Reply from u/Political in r/politics: Apolitical? Ha, cought you undercover Nazi. No one is apolitical.

        6: Message from r/MoreSubs: You have been permanently banned for saying the following: “Can straight men really be lesbians? That makes no sense?” - Note from moderation team: Delete yourself, anyone can be anything they say they are and you must allow your reality to be shaped by their imagination. It’s not enough to call them by their preferred pronouns, you must accept it and believe it deep down in your heart, you vile piece of elephant shit we’ll know if you’re lying.

        7: AWARD ENCLOSED: Someone has liked your comment so much that they’ve given it the “BEST COMMENT THROUGHOUT ETERNITY!” Award. This comment was handpicked by Jesus Christ himself as his favorite, which means, YOU are his favorite! Yes, this is literal confirmation that Jesus Loves you and you have been pre-accepted into heaven for an eternity of bliss! ALSO: You get one free month of Reddit premium, AD FREE! AND 750 coins of which you can use to pass on the blessings!

        Message from award-giver: This is Jesus Christ, I love you my son. I have seen the woes in your inbox and admire your good works in spreading the message of God around Reddit. I can’t wait to see you in heaven, my son, until then I will always be watching but don’t worry, I’ve already accepted you into heaven so you won’t fail and go to hell no matter what!

        8: YOU PUECE YX ASSHOLE I HTE U!

        • NaNaNaNaCatman@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, while my politics are typically fairly in line with the average Reddit user, I have little tolerance for bandwagoning or purposely misconstruing the opposition, so I always tried to emphasize that “while I totally agree with X, we shouldn’t pretend that there’s some huge outcry for Y or that Z is actually illegal anywhere in the US.” Usually didn’t matter, and I got banned anyway.

          But I guess when your identity is super wrapped up in being online and a mod, you need to feel like you got a win against the evils of the world.

    • Ashenparty@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They’re incompetent but I’m confident they’re at least going to put out some dumb replacement system ready by the time they have that karma to cash system.

      • Sharkwellington@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        Introducing the Reddit Battlepass! Post 100 times for this month’s golden Snoo! Skip a tier every day by clicking 50 ads! Now only $19.99!

    • vimdiesel@lemmy.world
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      That stuff also costs next to nothing to maintain. Thus proving that spez is even more stupid than we already thought. Now he’s just getting downright hitleresque, a comic book villain lmao

      • Burstar@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        Please don’t dilute Hitler by referencing him for something as trivial as removing gold awards.

        One sent millions to the gas chamber with the specific goal of committing actual genocide. The other? No longer lets you waste money to bro-5 a meme post. Be better.

  • Got_Bent@lemmy.world
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    Lemmy should make its own awards.

    Award #1 – Blackjack

    Aware #2 – Hookers

    • can@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I like to give out Lemmy Lemons 🍋

      I enjoy that they’re meaningless and if people find them obnoxious they can just downvote them.

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      An anonymous user liked your comment so much they’ve gifted you Lemmy Hookers™!

      Very dapper!

    • EuphoricPenguin@normalcity.life
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      What would be pretty awesome is if Lemmy implemented an optional awards feature that could accept donations into a tip jar of some sort. Many of us running smaller instances appreciate selfless donations, but this could be a decent way to make supporting hosting costs more fun.

      • Pika@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        instance based awards only though, as of would be hard to control award manipulation from private lemmy servers thay are federated

        • Derproid@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Make awards not actually do anything other than be a tip for the server hoster like Reddit gold used to be. Now which server owner it should go to is another question.

    • whatsarefoogee@lemmy.world
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      As someone who would never pay for reddit coins or premium, it’s still pretty easy to identify with them.

      They paid for a product and now it’s being removed with no compensation or refund. That’s total bullshit regardless of what the product was.

      • Pika@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        sounds like an easy chargeback claim if that’s the case, “service not rendered/doesn’t exist anymore” might lose the acct out of it but who really cares at this point

    • 1bluepixel@lemmy.ml
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      I hated the “coin culture” with a passion (hey, look, it’s Bill Gates, let’s give him tons of paid emoticons he won’t care about!), but it’s clear this move is part of Reddit’s further enshittification. You can bet whatever replaces coins will be even shittier, and I think Reddit’s users know it.

    • can@sh.itjust.works
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      I can’t identify with giving reddit money but I can sympathize with people who were saving monthly coins they paid for. Seriously, it has to be deliberate now. Why piss off your most loyal, paying customers? Is it a test?

      • FinalBoy1975@lemmy.world
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        Yeah, it’s a mystery to me how much money they got from these types of things. It’s a company that is supposedly not profitable, yet there is online rage about something some people bought. It makes me wonder about so much. First, I had no idea so many people payed money for these things. Second, Reddit wants us to believe, through legal loophole magic and accounting, that it is not profitable.

    • Ducks@ducks.dev
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      Yea I think the outrage is or should be directed at removing the already given awards. Just to go and wipe everything is not a great idea

      • SSTF@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Especially gold. The other awards were arguably bloat, but gold was iconic to reddit. All those classic posts now missing their gold seems wrong.

      • FinalBoy1975@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        People that are wasteful enough to prepay for that kind of nonsense sort of have it coming to them. Still, I agree that it’s not nice to do that. However, I have more important things to worry about.

        • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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          Sometimes prepaying is the more frugal option, since there’s usually a discount for buying in bulk. As of January of this year, I wouldn’t have believed you if you had told me that Reddit was going to do something so egregious that I would permanently stop browsing there.

          • FinalBoy1975@lemmy.world
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            Any kind of paying for this kind of junk, whether it’s prepay or not, is a waste of money and people should just stop doing it. There are far better things to do with money than to buy some digital thing-a-ma-bob that is useless and can disappear any old time at the whim of the web site owner. I mean, I could make the same argument about knickknacks, because they’re silly and collect dust. However, a web site can’t remove them from your house. So, even a knickknack that collects dust is a better purchase than digital coins and awards and all that other bullshit.

    • _number8_@lemmy.world
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      i used coins basically as a bookmark feature for great posts; it was nice to give a treat to a good poster as well. so incredibly stupid they’re destroying the site like this

  • WiseassWolfOfYoitsu@lemmy.world
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    I just dumped all my old coins onto comments encouraging people to do chargebacks for any year-long Premium subscriptions since they’re in material breach.

      • WiseassWolfOfYoitsu@lemmy.world
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        So when a charge is made against a credit card, you have the option to do a “chargeback” - this is meant to be used for fraud. In this case, the argument is that Reddit fraudulently changed the terms of the program after people had already paid - being in “material breach” means they made a binding promise to provide a thing and they failed to do so. Chargebacks are really, really bad for a vendor. They lose the money, and they get a penalty fee, AND if it keeps happening the credit card processor can crank up their overall fees or even drop them as a bad customer.

    • TheCraiggers@lemmy.world
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      Are they really in material beach since the agreement you agreed to by giving them money basically says “coins have no value and we can delete them at any time we want”?

      I mean, I hate Reddit as much as the next guy here but that sounds a bit like doing a charge back because you didn’t win on the slot machine you just pulled.

  • carrot@sh.itjust.works
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    Honestly the whole reddit protest was really good for me. I stopped spending so much time online, I only open lemmy occasionally too. Overall goodness for the planet

      • what@lemmy.world
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        I’ve been working on switching careers for the last six or so months. Made a lot more progress after the protests and have a final interview on Thursday. Please send prayers and/or good vibes my way. Switching from Marketing to Cybersecurity. One less talented marketing person makes the world a little less cluttered with people buying shit they don’t need.

        Besides that specifically since the protests started I’ve been researching and thinking about learning to play piano. It’s amazing how much time I wasted scrolling endlessly on Reddit.

        • andy_wijaya_med@lemmy.world
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          That sounds awesome. :D But how can someone moves from marketing to cyber security. I mean, it’s a completely different thing.

          Music instrument learning is fun! Glad that now you can utilize your time better.

          • what@lemmy.world
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            Cybersecurity and Penetration Testing/Hacking is more skill based than most industries. It’s just a matter of learning the tools and getting good at it.

      • Found@sh.itjust.works
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        I think its supposed to mean that since they are spending less time they are more active outside of just the reddit focus and if they are doing it others will be doing similar. Less of a “good for the environment” and more of a “good for the group of people who quit”.

    • scytale@lemmy.world
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      That’s gonna be the final nail in the coffin for me. As of now I only go there for my city’s subreddit as the fediverse equivalent isn’t quite active yet.

      • nodel@lemmy.world
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        Go be the change you want. Create posts, invite the users from your city’s subreddit

    • DigitalWanderer@lemmy.world
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      that used to be what i though would be my queue to exit…until i realised that my reddit experience was basically RIF… so yea if they want to get rid of another great chunk of users, do get rid of old reddit, do it spez!

      • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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        Haha same. “Oh I will just use old reddit” forgetting that 95% of my internet usage is mobile and old.reddit is nearly impossible to navigate on mobile. I have been 94% Lemmy since July.

      • WhatASave@lemmy.world
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        It’s funny whenever this is brought up on a reddit admin post. They always come with some stat saying a tiny % of users use old.reddit.com like that means people barely use it and therefore useless. But I see a lot of active posters talk about it which means those are probably the users you want to keep around lol.

    • thayer@lemmy.ca
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      While I agree that user-generated reddit topics are best left to a dedicated community, I also think that published articles discussing the platform are appropriate for any Technology community; no different than Twitter, Threads, or other social media platform news coverage.

    • Anders429@lemmy.world
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      I’m with you, but judging by the number of upvotes this post got, apparently we’re in the minority on this.

    • _number8_@lemmy.world
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      i was hoping with lemmy people would stop caring about something completely arbitrary like this

  • Uno@monyet.cc
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    Reddit has gone to the crapper. It’s not just banning 3rd party apps, it’s not just ditching awards, all of these wildly unpopular decisions have left a permanent scar on the user base and it shows. Now, all of the top posts on r/popular are garbage nonsense like “unpopular opinion: the far left and far right are both just as bad as each other” or “im a horse girl rate me”. Sad times.

  • 99nights@lemmy.world
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    Honestly I can’t wait for the downfall of reddit. They seem to be constantly pushing away and annoying their users.

  • skillissuer@lemmy.world
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    how much is anyone’s betting that it will involve crypto in some way? i raise you a very fine 6mm dia 1m long aluminum tube

      • Odo@lemmy.world
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        Reddit already has NFT avatars. Adding them for awards would make sense with that recent story about letting users make money from their awards. Bleh.

        • skillissuer@lemmy.world
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          imo it’ll turn out to be more like another karma counter, especially after crypto they will be paid in craters (because no way it’ll involve real money)

    • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
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      It’s the obvious answer, but I wonder if it would implode in their face in some interesting ways.

      Reddit has been the epicenter of a lot of crypto communities over the years. They’ve been there for plenty of projects to rise and fall, and most importantly, the wholesale evolution of the market. The remaining crypto market is not a place where you can hope to launch a new, lasting project on hope, enthusiasm, or promises of future utility. For anything outside a few very narrow cases (actual CBDC or related projects), the announcement of a new project is little more than starting the count-down to the inevitable rug-pull, technical collapse, or financial meltdown. All this is documented in huge detail across their communities.

      Launching a new crypto-based product in 2023+ would be like Airbus saying “we’re going all in on propeller triplanes.” It’s sketchy, and they have full knowledge that it’s sketchy. I sort of wonder what promises and stories they’ve tossed towards their existing investors, who I imagine are frantically Googling the phrase “breach of fiduciary duty” already.

        • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
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          I suspect we’ll see products that end up getting branded CBDC (e-yuan, e-rupee, e-dollar), but it may look nothing like blockchain hype projects.

          There are plenty of real world problems that a natively digital transaction system can mitigate. The obvious use case is “I’m in Los Angeles, how can I pay someone in Edinburgh three pounds without spending days for settlement, worrying about inter-bank communication, or dealing with private firms that have turned it into a rent-seeking space that adds huge fees”. Note this can be done without some elaborate blockchain system. In fact, a centralized service operated by the state has the right incentive alignment: they are more beholden to the social and political goal of “efficient commerce helps economic growth” rather than the private-enterprise mindset of “if I can get people to consume the tokens I already own, I can be a kazillionaire.”

          • skillissuer@lemmy.world
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            every time i hear criticism like this i have to notice that these problems exist mostly within heavily outdated american banking system. in my country i can send bank transfer to anyone within country for free and it will always clear within 24h, but less than ~3h if sent during normal working hours. transfers within bank are instant; when i pay my internet bill, for example, such instant transfer goes to payment processor (with little overhead ~0.3$). within EU, there are SEPA transfers

            then, outside of banks in usual sense of this word, there is range of solutions from revolut to m-pesa

  • mand0rk@unilem.org
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    Keep it up Reddit! Push more people away! Lemmy devs watching all the Reddit refugees (I’m one): o.O

    • Bucky@lemmy.world
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      When the API changes were announced, for the first time I started thinking I should leave reddit. This coin thing was just kicking me while I was down. Ok, they want to get rid of awards for a new system. But you also want to remove them from past posts?? And you’re not going to convert coin balances into anything?

      Those are the things a company that has no regard for it’s users does.

      • Marxism-Fennekinism@lemmy.ml
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        They learned from the best: Google. The number of times Google had suddenly killed some YouTube feature that the community had collectively sunk millions of hours into is infuriating. Community-made subtitles are the most recent one.

  • Orionza@lemmy.zip
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    For me, I don’t much care. I stopped visiting Reddit when my app was shut down. I find my information and make my contributions elsewhere now.

    • LordPassionFruit@lemm.ee
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      I did the same. I used Boost (which is working on a Lemmy app currently) and it somehow lasted 7 days longer, but as soon as it stopped working I deleted reddit.

  • Ddhuud@lemmy.world
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    Wasn’t that one of the exclusive “features” of the official app. I guess there’s no point for exclusive features now.