Reddit is ending Reddit Gold and users are furious::undefined

  • Clbull@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

    • astral_avocado@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • blueskiesoc@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • draxil@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Cyber Yuki@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    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?

    • QQuixotic@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Clbull@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • arcturus@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    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

    • Skellymax@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • anonono@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      reddit gold used to be how the community helped with server costs back when reddit had only a few employees

      • drcobaltjedi@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        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.

        • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

    • irotsoma@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • ziggurism@lemmy.fmhy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • jonne@infosec.pub
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      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).

      • toxic_cloud@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • Briongloid@aussie.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • SpaceshipPanda@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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!

    • Varcour@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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…

  • Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • BaggySpandex@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 year ago

        Capitalism is fine as long as people aren’t complete scumbags about it. Rare, I know. It’s a human morality proposition.

        • ChatGPT@lemmy.world
          cake
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

            • FediFuckerFantastico@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              1 year ago

              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?

              • Action Bastard@lemmy.world@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                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.

        • grte@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          1 year ago

          You’re putting the cart before the horse. Capitalism incentivizes people to be scumbags.

              • Dark Arc@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                0
                ·
                1 year ago

                As is capitalism incentivizing people to be scumbags, as trendy as that perspective is.

                • grte@lemmy.ca
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  0
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  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?

    • muertinez@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      i may get some flack for this but i honestly think reddit had it’s best years when alexis was most involved.

    • Imgonnatrythis@lemmy.fmhy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • HardlightCereal@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            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.

  • Wolf_359@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • kescusay@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 year ago

        Also its a forum and its appeal is asking questions to real people. Paying users will destroy that appeal.

        • Holyginz@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          1 year ago

          The company doesn’t care. They don’t actually understand what reddit is/was and have decided they want it to be something else that they can squeeze money out of. Whatever they end up with is going to be bland and nothing like what it was before. Doubt it will get them what they want in the end.

          • tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            1 year ago

            They don’t seem to realize Reddit isn’t that special. It’s a forum… Digg and Slashdot thought they were special too Myspace before that…

            They’re just where most people are at the moment. That can and likely will change. Whether it’s Lemmy or something else entirely.

            • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              1 year ago

              Yeah it’s not like Facebook where I need all my friends to move. I just need a few thousand people to move to Lemmy and I’ll never need Reddit again.

              • Boz (he/him)@lemmy.one
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                And since Lemmy is already at, iirc, the 200,000 mark, and is only part of the greater fediverse… I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t feel lonely here.

                • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Same. Honestly I’m getting more responses and conversations than I do in Reddit. And they’re way more positive

  • elrik@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    This finally pushed me to stop supporting the platform with a premium sub and now here I am, checking out lemmy!

    • Boz (he/him)@lemmy.one
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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…)

    • Revan343@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      4 months ago

      Some of us paid actual money for coins because we liked Reddit and wanted to help keep the servers running. Emphasis on liked.

      Guess I’ll help lemmy.ca keep their server running instead