It is quite crazy. People will have time until Sept. 12 to spend their coins on awards … and then Reddit will delete all gilded awards from every post. WTF? Why even use them at all from now on?
This thing reeks of control. Reddit is trying to prohibit people from giving undesired opinions more visibility. In the past sometimes comments received awards that were not in line with advertisers. Now by removing this feature, these comments can only receive an up- or downvote but do not stand out by gilded awards anymore. And the up- and downvote is something that can easily be twiddled with behind the scenes to the desired outcome. It was much harder to remove awards from a comment, as the person who gave them out, would recognize it immediately. But who can proof that their up/downvote was not counted correctly… it is the perfect manipulation.
See also: Guided democracy
In a guided democracy, the government controls elections such that the people can exercise democratic rights without truly changing public policy. While they follow basic democratic principles, there can be major deviations towards authoritarianism. Under managed democracy, the state’s continuous use of propaganda techniques prevents the electorate from having a significant impact on policy.[3] It is today widely employed in Russia, where it was introduced into common practice by Kremlin theorists, in particular Gleb Pavlovsky.
Yes, it’s definitely a tool of control. They can now basically choose what opinion they want to have visible on their site.
Also with the history of u/spez changing users comments, I wouldn’t be surprised if the upvotes can’t be trusted.
Give it a couple of month and this site will be run by 80% bots and advertisers.
It makes me wonder how long (not even “if”) they have been artificially manipulating post/comment scores of submissions they have a vested interest in.
I mean you’re assuming this isn’t happening more in reverse to platform disinformation: take a look at any trans related thread in a UK sub and you’ll see the most useless leap of faith transphobe comments receive 5 gold while the more scientific pro trans comments are buried far, far down the chain.
Also, equating gilding with democracy is odd - we live in a world where economic inequality is growing. Who can afford the most gold? It’s not the poor/disabled/other minorities who have important views that need to be heard - they can’t afford to give 5 gold to random reddit comments they agree with because they’re statistically earning less.
Buying gold is not democratic. There’s a reason you can’t just (directly) buy votes in elections. This is still a shitty move on Reddit’s part, but for a different reason than hurting democracy.
I mean you’re assuming this isn’t happening more in reverse to platform disinformation
Well reddit allowed quite a lot of disinformation, far-right hate groups and such to flourish. So while this is a nice though, I doubt it’s so benevolent. Especially with how the US courts are trying to prevent the US government from limiting disinformation on social media, there seems little incentive to do this at all.
Eh, theres a lot of people who don’t into the T, even in western countries. TERFs are a thing. Id argue its more home grown than yall realize.
I’ll save you the Reddit click:
Existing awards will be removed from posts and comments; this will happen after Coins/Awards are sunset on Sept 12.
The changes we are announcing today will not have an impact on award-related trophies on user profiles, except that once awards are no longer available, those trophies will stop being delivered.
These changes also won’t have an impact on users who have already accumulated Premium via gifted awards.
For those who actually paid for gold and awards, chargeback time.
Like many places this will probably get your account banned. Which at this point, good?
Except that many large companies share large payment processors, and too many chargebacks (keep in mind “too many” is not a set number, it’s a changing variable depending on many factors) can get you banned from the using the entire payment processor and any companies that use them.
None of this makes any sense. They’re already reworking awards and coins, fine. But why go so far as to remove the ones that already exist?
EDIT: Looks like the code base the awards use is being changed, but… can’t they figure out a way to grandfather in the ones that already exist? This is really awful. It really shows how little the team cares for its userbase
May the new reddit die a painful death
I have that domain blocked. Can someone give the context?
Why is this fraud?
They lured people into spending money on getting awards. Now they are not only removing the award system, but going back and retroactively removing awards that have already been given out, effectively taking peoples money and not providing the service that the money paid for.
People spending money on something worthless and that’s what they got.
The terms were clear that these worthless awards were temporary by nature to begin with. There’s no argument for fraud, and I’m sure Reddit has a competent legal department.
(Civil) Legality aside. The remorse these buyers feel is healthy, imo.
Anyhow, fuck Reddit.
I see what you mean.
So, not just removing awards, but deleting most of the history of their use. Did spez buy a collection of foot shotguns he wanted to test out?
The best part is they told them they have X amount of time to spend the coins, but whatever they buy disappears anyway!
This is going to make reddit even more filled with spambots and ads, and I’m fine with that
I had some coins leftover from being awarded myself, and I applied them to the most harmful drop-shipping bots I could find in rising posts on my way out
Thank you for your service
