https://mashable.com/article/reddit-gold-coins-awards-system-remove
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.
In recognition of your egging them on, I'm pleased to present you with the coveted Lemmy Lemon-Egg award.
🍋🥚
Congratulations on your achievement!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
And socialism is the middle ground that apparently no one with the power to implement it wants.
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.
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".
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?
i may get some flack for this but i honestly think reddit had it’s best years when alexis was most involved.
What do you mean?
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?
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.
I thought Reddit silver was just an image a user would post if they were too broke to afford gold.
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.
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
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 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
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...
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.
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.
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?
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...)
"Hey Poster, go kill yourself. Why don't you try opening your own place during covid era. Why don't you come and be a great CEO? There's plenty of people wanting to post now huh? I hope people like you don't come back to my site because you only care for yourself and not what others are going through. Have a nice life."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also its a forum and its appeal is asking questions to real people. Paying users will destroy that appeal.
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.
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.
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.
Real people who don't expect something back in return from you is what made reddit special. Advice is given because someone wanted to help as opposed to wanting a like, subscribe, notification bell, patron, merch store, etc. Now they want to turn into into some influencer platform full of people trying to sell shit whether it's themselves or some crap.
Exactly. People on Reddit usually don't have any incentive to lie about e.g. the quality of a fridge brand. Give them an incentive and it immediately becomes as useless as Google seo spam
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.
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.
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 doesn’t care what they do, they’ll 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.
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.
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.
Not only that, but they'll probably be angry on reddit as well.
He's literally just doing whatever Musk tells him to. Get rid of all the people who cared about the site, then you can advertise your site as a walled garden for bigots and terrorists
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.
Here’s what I received today… first time I’ve 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 – 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.
I ended up with a fairly sizable pile of gold after ten years of drunken shitposting and never really got the appeal of the gold lounge sub. I just went around and threw random shinies at people saying especially vitriolic things about Huffman before nuking my account.
Apparently I've got 300 coins sitting there...
What the hell can I actually do with that?
Anything?
They have like 500 various awards so just pick some that look fun and decorate funny comments I guess.
Actually useful? Nah
I literally don't even know how to do that though... Lol... 😂
Guess I'll Google it in the next couple days if I'm bored
I'm just gonna let mine die. I don't want to use the site any more than necessary. The kinds of posts I'd want to draw attention to at this time are those that would appear hypocritical to give rewards to. I don't want to give the impression of having given Reddit money (even though I've never bought a reward and all my coins are from receiving).
FWIW, I overwrote and nuked my account at the end of June same time as Apollo went dark. Threw out every free award I had before doing it, while still using the free API and just the app I paid for.
At this point, I’d say log in and remove your content, but interacting with the site any further is giving site traffic numbers they shouldn’t have. If you want to give awards, gild comments about the fuckery afoot
I've also got 300, no clue what to do with it. Maybe give out 3 random silvers? Not that it does anything.
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.
I mean, it's less about the coins and more about something that has an equivalent monetary value being wiped without any compensation whatsoever.
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.
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.