The website has been knocking it out of the park for popular decisions lately /s
We all know this is happening with Reddit gold, however I thought it would be relevant to point out that there has been fallout amongst Reddit Premium subscribers.
what I take from this, though, is that even with the anger against Reddit, there’s no talk of leaving in the comments on that post!
you hate the site and all of their changes so much and it’s only been getting worse… why do you stay? even the content is already worse, and even worse on the subs that have the new Reddit tipping system… why stay?
The article comments are linked to Reddit, if you click on "Replies" it routes you to the topic on Reddit where there are posts about leaving the platform.
Yeah it's been enabled on the crypto reddits for a while... as a result the subs overwhelmingly changed to "vaguely interesting and/or attention-grabbing but ultimately useless with a race to see who's first" posts, signal-to-noise ratio got way worse.
Why? I mean, technologically, why couldn’t a more standard payment platform work, and then just pass around those payments among instances? PayPal is not crypto, but you can use it almost anywhere online.
PayPal is not decentralized. None of the "more standard" payment platforms are. If you want to have some kind of cross-instance limitation on things like awards and not have instances be able to just spew them out willy-nilly if they want to then you're going to need some kind of decentralized ledger to track them authoritatively, and that's basically cryptocurrency in a nutshell. This is what cryptocurrency is for.
Generally speaking the solution to these sorts of things when one doesn't want it is "then don't use it." That's especially true in a federated, decentralized system like this.
Put anything to a vote
Run weighted polls to make big decisions in your community, like getting input on rules changes or deciding how to distribute Points.
Unlike regular polls, these polls give a larger voice to people who have contributed more to the community. The more Community Points someone has earned, the more weight their vote carries.
This will end well...
EDIT
What they're really looking for are a bunch of whales to drive engagement.
Call me a cynic but I suspect the biggest ‘contributor’ to r/product will end up being product’s marketing department account, likewise with r/country and party-political apparatchiks. The move is elegant in a way: Reddit Inc can ruin true democratic operation of subs by turning subscribers into shareholders (which wards off repeats of mod activism) and simultaneously provide further cover to astroturfers (lots of points = Time and Effort™ = good faith actor).
Oh, absolutely this is the case. Reddit could even run bot accounts to gain a lion's share of points for any particular sub they want to control, thereby stifling any sort of protest or activism authorized by sub vote.
Wow, Reddit is not joking around when it comes speedrunning enshittification. I think it’s going to be very tough for other platforms to match these moves.
It’s the equivalent of a crack dealer at this point.
At first they got people hooked with cheap drugs that worked and got you an easy high.
But now you need more and the dealer knows you’re desperate … so they increase the price, give you a cheaper product and string you along because they know no matter what they do, you’ll keep coming back for more.
They’ll start whoring you around and selling your body like trash and you won’t like it but if it means getting your next fix, you’ll do anything.
Just out of curiosity, what is it that you were subscribing for? I used r*ddit for 13 years and never saw the need to pay for premium or gold or whatever. What features did it offer?
I subscribed before the new redesign. One of the things I liked was on the website it highlighted new comments in a thread for you. That feature didn’t make it into the redesign. And the available Dark Themes became broken over time on old.reddit.
The free coins would have been nice if I hadn’t started spending more time on RIF instead of the website or if third party apps had access to the award API.
In the end, I kept my subscription going mostly on momentum and maybe the hope that something useful would show up eventually. Plus I had a grandfather clause price point on my subscription from before they changed the subscription from “Reddit Gold” to “Reddit Premium”. So there was that overly-emotional fear of losing out on that deal should I eventually re-subscribe.
Should have ended the subscription far longer before I did. But in the end, I ended it to time with the recent Blackouts.
Ad Revenue. Someone paying for Reddit Premium gets an ad free experience which is fine but someone who gets gifted Gold also gets an ad free experience. They need as many people as possible to see ads so free loaders have to go…which means so do the coins.
I fully expect that within a year Reddit will start doing what many streaming services are where the lowest tier is free but ad supported, then there’s a paid “limited ad” tier, followed by an even more expensive “No Ads” tier. The current Reddit Premium program will transition to that mid-tier category and they’ll add “Reddit Ultimate” or some BS as the new Ad Free option. It’ll probably cost $10 a month too.
I can see why they’d want to streamline the award system, since it is a bit messy, but they’re getting rid of something that made Reddit unique and that people seemed to like, for…what, exactly?
Community Points (aka Crypto bullshit). There is link in the comments to the nonsense. Just be warned it’s so cringey blindness or brain aneurysm are possible side effects of reading it.
Not that I even use Reddit anymore, but when I did I used Apollo and I had awards disabled. Honestly they don’t bring anything to the discussion and certainly not since they introduced a hundred new awards that were free.
So someone did some math and figured out that the award system was unprofitable somehow?
Don’t know how that works out.
Or maybe they are willing to take the hit because they are embarrassed when posts and comments criticizing Reddit get a ton of awards? (Plenty of people already have a large cache of Reddit coins, so handing out an award is not necessarily paying anything to Reddit at the time of award.)
That's a good point, lol.
No, according to The Verge's article, they say that users don't like the current system:
“First, many don’t appreciate the clutter from awards (50+ awards right now, but who’s counting?) and all the steps that go into actually awarding content. Second, redditors want awarded content to be more valuable to the recipient.”
And there are hints as to what may be slated to replace it:
While Reddit hasn’t specified what the new system might look like, Android Authority may have dug up some clues. Based on code in the Reddit’s Android app, Reddit appears to be working on a “contributor program” that would let users cash out gold or karma (basically, points you get for posts, comments, or giving awards) they receive into real money. Reddit didn’t respond to a request for comment sent Wednesday about Android Authority’s article.
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