I'm not sure if this is new, but when I clicked on the /r/pics protest post link from the frontpage here, I was redirected to this: https://old.reddit.com/premium
I'm not sure if this is well-known or not that they're pushing it now, but it's the first time I've seen it, especially on old.reddit.
I'm ashamed to admit I'm a former reddit premium member. I canceled my subscription after being a paying member for a number of years the day Spez started his bullshit. I just can't see myself going back. I just need to find an instance for my country that's actually active.
I was a premium member a while ago because I love reddit and wanted to support it + get rid of adds on the mobile app (I use their app) but I cancelled it during the last blackout (I think it was the 2021 one about hate speech).
I loved Reddit, and I still love Reddit. I love so many little communities. And although I am persuaded that the fediverse is the future, I would go back in a heartbeat if it managed to regrow a soul. I happily paid for premium back in the day.
That's the amazing thing. In about a month Reddit went from a well liked company to hated. I would love see the cross section of premium users used third party clients. Reddit just torched all good will for nothing.
Hmm, I wouldn't say a month, I was talking about maybe a good six years ago when there was enough good will towards Reddit that people would happily hand them money because they genuinely wanted to support them. It's been slowly downhill since then.
I had a premium subscription for years. For as much as I used to use the site, it felt good to give a little back. Now they'll never see another cent from me.
I was a premium subscriber, simply because I used Reddit a lot, I could financially bear it, and I generally liked how the place was run so I wanted to support them. Now I feel betrayed and my trust is violated, like when your friend borrows money off you and then never pays it back and just laughs in your face for being so naive. So I went from 'I love Reddit' to 'fuck Reddit' in about a month. Impressive achievement.
Same here. On reddit for 17 years, signed on to Premium as soon as they offered it because I believe in supporting good services. I, too, feel betrayed.
I don't really understand this sentiment, I'd rather pay a subscription for a service like fb / insta / reddit than have ads and my identity sold to the highest bidder.
Social networks are expensive to run, the idea they should be "free" is half the problem.
Though of course the enterprises behind them make far more money through advertising and mining user data than they would through a subscription model.
YouTube has been shown recently to be sliding ads into premium user feeds so I can only expect the same, if not worse, especially from a company so blatantly caught lying.
I have no problem paying an app developer to remove ads.
But I'm not going to pay an organisation that has just hiked it's API prices which means it's now going to be earning a fortune from the likes of Google/Microsoft.
Delusional to think a paid subscription would keep them from selling your identity to the highest bidder. Even if you sued them on GDPR bases they'd gladly take that loss if you somehow won so they could keep abusing you.
It's just another revenue stream to make people feel better about their poor financial decisions.
The problem is that selling your data + targeted advertising is always going to be more lucrative than a subscription model. So even if you are willing to pay a subscription, it's usually only a matter of time before the social media company in question changes tack. Especially if they have shareholders and/or venture capital investors breathing down their necks. If you run it like Wikipedia is run, I'm pretty sure you can operate a social media company on subscriptions/donations, but as a business model that doesn't make sense as it is not the least effort way to make the most money.
Yup, agree totally. Only way it can work is if the org running it is a not for profit with great transparency, which hopefully is what we will see with the likes of Lemmy etc.
There is an argument to make that things like reddit or even Facebook (original fb, not what it is now) should be publicly owned services. They CAN provide value to society, similar to how a town hall can.
Id rather pay for a subscription for a forum site or something. I know echo chambers are dangerous, but sometimes you just need a gated community. Money makes it really easy to keep the lunatics out.
I will happily pay to keep a free and open service free for everyone. I do not enjoy paying for "exclusivity". I don't want to pay to use a service, I want to donate to support it. Fuck paywalls. Gatekeeping the Internet is not a good idea.
A site you pay for has incentive to keep you on their site for ads and data collection. One way to do that is to keep serving data you engage with. So, keeping you in a bubble.
I was using qx.reddit.com - who runs old and qx? are they different? How do they monitize? Tell me about this please. I thought they were reddit but easier for the plain.
Avatars, coins, app icon im not interested at all. No ads isn't necessary as none ever appear on my feed. Literally zero need for premium. But but you have access to r/lounge! < Wanking gesture>
Reddit gave a shit ton out to mods to give to inflate the appearance people were buying them to give out. And when you'd receive gold, you got coins to give others gold.
It's like a Ponzi scheme but without money...
I never paid a cent for gold, but had it at least 50% of the time on Reddit.
I was similarly confused when I saw a screenshot somebody had posted of another post in Jerboa. It was hard to tell where the screenshot ended and the app UI began again.
I think I ought to file a bug report/feature request that a thin border be added around images so they don't take up the whole screen width and you can distinguish them as images better.
This is a pretty shit deal tbh. Ooohh ad free browsing and some free pngs you can tack onto your avatar or comments.
It sure is convenient that the second they kill third party apps they push a subscription model for ad free service on their ad riddled, barely functioning app...
That exclusive avatar gear it probably NFT-based, so it can be traded independently of Reddit. (Alhough if you think navigating the Fediverse is hard, try navigating how to transfer and sell those NFTs on a marketplace).
There are certain subs where they have crypto-based community points, like r/cryptocurrency, based on participation. I have posted there, and have been give some of their token, which is inexplicably worth something.
Reddit's foray into crypto has been interesting to watch, and puts me in the position that if I decide to leave Reddit for good, they have given me a severance package. I will be sure to sell every bit of it before leaving, except for one token , which I will carefully monitor to see what Reddit does with community points from deleted accounts.
They rolled those out when new.reddit became a thing. Before that people with Gold/premium could customise their snoos but they weren't displayed on your profile anyway.
it's so evident that they're going to pump and dump the hell out of reddit, while some unknowledgeable investors are going to be left holding the bag. every move they make is a superficial show with no teeth. they're trashing reddit while dressing it up in designer clothes. it's blaring.
I don't think the street is that dumb in current year. This isn't 1999 where you could scream OMG LINUX and get a few hundred million. The VC purse strings are tight, the brand has been in decline for a decade, and all the political horse-picking won't help them.
can anybody please tell me why lemmy wont be regulated or commercialized like reddit in the future? which safety rules are installed in the lemmy ecosystem to guarante freedom and democratic rule changes?
It probably will, but there could be a good few years where it's growing and can get investment as it grows it's user base because it's good. The push for profit will turn into advertising trash eventually.
Let's imagine you sign up for email service with GMail. You're happy for a while, but then Google announces that they'll be charging per email, or blocking emails sent to France, or displaying all your emails on a ticker in Times Square. You can just up sticks and move to another provider, because while Google owns GMail but they don't own e-mail in general.
Anyone can set up an email server and they don't need to ask Google's permission to do so and even with a home-spun email server you can send and receive message between jibs@whatever.eggs and someoneelse@gmail.com no issue. It probably never occurred to you that email between domains would ever be a problem.
This is because email - like Lemmy, Mastodon, PeerTube, BitTorrent and Matrix - is federated: no-one owns the network, because there is literally no network to own, it's just lots of servers that work on established standards. As long as your server, or the server you use, works to the established standards, it'll keep on working.
You can. For email, DNS serves a similar purpose to the telcos' mobile number portability databases. If you want to move your email domain to a new server, you just need to update its DNS MX record.
Good points, but we must not relax under the comfortable blanket of "standards", because the Big Boys™ are busily unraveling them.
A prime example is Google's "Chrome" browser, that's weaponized 'web-standards' in the most anti-competitive manner possible. Worse is their bullying of "web standards bodies". This is specifically aimed at neutering Mozilla and independent browser-extension developers who throw up obstacles to their dominance.
Google wants to eliminate the possibility of users avoiding their data-vacuuming, ad- spamming and universal tracking. That's what's behind their endless propaganda about 'speeding up your web experience'.
Once they "succeed", all 'unapproved' extensions, 'users' and browsers will just be "unable to connect" with what used to be the greatest communication and data-sharing system in human history.
Concerned users should become familiar with the politics of "international standards bodies" that affect our ability to use the internet.
Aren't they backing off a bit, getting rid of universal 3rd party ad tracking cookies?
But whatever, Mozilla is definitely more sustainable in the long run, and the degradation of web kit will drive away users in the long run, even casual ones. I switched to Firefox, and I am recommending others do the same.
I think the thing to stop this happening is for the user to own the identity they use on Lemmy - so if you do not like what gas happened on the instance you signed up on, you can easily move to another instance or social media.
Lemmy is open source. Lots of people run instances, so there are a lot of choices.
That is why I am supportive of something like self-soverign I'd
I was actually ok with paying them $50 a year for ad-free before they started de-modding people for protesting. Now they can go fuck themselves. I am sympathetic to their need to be profitable. But effectively taking over subreddits is totally unacceptable and Reddit is no longer Reddit.
100% agree. It’s so fucked that they are stomping out 3P apps. Even with greed and profit as the only motivation, financially it would have made more sense to charge reasonable API fees than die on this hill. I would happily pay for Apollo if it was necessary to keep it running.
The funny thing to me is that when Reddit Gold first became a thing, I happily joined because I wanted to help support the platform and help pay for the servers. They used to have a little meter on the sidebar showing how far we've gone towards paying server costs.
Gone are the days when they had enough good will to get away with something like that.
Add comment