Reddit enrages users again by ditching thank-you coins and awards::Reddit, which is still dealing with the fallout from its last controversial decision, said it plans to phase out coins and awards.
Lemmy should make its own awards.
Award #1 – Blackjack
Aware #2 – Hookers
In fact forget the awards
I like to give out Lemmy Lemons 🍋
I enjoy that they’re meaningless and if people find them obnoxious they can just downvote them.
An anonymous user liked your comment so much they’ve gifted you Lemmy Hookers™!
Very dapper!
🏅
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As someone who would never pay for reddit coins or premium, it’s still pretty easy to identify with them.
They paid for a product and now it’s being removed with no compensation or refund. That’s total bullshit regardless of what the product was.
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sounds like an easy chargeback claim if that’s the case, “service not rendered/doesn’t exist anymore” might lose the acct out of it but who really cares at this point
I hated the “coin culture” with a passion (hey, look, it’s Bill Gates, let’s give him tons of paid emoticons he won’t care about!), but it’s clear this move is part of Reddit’s further enshittification. You can bet whatever replaces coins will be even shittier, and I think Reddit’s users know it.
I can’t identify with giving reddit money but I can sympathize with people who were saving monthly coins they paid for. Seriously, it has to be deliberate now. Why piss off your most loyal, paying customers? Is it a test?
Yeah, it’s a mystery to me how much money they got from these types of things. It’s a company that is supposedly not profitable, yet there is online rage about something some people bought. It makes me wonder about so much. First, I had no idea so many people payed money for these things. Second, Reddit wants us to believe, through legal loophole magic and accounting, that it is not profitable.
Especially taking things away from people who prepaid for those things
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Sometimes prepaying is the more frugal option, since there’s usually a discount for buying in bulk. As of January of this year, I wouldn’t have believed you if you had told me that Reddit was going to do something so egregious that I would permanently stop browsing there.
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i used coins basically as a bookmark feature for great posts; it was nice to give a treat to a good poster as well. so incredibly stupid they’re destroying the site like this
I just dumped all my old coins onto comments encouraging people to do chargebacks for any year-long Premium subscriptions since they’re in material breach.
Can you elaborate, I’m not quite sure i understand?
So when a charge is made against a credit card, you have the option to do a “chargeback” - this is meant to be used for fraud. In this case, the argument is that Reddit fraudulently changed the terms of the program after people had already paid - being in “material breach” means they made a binding promise to provide a thing and they failed to do so. Chargebacks are really, really bad for a vendor. They lose the money, and they get a penalty fee, AND if it keeps happening the credit card processor can crank up their overall fees or even drop them as a bad customer.
Are they really in material beach since the agreement you agreed to by giving them money basically says “coins have no value and we can delete them at any time we want”?
I mean, I hate Reddit as much as the next guy here but that sounds a bit like doing a charge back because you didn’t win on the slot machine you just pulled.
EULAs are not legally binding and any court and credit card company on the planet would accept that you had a reasonable belief that you would be provided the services that were offered when you paid for Reddit Premium.
Are you sure this would be considered an EULA and not a TOS?
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that used to be what i though would be my queue to exit…until i realised that my reddit experience was basically RIF… so yea if they want to get rid of another great chunk of users, do get rid of old reddit, do it spez!
Haha same. “Oh I will just use old reddit” forgetting that 95% of my internet usage is mobile and old.reddit is nearly impossible to navigate on mobile. I have been 94% Lemmy since July.
Same here.
I didn’t think old reddit would outlast me lol
It’s funny whenever this is brought up on a reddit admin post. They always come with some stat saying a tiny % of users use old.reddit.com like that means people barely use it and therefore useless. But I see a lot of active posters talk about it which means those are probably the users you want to keep around lol.
That’s gonna be the final nail in the coffin for me. As of now I only go there for my city’s subreddit as the fediverse equivalent isn’t quite active yet.
Go be the change you want. Create posts, invite the users from your city’s subreddit
Honestly the whole reddit protest was really good for me. I stopped spending so much time online, I only open lemmy occasionally too. Overall goodness for the planet
What do you do for the planet instead of browsing Reddit man. :D serious question!p
I’ve been working on switching careers for the last six or so months. Made a lot more progress after the protests and have a final interview on Thursday. Please send prayers and/or good vibes my way. Switching from Marketing to Cybersecurity. One less talented marketing person makes the world a little less cluttered with people buying shit they don’t need.
Besides that specifically since the protests started I’ve been researching and thinking about learning to play piano. It’s amazing how much time I wasted scrolling endlessly on Reddit.
That sounds awesome. :D But how can someone moves from marketing to cyber security. I mean, it’s a completely different thing.
Music instrument learning is fun! Glad that now you can utilize your time better.
Cybersecurity and Penetration Testing/Hacking is more skill based than most industries. It’s just a matter of learning the tools and getting good at it.
I think its supposed to mean that since they are spending less time they are more active outside of just the reddit focus and if they are doing it others will be doing similar. Less of a “good for the environment” and more of a “good for the group of people who quit”.
Amazing. Really does sound like they’re trying to sabotage the site now.
I was thinking about it; Lemmy could technically implement a system of gold on its own e.g can give one award a month after hitting a certain karma level or something to siphon more Reddit users.
But a lot of people on this site seem to not want normie Reddit users flocking here and my personal expectation is that people here would not care for awards. So whether they flock here or not will likely depend on how fed up they get.
Feels like Elon bought Reddit and we just haven’t heard about it yet
I think little piggy spez is an Elon fanboy so it makes sense
https://i.imgur.com/sGCReCn.png
Can someone please put Elon’s face (person on the right side)
My eyes and I are very upset with you for causing me to see such horror
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I prefer to think that it’s all coordinated by real life Bond villain (and Musk’s old business partner) Peter Thiel. He failed at setting up competing Twitter platforms, so he got Musk to buy and tank it. After seeing how effective that was they roped in reddit’s owners to undermine that as well.
Let’s not forget the Saudi royal family. They really hate social media.
Definitely not. Here’s the breakdown of the $44 bn purchase:
- $5 bn from other investors, including a Saudi prince
- $26 bn from Elon, underwritten by stocks in Tesla (which significantly dropped in value after the purchase)
- $13 bn in a loan that Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk’s behalf.
Twitter could hardly pay the interest on that $13 bn, even before Musk tanked the company’s revenue. Either Twitter steps into line and gets more investment from right wing control freaks, or it dies - both could be seen as a win in the eyes of Peter Thiel or the Saudis.
don’t you mean billion?
I did, thought I’d edited out all the "mil"s hah. Thanks, fixed now.
I have no problem with Redditors flocking over here, but I just don’t think online discussions should be “awarded”. It just distracts from actual discussion and turns everything into a popularity contest. Leave the karma and point hoarding on Reddit IMHO.
I think it would be a great system to easily donate to instance hosts if it was supported as an instance opt-in feature.
That was the original premise of reddit gold. You bought it to support the server costs. It used to even show you how much server time your gold had supported. I think at one point it even had a progress bar for monthly costs.
With how Lemmy works, it might be a little complicated. Especially since the payment information would need to be federated, and there would be a lot of complications depending on the region the server was hosted in.
Yeah. Giving awards would probably be limited to comments/posts that are on the same instance as your user.
Honestly I wouldn’t want anything baked into the protocol, but I can see people donating small amounts to the instance hosting a worthy comment if there was a simple enough way to do it.
Cryptocurrencies were supposed to enable that, but I think we are still a long way away (no, lighting does not qualify).
Given the work by the guys behind podcasting 2.0 it would be interesting to see the fediverae adopt boosts backed by sats / the lightning network. It seems like they solve a lot of the same problems. You need a common currency people can freely transfer in small amounts to support content they like and the infra they are hosted on.
Here is an article by one of my favorite podcasts that have gone all in on boosts.
A lot of Reddit users have become more toxic over the years. Let them sink down with the Reddit failboat, we don’t need them here.
How many times do we have to teach you this lesson old man
😂
Is spez trying to beat Musk’s record for number of strategic blunders made while running a tech company?
Spez idolizes Musk. So he’s doing the exact same thing.
It seems so, and also seems like he’s in a hurry to catch up.
They want to force redditors to see ads. That’s the whole point. Gilding someone was a way of gifting an ad-free experience to a random redditor, and Reddit doesn’t like that anymore.
Of course it’s also because spez doesn’t like seeing too many awards on “fuck spez” comments.
the lengths people will go before installing adblocker
most Reddit users use the official app now, so an adblocker is pretty much useless there
(+ the vast majority don’t know how to use an adblocking proxy on their phone)
I imagine having a baked-in method for users with disposable income to avoid seeing any ads isn’t exactly an attractive feature for potential advertisers.
That’s literally YouTube Premium’s value proposition.
I’d expect there’s an equilibrium to be found.
Even if you had the hypothetical “ultimate consumer” – so stupid that they clicked every ad and bought everything they saw-- there would be a finite cap of ad revenue you could get out of them. There are only so many advertisers, and they’re only willing to pay so much per ad, because their acquisition budgets are finite and they anticipate much more real world levels of conversion from view to click to sale.
Maybe an “optimal” real-world user is worth $30 per month in ad clicks. Maybe they’re worth 30 cents. Either way, it’s still a number where you can say “we can offer an ad-free experience for a price anywhere above that, lose no revenue, and provide a premium option.”
I’m also surprised there isn’t more concern from the investor world about anchoring more and more products and services to the advertising universe-- it’s a brittle, finicky bubble that’s based on everyone lying to everyone else and hoping nobody checks the books.
It was such a nice way to monetize, just a teensy little icon on posts you could easily ignore. Tells you whatever replaces it is gonna be far less acceptable.
Gonna be they’re version of a blue check mark. Buy the widget and it stays at the top regardless of up votes or down votes.
they’ll make blue aliens more important and always float to the top like the blue check robot armies on twitter lmao
Honestly I can’t wait for the downfall of reddit. They seem to be constantly pushing away and annoying their users.
For me, I don’t much care. I stopped visiting Reddit when my app was shut down. I find my information and make my contributions elsewhere now.
I did the same. I used Boost (which is working on a Lemmy app currently) and it somehow lasted 7 days longer, but as soon as it stopped working I deleted reddit.
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it’s zombie reddit over there. most of the people that stayed were just lurkers. They still think this was all caused by “power tripping mods” and don’t notice the site decaying around them. They’re just glad the mods that chastised them for being racist are gone.
For some people the experience hasn’t decayed. There is still cat pics and vitriol, if that’s all they used to see that’s all they still see.
I wonder if anyone has done an analysis of the ratio between say upvotes and # of comments. I bet it is much worse for Reddit these days and as commentors dwindle so does content people will add. It’s a downward spiral as people lose interest, and it just becomes a circle jerk of bots fooling advertisers, lol.
There’s still lots of comments over there, but the depth and variety of the comments seems to have sharply diminished.
how much is anyone’s betting that it will involve crypto in some way? i raise you a very fine 6mm dia 1m long aluminum tube
It’s the obvious answer, but I wonder if it would implode in their face in some interesting ways.
Reddit has been the epicenter of a lot of crypto communities over the years. They’ve been there for plenty of projects to rise and fall, and most importantly, the wholesale evolution of the market. The remaining crypto market is not a place where you can hope to launch a new, lasting project on hope, enthusiasm, or promises of future utility. For anything outside a few very narrow cases (actual CBDC or related projects), the announcement of a new project is little more than starting the count-down to the inevitable rug-pull, technical collapse, or financial meltdown. All this is documented in huge detail across their communities.
Launching a new crypto-based product in 2023+ would be like Airbus saying “we’re going all in on propeller triplanes.” It’s sketchy, and they have full knowledge that it’s sketchy. I sort of wonder what promises and stories they’ve tossed towards their existing investors, who I imagine are frantically Googling the phrase “breach of fiduciary duty” already.
announcement of a new project is little more than starting the count-down to the inevitable rug-pull, technical collapse, or financial meltdown
arguably it always has been https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html#sum
monetization of upvotes, lack of bot control, yeah i see no way this can go sideways
CBDCs were always a vaporware, and crypto in general is driven by hype only
I suspect we’ll see products that end up getting branded CBDC (e-yuan, e-rupee, e-dollar), but it may look nothing like blockchain hype projects.
There are plenty of real world problems that a natively digital transaction system can mitigate. The obvious use case is “I’m in Los Angeles, how can I pay someone in Edinburgh three pounds without spending days for settlement, worrying about inter-bank communication, or dealing with private firms that have turned it into a rent-seeking space that adds huge fees”. Note this can be done without some elaborate blockchain system. In fact, a centralized service operated by the state has the right incentive alignment: they are more beholden to the social and political goal of “efficient commerce helps economic growth” rather than the private-enterprise mindset of “if I can get people to consume the tokens I already own, I can be a kazillionaire.”
every time i hear criticism like this i have to notice that these problems exist mostly within heavily outdated american banking system. in my country i can send bank transfer to anyone within country for free and it will always clear within 24h, but less than ~3h if sent during normal working hours. transfers within bank are instant; when i pay my internet bill, for example, such instant transfer goes to payment processor (with little overhead ~0.3$). within EU, there are SEPA transfers
then, outside of banks in usual sense of this word, there is range of solutions from revolut to m-pesa
Honestly probably an nft. Pay extra for your own unique award to give out! 🤮
Reddit already has NFT avatars. Adding them for awards would make sense with that recent story about letting users make money from their awards. Bleh.
imo it’ll turn out to be more like another karma counter, especially after crypto they will be paid in craters (because no way it’ll involve real money)
I raise you this inanimate carbon rod.
i gamble only in the best metal, aluminum
I haven’t visited reddit since boost stopped working a few days after the API change. Filled the void mostly with twitter. Don’t miss it at all.
the moment boost for lemmy launches. bye bye reddit.
You stayed on Reddit after boost stopped? I just couldn’t force myself to use that shitty app. Not judging there are things I would definitely like to use it for but can’t stand that app.
You can patch boost to work again with Android 10+ though there’s a tutorial somewhere thinking of using that for things I can’t yet find here
yeah, im just soldiering on. the official app is a shitfest though and i hate it.
Not only is it a shit fest but I’ve noticed that now they’ve taken one out of Twitter and Facebook’s playbook and on mobile all search result content just directs me to download the app which is really irritating. I refuse to even download that shitty app.
Fortunately on mobile I was able to open desktop version to read an old article I needed but on computer iirc I couldn’t get it to display anything even though I was already on the desktop version.
Every change they’re making is pissing off the user base, spez must be wanting to clean it up and sell to advertisers ir something
Read-only (without nsfw) still works in RiF, I open that from Google searches or I’ll go to the website, when I’m looking for specific things. But other than that it’s been all Lemmy for me since late June.
Liftoff is a descent replacement till boost comes alive for lemmy…i won’t ever give another login to re**it
Have you tried mastodon?
Fun fact: you can view and post lemmy posts from mastodon
Lemmy is basically an implementation of mastodon, I thought? I prefer Nostr because it is more censorship resistant but the community isn’t quite there yet.
Specifically it is an implementation of something known as activitypub, which connects the entire fediverse, services from mastodon and akkoma to pixefed and peertube to lemmy and kbin
Glad to see my fellow boost people around. Also haven’t visited reddit since boost stopped working. The boost app can be patched to work but… I’m just sick of Reddit and don’t want to support it. Can’t wait for Boost for Lemmy! Jerboa is great but miss my boost
