I just said this yesterday or two days ago when they announced they were going to start paying people for content, but it truly is amazing how Reddit can find another significant thing that will hurt them as a business and move forward with it.
It seems like they’d run out of things that could significantly hurt their business, they just keep finding something else.
Soon they’re going to be down to basic features, And they’ll be like hey look so hyperlinks don’t work anymore. And then that’ll be the end of the press release.
Their “business decisions” are insane right now.
It’s very difficult to see this procession of self-mutilation technologically in another light other than deliberate corporate suicide. Like is someone going to benefit if Reddit goes bankrupt? Is that what’s happening?
I don’t want to give Reddit any traffic so I’m reposting the content here:
Hi all,
I’m u/venkman01 from the Reddit product team, and I’m here to give everyone an early look at the future of how redditors award (and reward) each other.
TL;DR: We are reworking how great content and contributions are rewarded on Reddit. As part of this, we made a decision to sunset coins (including Community coins for moderators) and awards (including Medals, Premium Awards, and Community Awards), which also impacts some existing Reddit Premium perks. Starting today, you will no longer be able to purchase new coins, but all awards and existing coins will continue to be available until September 12, 2023.
Many eons ago, Reddit introduced something called Reddit Gold. Gold then evolved, and we introduced new awards including Reddit Silver, Platinum, Ternium, and Argentium. And the evolution continued from there. While we saw many of the awards used as a fun way to recognize contributions from your fellow redditors, looking back at those eons, we also saw consistent feedback on awards as a whole. 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.
It’s become clear that awards and coins as they exist today need to be re-thought, and the existing system sunsetted. Rewarding content and contribution (as well as something golden) will still be a core part of Reddit. We’ll share more in the coming months as to what this new future looks like.
On a personal note: in my several years at Reddit, I’ve been focused on how to help redditors be able to express themselves in fun ways and feel joy when their content is celebrated. I led the product launch on awards – if you happen to recognize the username – so this is a particularly tough moment for me as we wind these products down. At the same time, I’m excited for us to evolve our thinking on rewarding contributions to make it more valuable to the community.
Why are we making these changes?
We mentioned early this year that we want to both make Reddit simpler and a place where the community empowers the community more directly.
With simplification in mind, we’re moving away from the 50+ awards available today. Though the breadth of awards have had mixed reception, we’ve also seen them - be it a local subreddit meme or the “Press F” award - be embraced. And we know that many redditors want to be able to recognize high quality content.
Which is why rewarding good content will still be part of Reddit. Though we’d love to reveal more to you all now, we’re in the process of early testing and feedback, so aren’t ready to share official details just yet. Stay tuned for future posts on this!
What’s changing exactly?
Awards - Awards (including Medals, Premium Awards, and Community Awards) will no longer be available after September 12.
Reddit Coins - Coins will be deprecated, since Awards will be going away. Starting today, you’ll no longer be able to purchase coins, but you can use your remaining coins to gift awards by September 12.
Reddit Premium - Reddit Premium is not going away. However, after September 12, we will discontinue the monthly coin drip and Premium Awards. Other current Premium perks will still exist, including the ad-free experience.
Note: As indicated in our User Agreement past purchases are non-refundable. If you’re a Premium user and would like to cancel your subscription before these changes go into effect, you can find instructions here.
What comes next?
In the coming months, we’ll be sharing more about a new direction for awarding that allows redditors to empower one another and create more meaningful ways to reward high-quality contributions on Reddit.
I’ll be around for a while to answer any questions you may have and hear any feedback!
thanks for posting here. I have no idea who the venkman01 is but the way they worded that post is borderline cringe
Yeah, “sunsetting” is such trash corporate speak.
Corpo scum are allergic to saying exactly what they mean, so they insist on hiding their intent behind flowery words that sound “good” to them. I guess they think that if they use weasel words, it’ll soften the blow when they decide to strip out features and further destroy their platforms.
It’s not an allergy, it’s hiding punches. It’s concealing the fact that they’re fucking you in the ass by telling you it’s just a penis-based prostate exam, and that you’re the one being weird. It’s gaslighting.
It’s one of the things I hate most in our capitalist dystopia.
deleted by creator
Also he is using it wrong because “sunsetting” means a slow winding down. You know, because the sun doesn’t instantly turn off.
But they basically literally just suddenly turned off gold today, without any pre warning.
They have basically sent a message to everyone telling them they’ve already done it.
This made me realize I spend too much of my life reading and writing trash corporate speak because I breezed past most of this as yup, seems normal lol.
I’m so sorry. You should spend more time here, where everyone uses language in a completely classy, sublime, and not-at-all-ungrammatical-ever way.
Yeah, next they’ll say it’s time to ‘say goodbye’ to awards. thanks, I’m 6
That means it’ll come back soon, right?
Right, Anakin?
Official reddit posts are always cringey. They unironically call people “Snoos”.
Gesundheit?
Anyways, who has time and energy to read such a dumb, way too long post?
Danke!
I will say one thing. At least he didn’t use a cringe gif in the post.
What, you don’t like 3 gifs per line?
It feels forced and inauthentic. For a little while posts seemed like they followed a template and to be honest many of them were just embarrassing that an adult posted them.
I am pretty upset that they are removing awards from past posts because I’ve given out 455 golds, 125 platinum, and 200 community awards and now those posts won’t carry those badges anymore. I just don’t understand that.
Also, are you the same person that created the Fast Report Userscript for reddit? It was a godsend for the 9 months or so that I was aware of it. I created a ban bot for which that tool was an essential part of the workflow. Anyway, that’s all over now. Lemmy’s API looks to be much , much easier to work with than reddit’s so I haven’t found any roadblocks whatsoever to moving my entire presence here so that is my current plan.
Yup, that’s me. I’ve got some lemmy scripts in the works too. Here’s one that sets your language automatically when posting, and let’s you use command enter to post on a Mac
Fast report has been updated, removing the botdefense 1 click submit. Funny thing is, I wrote fast reports to make using a bot on rAndroid easier
I’m an 11 year user, but I don’t see myself using the site much longer, or if I do, continuing in the same way that I used to. I’ve modded probably 150 or more different subs in my time. All good things must end.
How can you see how many awards youve given out on Reddit?
It’s on your profile page on old reddit.
Of course it’s cringe. Wankman can’t even spell his own username correctly.
“Trust us everyone, it’ll be great! Also we’re taking away stuff you paid for and we’re not refunding any of your money because fuck you LOL.”
– if you happen to recognize the username –.
Lol no one knows or cares who you are
Sunsetting? Winding down? What are they? Dolores Ambridge? It sounds like they are sugarcoating a syrup.
It’s just bog standard corporate speak. Just disrespect everyone by sugarcoating it instead of being direct.
Here’s the top comment and a few replies. There’s a lot like this:
You’re just taking coins, that we’ve paid cash for, with no consideration? Not even going to give us the equivalent value in premium time for our existing coins and coins we are going to end up not getting?
What a shit way to do things. It’s like they want to alienate the users who gave them money in the past
Exactly, this genuinely is the worst way I have EVER been scammed in my entire life.
Which is why rewarding good content will still be part of Reddit. Though we’d love to reveal more to you all now, we’re in the process of early testing and feedback, so aren’t ready to share official details just yet. Stay tuned for future posts on this!
“Super-upvotes” will cost real money. There will still be normal upvotes of course, but content creators (and Reddit, of course) will be able to get real money. It’ll be like YouTube or Twitch and people will make Reddit a full-time gig.
It’ll start a commercialization wave that just results in clickbait and celebrities controlling the culture.
It’ll make them money though, and that’s all they care about.
Pour one out for the OG.
I bet they just don’t like seeing all the awards go to fuck u/Spez posts.
First, many don’t appreciate the clutter from awards
“Hide Awards” in settings?
It’s almost like they’re allergic to working on their app.
It’s good that Reddit did this today because the memes on the fediverse have been extremely good lately. Reddit Remainers checking it out will find a fun, active community
You can always tell when a community is going downhill when they say they’re “empowering users” with their latest changes. They’re never actually empowering anyone but the shareholders to make more money.
Although they’re just taking an existing feature away here. Not sure how that’ll create more money.
TL;DR: I’m no fortune-teller but I feel like they want to change how we perceive and consume Reddit posts: to kill ways of engagement and make you just scroll feed.
I bet they’d add new subscription-based service, something musk-esque, that would promote you to the top of the feed or comment section. In new Reddit there are like a dozen of top comments visible before you tap to show more items. They’d probably be mostly from paid users. Also, no ability to visibly promote others’ posts – it’s bad for PR when something bad gets gold, like advertisements for Lemmy. And, in general, Reddit should (in their vision, imho) be like tiktok, where you just scroll through a queue of curated content – staying in comment section for too long or showing your opinion (with up\downvotes or gold a.k.a superupdoot) is wasting your time while you could as well watch some ads. In this case, killing comments and any kind of active and natural reaction is obvious. As a bonus, there’d be more advertisers, as critique of them won’t get viral and their post won’t get downvoted into hell. Oh, and if their board of managers won’t get booted, downvote button and post stats would be cut next.
The fact that this even sounds plausible is stunning.
I love the fact it is stunning for you. It’s heartwarming to know just some of us, including you, arem’t used to the worst possible outcome 😅
I guarantee there are spreadsheets and roadmaps and OKRs with a plan that ultimately leads to them making more money. Maybe it’s increased engagement leading to more ad revenue. Maybe it’s a replacement with other micro transactions. Whatever it is, it starts with removing rewards and the end goal is shareholder profits.
I’m myself in meetings where OKRs and spreadsheets are created. Just because an idea makes it through such a meeting doesn’t mean it’s a valid one.
Absolutely, but the goal remains the same. They’re spinning their wheels looking for a way to generate revenue.
Empowering users to give us money
Removed by mod
I feel like I’m standing on the shores of sanity while I watch Reddit sail off into the sunset.
Except the whole ship is on fire and everyone is fighting each other.
some of us exited, and are observing the madness while sitting comfy at lemmy. when the api stuff started, i was really stressed out about not having a place to call home. and now that i do, i need to buy more popcorn.
Same here. I was surprised how sad/bittersweet it felt to stop using reddit. Like parting ways with an old friend. I check back occasionally, and it’s been pretty reassuring to see how much lemmy’s content quality and quantity has increased, just as much as reddit’s has decreased, since July.
I went over there for a little bit a couple days ago and it looks like business as usual in the comment sections, but the vibe was way off. Felt like I needed a shower after being there
Exactly! It just feels dirty or nasty now… I know it’s been that way for a long time, but now that I know of an alternative that isn’t like that, its super obvious now.
They where inspired by another ship on fire! Nobody can help them.
That’s the part that really puts the cherry on top, for me. It’s one thing if your CEO is acting on his own rectally generated ideas, but in this case, it’s not even his own rectum.
(And don’t ask why I am putting cherries on my popcorn. I just like cherries, ok?)
Cruising in a sardine boat
Loaded up with crazy people
We could be the Santa Maria
Looking for a brave new worldGreat explanation of this feeling.
Bittersweet, knowing how it started.
wish me luck :) I’ll keep you updated.
Who cares. reddit has killed reddit. Just be here now. Ready to move on.
Who cares. reddit has killed reddit. Just be here now. Ready to move on.
Uh, sir, I think you wandered into the wrong place. This is /c/Reddit>
You keep your reddit memes in a folder on your harddisk on an MS DOS machine? /s
<LinuxGeek> That would be a Unix-like filesystem, DOS and Windows uses backslashes with drive names </LinuxGeek>
I know its wrong, but id be a wasted opertunity When your
PS1='${PWD}> 'and you have really bad symlink conventions
Sometimes, I wish Lemmy had a feature where I could quickly edit my comment within the first minute without receiving an “edit” flag… But even then my MS DOS machine wouldn’t be able to edit it fast enough anyway.
I think it might be Mrs. DOS now. There was something about a virtual wedding in the paper last year.
Boldly move forard! Add things like this to your blocklist, dont lerk here, leave the drauma to “stink in the corner”
I’m here, but all my niche communities are still there. Hopefully they see the light.
you can start your own community. that’s what i did.
Next: Subscribe to /r/Pics - $.89/month!
Then where would I go to look for cat pictures?
Trick question. Everyone knows cats invented the Internet to put their pictures in.
none of which goes to the mods of course, they should just be grateful for their landed gentry status after all
After that: Subscribe to r/NSFW - $.89/post!
I see the “follow twitter” business model is proceeding.
“We’re having cash flow issues? What should we do?” “I know! Lets cancel the one thing that we’re doing that people are just giving us money for!” “Brilliant!”
Implementing changes on announcement (or lack thereof), with no warning or transition period, is entirely Elon-esque as well.
Lol. This venkman guy claims credit for creating the awards when it was reddit users who started the semi-ironic (and free) Reddit Gold shit.
but taking credit for others’ work is how executives get ahead in the modern corporate hellscape! how else are they supposed to get promoted? working?!
The day I stopped working hard was when credit on a project I busted my ass off on, got stolen by my manager who shortly got promoted because of it.
And then stole silver, too, replacing gold with it and making gold more expensive.
Either they are dumb or I am.
Though we’d love to reveal more to you all now, we’re in the process of early testing and feedback, so aren’t ready to share official details just yet.
So they are killing cashflow at this crucial point and any possible replacement is “in the process of early testing and feedback”? WTF? Am I missing something?
Zero percent chance this isn’t a cover to launch something more predatory for monetization reasons.
