Reddit is getting rid of its Gold awards system

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/13/23794403/reddit-gold-awards-coins-sunset

by thunderbong • 3 years ago

55 54 3 years ago

theverge.com

heyoni• 3 years ago

Haven’t used it since Apollo shutdown, so

skyyler• 3 years ago

Me either. Not missing out on a lot, it feels.

coufu• 3 years ago

I finished two books since Apollo shut down. I hardly ever read ever so big win for me.

prepend• 3 years ago

It seems like an anti-pattern to me to remove something without announcing it’s replacement, but say “we’ll figure it out later.”

It’s hard to understand things and communicate. Having two different messages at two different times is extra confusing.

I think it’s generally easier to have a single message than to have two. So this probably means incompetence. Even if they think the replacement is worse, this indirection will make whatever they come up with worse.

I think it may be a situation where they have to make a change and get political capital tied up in any change, not a specific change. So the conflict is “will we change” rather than “we’ll replace gold with blue” (or whatever).

One of the organizational dysfunctions.

joshstrange2• 3 years ago

Gotta love how they are giving themselves 2 months till coins go away and they only gave app developers <1 month to completely change their business models.

Also how dumb are the people who run Reddit? Like I know they are liars and assholes but why would you take away a perk of Reddit Premium before figuring out what’s replacing it? It’s not too dissimilar from when they announced there would be pricing changes but not what they were but come on, this was clearly going to piss people off, why not just wait till have the replacement ready to go?

replygirl3• 3 years ago

fwiw it was two months to make changes (announced apr 18, apollo dev publicly confirmed impact by apr 19, changes effective jun 19) and another month for the first bill to come in

joshstrange2• 3 years ago

June 19th was when they announced pricing [0]. Announcing that you are planning to make changes without giving pricing is unactionable. June 30th was the shutdown.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

Guvante2• 3 years ago

Incorrect. Reddit announced a new pricing model without details on that date.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

Can't figure out to get an exact date on mobile but Apr 19 is not "1 month ago".

A June 1 post said "pricing details not announced" and the posts about this say June 30.

Rebelgecko• 3 years ago

The announcement on April 18 didnt include a lot of pertinent details, like the new cost of the API

hsjqllzlfkf• 3 years ago

Also how dumb are the people who run Reddit?

I would say they're not as dumb as the people who support it.

ozyschmozy• 3 years ago

Calling it here, it'll be some crypto/coin nonsense that they'll try to push on people

richbell2• 3 years ago

Reddit Notes 2.0?

https://www.engadget.com/2014-12-19-reddit-notes.html

r721• 3 years ago

Yeah, that's what one redditor noticed:

Hey [OP], from your comment history it looks like you’ve been working on NFT and blockchain stuff for the last year. Does that mean these award changes are likely to be related to that in some way?

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/14ytp7s/reworking_a...

PretzelPirate• 3 years ago

It's not a hard thing to imagine. Reddit already uses a blockchain for it's NFT avatars.

tw04• 3 years ago

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.

I can’t see that being anything but an unmitigated disaster. They already struggle to deal with repost bots. Now you’re going to add a monetary incentive?

saiojd4• 3 years ago

I'm not the type to hate on capitalism but Reddit's management is truly capitalism gone wrong. Ruining a public service for the profits of a few. What a waste.

treeman79• 3 years ago

This is a prime example of why capitalism is good. If Reddit was state owned or equivalent with regulatory capture, then nothing could be done about it. Doesn’t matter how bad it is. Like the DMV.

Now since Reddit is determined to shoot itself in the foot, new competitors can rise up and replace them. Reddit did the same to its predecessors.

Capitalism punishes harshly companies that decide to be stupid.

WatchDog• 3 years ago

Apparently reddit isn’t profitable, so the current management aren’t exactly good capitalists.

randomdata7• 3 years ago

I'm not sure that is the case. Reddit's problem is that they have consistently used up more value to run the service than they have been able to deliver in return. Now they are running around like chickens with their heads cut off desperately trying to find some way to increase the value provided/decrease the value needed to stave off certain death.

A socially owned organization operated in the same manner would be suffering the same fate right now. The idea that exchanging parties expect trade of equal value is not a feature of capitalism. It is the basis of all economic systems; at least those which do not depend on an imagined post-scarcity world.

bloopernova• 3 years ago

It's even worse than that: Moderators can remove a post, then immediately repost it themselves to gain the currently-meaningless votes.

If the money-for-votes scheme is implemented, those moderators will have a financial incentive to do that.

Why would anyone who isn't a moderator want to participate in that?

In my opinion these kinds of decisions are being made by people who have only interacted with the business side of reddit for a long time. It's ridiculous how out of touch the management of reddit appears to be!

Why didn't they implement a per-user API key with reddit premium and provide a method for any 3rd party app to obtain and use said key? Do they really think they would make more money from advertising than through subscriptions? If they wanted to push their own mobile app, they could make its subscription cheaper than the 3rd party API key. Heck, they could have added a moderator or "extended use" API fee for those people that want to do extra stuff with the API, or more often, etc etc.

I do wonder about the legality of paying people for posts. My ideal situation would be that mods and content creators get paid from the reddit awards something like this: 50% goes to reddit, 25% goes to a user-designated reddit-approved charity, and the final 25% goes to the user.

Then again, I'd also implement comment signing via gnupg so I'm obviously not CEO material.

richbell2• 3 years ago

It's even worse than that: Moderators can remove a post, then immediately repost it themselves to gain the currently-meaningless votes.

This is what GallowBoob, who IIRC worked for some sort of digital advertising company, did.

dsir• 3 years ago

My ideal situation would be that mods and content creators get paid from the reddit awards

I've been working on a community platform/Reddit alternative that has a business model exactly like this.

It's like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid taking the best features of each platform and combining them under one umbrella. One key aspect is we have non-intrusive monetization methods baked into each community where the revenue primarily goes to the community owners. The monetization stuff is completely optional and disabled by default, however it feels like the people curating the communities should have the option to be rewarded for the work that they do.

https://sociables.com

godshatter• 3 years ago

Reddit is enough of an echo chamber as it is. Now people will be posting or reposting things trying to hit that group think even harder than they are now since karma and awards won't just be for ego-boosting anymore.

WillAdams• 3 years ago

There's a new startup called "Pockerides" which has a similar idea:

https://pocketrides.com

jdlyga• 3 years ago

After the disaster with 3rd party apps, Reddit needs to make some big changes to keep its userbase. Elon already saw how vulnerable Twitter was when Threads attracted 100 million users in 1 week.

randomdata7• 3 years ago

100 million users in a week appears, based on what I could find, to be about on par with other features Instagram has added over the years. Given that Instagram's user base has grown quite a bit since some of those other features launched, 100 million users of a new feature may actually be a poor showing, comparatively.

Indeed, Twitter is as vulnerable as Snapchat was when Stories launched, and Twitch when IGTV launched, and TikTok when Reels launched. But how vulnerable is that, really? In fact, I was just thinking about how much better Twitter's content has become lately. Perhaps Threads has served to relieve Twitter of the dregs that was bringing it down?

16bitvoid• 3 years ago

I'm not sure it's really comparable to instagram "features".

- requires a separate app

- no desktop site yet

- available in a limited number of countries (e.g., most of Europe does not have access yet)

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

[dupe]

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36716000

HeyLaughingBoy2• 3 years ago

I've been on Reddit for at least 14 years now. I have Reddit Gold and after I received the "use it or lose it" message, realized I had absolutely no idea what it's used for!

Reddit is getting rid of its Gold awards system

Related Stories