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?
Reddit’s incompetence is so mind-blowing it’s unreal. Even a crackhead can manage Reddit better than spez
It’s truly shocking. Like all the Twitter stuff that musk is doing, seems in some way connected to his ego and they seem like genuine mistakes that he’s making because he’s completely out of touch and an a******.
But with Reddit, it’s like I can’t follow the logic of these decisions at all, I can’t tie back these obvious blunders to any sort of logical troubleshooting decision making process for their company.
Perplexing
The logic is the same as Twitter, Spez said so: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-protest-private-ceo-elon-musk-huffman-rcna89700
Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
The logic is to destabilise public forums ahead of upcoming elections, so the wealthy can consolidate more power.
I hate that this take seems like the conspiracy take but also is totally plausible. Just look to the example of the Arab spring and how instrumental social media was for organizing. By fragmenting all social media it’s a lot less likely you see a massive resistance if shit goes sideways.
This might be the top-down view, but the bottom-up is Telegram forums, Mastodon, Lemmy, and similar distributed hard to close down spaces.
“Divide and conquer” is a valid strategy when one can conquer each part separately, “guerrilla warfare” is the aftermath of failing to conquer the divided parts.
If this is the case, I guess it makes sense why these bad, seemingly “money-losing” changes aren’t going to be felt by the company or CEO. Soon as they go public, the elite that pushed these changes will buy up the amount they promised, spez will take his payout, and they will have “union-busted” another prominent social media platform used for progressive ideas and discussion.
Fun fact, most of the money Musk spent on Twitter was underwritten by stocks in Tesla, which have drastically shrunk in value since the purchase.
TSLA has mostly recovered though.
Reddit is overall quite left leaning, with a lot of its communities being some of the biggest hubs for lefties on the internet (antiwork comes to mind, all the LGBT subs, majority of the big politics subs also heavily lean left).
I don’t think it’s that crazy a “conspiracy theory” to say that this could be intentional sabotage. IMO it’s what’s happening with Twitter also, I think the alt right is paying big to take down left leaning social media so they can control the flow on information. I know Musk and Spez are profoundly stupid but I don’t think they’re stupid enough to genuinely believe in their recent business decisions. I think these decisions make a lot more sense when viewed through that lens.
They got officially fact checked a few times and that put the fear of god in them, since their whole schtick relies on ignorance.
You can’t convince me spez if alt-right. He is what led to reddit becoming so left leaning.
Like Mel Brooke’s The Producers yet with more to lose and even more stupid.
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.
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.
Pour one out for the OG.
I like how you didn’t even bother to crop out the dot 😂
The less you try, the more authentic it is
It’s as authentic as my very organic “Barbie” marketing campaign here.
Did you expect anything less from Margot Robbie, master digital artist?
🏅
I bet they just don’t like seeing all the awards go to fuck u/Spez posts.
I think that’s actually closer to the mark than many realize. Awards are great when they are not directed at the company or it’s rep in a negative manner as they show positive engagement and help the company with sales marketing. When awards and upvote/downvote counters are used to highlight that the users are having a negative experience then it hurts the platform image. Similarly to how YouTube removed the downvote tracker because their marketing team realized it hurt their sales revenue with business partners.
TBH, I don’t think they care. It is monetization and engagement of their microtransactions…as smug as they may be, I think it’s all about $
That’s where I’m putting my money. They don’t want clearly shit dogshit admin posts to get poor awards
I was going to post, “Do they understand their user base?” but after reading your post, I believe they do.
Most likely so.
That would fit with the Musk comparisons
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.
I’ve never seen this be an issue for anyone.
I hated the clutter and many people mentioned it when they talked about 3rd party apps being killed.
I’ve now seen one person complain about it.
I only used 3rd party apps to navigate, so it was never an issue.
Sounds like R×ddit’s solution for a barking dog is to run it over with a steamroller.
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
Here, please enjoy this lemmy lemon award 🍋
If I was more paranoid, I’d say that the fucking stupid bean meme bs that happened right when the Reddit api shut down was awfully convenient for Reddit.
I thought it was hilarious and made the community feel fun and alive, which Reddit hasn’t felt like for a long time.
I upvoted everyone I saw with PRIDE! It was dumb and hilarious. The things that modern internet silliness were founded on.
Yeah, Reddit just doesn’t feel good anymore for me. Lemmy does.
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.
Empowering users to give us 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.
Sometimes people would buy me coins if I posted something they liked. It took me forever to find some sort of use for the coins, since I never did any of the shit that people might spend coins on. 15 years on the site and I never had an avatar or anything like that. THEN I finally figured it out. The only acceptable use for reddit coins. Buying cute teddy bear awards for people that hate you. It was fun, and it pissed them off. When they’re trying to have a vicious argument about “marvel movies” or something, and getting all worked up sending them a cute teddy bear icon that attaches to their name, whether they want it or not, is exactly the right thing to do with your stupid gold coins.
wish me luck :) I’ll keep you updated.
You dare link me to that vile place?!
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?!
And then stole silver, too, replacing gold with it and making gold more expensive.
Man. What the actual hell is Reddit doing? They’ve been making the most suicidal business decisions this year. Blocking third party apps, they piss off a huge active portion of their user base but sure, you could say they weren’t paying anyway. But now they’re screwing over their PAYING users? I don’t even know what they expect at this point.
I paid for Reddit gold back in the day, I really enjoyed the ability to selectively gift gold to comments.
When they replaced gold with coins I ended up unsubscribing. The coins felt like they devalued what gold actually was.
I think it’s fair that they want to revisit the feature, but shutting off a revenue stream a month after they made such a big deal about charging for API access, it feels to me like they are lacking common direction and priorities within the company…
NO WAY HAHAHAHA
If I was a VC, I would want a glut of ad-sensitive, lowest common denominator users. Think your Aunt on Facebook, or your sister on VSCO, or your young nephew on TikTok. I don’t think those people are necessarily attracted to the overall community attitude(s) currently on Reddit.
I would never call the ex-Hacker News/Digg Redditors smart. But.
Those users do have certain proclivities that make them EXTREMELY unattractive to investment dollars. Strong interest in anti-mainstream topics, including the 3Ps (Privacy, Piracy, and Pornography) doth not good ROI make. This exodus of users and elimination of features, outside looking in, seems like a misstep. I’d be skeptical.
