We mentioned early this year that we want to both make Reddit simpler and a place where the community empowers the community more directly.
The community isn’t empowered at all. u/spez is a dictator who doesn’t care about the community.
Yep the leaked coming moves will be the death of Reddit. Screwing your users doesn’t really matter because the vast majority will obviously contribute to tolerate it.
This will just make Reddit a shitty place to be. They just need to admit that there’s no viable business model.
I think “there’s no viable business model “ is where they are, yeah. I think if they had taken a different path… I don’t know, several years ago… they might have found one, but they just keep throwing away their assets.
It’s so on-brand for Reddit to announce killing these features without any explanation of what is to take its place. Just a vague mention of more communication “in the coming months”.
How exciting.
Reminds me of when they killed Reddit Gifts/Secret Santa.
Reddit and Twitter are racing to see who can kill themselves faster.
Nothing is coming. You’ll get nothing and you’ll like it!
I always disliked the crazy number of awards when they came our, it felt like they all suddenly became meaningless when there were so many. I will miss gold though, getting that shit always made you feel like a celebrity
Reddit gold was great and classy design. Reddit silver should have died the same month it should have been released, April. The rest were dumb money grabs that no one really fell for, and that’s why they’re killing them.
Might as well throw the baby out with the shitwater.
Reddit Silver was at its best when it was a jokingly copy pasted poorly drawn image rather than an actual award. It was the way to show how utterly pointless and stupid virtual “gold” is that doesn’t even go to the one you “rewarded” but rather to Reddit’s shitty admins.
I made a funny or thoughtful comment that someone with money really liked!
…you laugh, but there are people whose entire career is based on creating that scenario.
I gave all my coins away this morning to people who didn’t need them. Thousands of coins from hundreds of awards over the years were distributed to the least deserving replies. Wewt! Bye, reddit.
Soon: “Buy NFTs of your favourite comments and posts! The creators get crypto worth $0.50 for every purchase!”
is reddit trying to kill their platform on purpose?
By all indication, yes.
I suspect it might be an enemy of reddit playing Wormtongue with upper managemebt.
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.
Might as well say “we’re changing it because capybaras need to learn to fly better”, as it makes as much logic as they said. (None.) Or just, you know, admit why you’re actually doing it?
In the most lenient of the hypotheses, they might have been taking old feedback into account… but only after said feedback lose relevance. Users hated awards when they were implemented, as they were clearly a way to convert money into post promotion. Except that now users grew used to those awards, so their removal will be clearly met with resistance.
Another possibility is that they’re trying to simplify the system not for the users, but for advertisers. Think about it: if Reddit plans to allow you to sell karma for money, perhaps it’s also planning to allow you to buy karma with money. Advertisers would love this; instead of buying coins to grant themselves awards, now they would be able to buy an arbitrary amount of upvotes to boost their spam.
A third possibility is some unknown party bribing a few Reddit key positions here and there, to wreck their product on purpose. So when the IPO happens, Reddit prices are in the rock bottom, and the unknown party can buy the platform really cheap.
Frankly none of those things seem remotely sane for me. That’s how puzzling their decision is in my view.
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.
So your actions did absolutely nothing, and now you’re realising it? Might as well call yourself Epimetheus.
My guess is that the real reason is really simple. They don’t want people to be able to escape ads anymore. They’ve done the math and decided that the revenue from ads is greater than the revenue from coins. Any time Reddit says “we’re changing it because we have something better lined up” it actually means “we’re killing this feature for good and we know everyone will stop talking about it in two weeks, so a lie of improvements is a good enough diversion”. Fucking Reddit. Amiright?
Could some please paste the post here? 🙏
Reworking Awarding: Changes to Awards, Coins, and Premium
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!
I can only imagine we’re going to see it replaced with something altogether more exploitative.
The admin that posted that has been working on blockchain/crypto/NFT stuff for the last year… I can only imagine they have some awful plan relating to that.
That’ll be very interesting. I always forget about the NFT shit despite having been a redditor for years. I don’t want to give them ideas, but I’m guessing they would let people “reward” each other those fugly ass avatar NFTs.
They never actually replace things that they kill though. They just say they have something better lined up and then you never hear about it again. They said the same thing when they removed the setting from your profile to disable the constant app nagging in your browser. They said “we have something better planned”, removed the toggle, and that was it. That was like a year ago.
They have no incentive to improve the user experience, it’s a money machine where you’re the product and advertisers are customers. When you use their app they can track you and serve ads more effectively.
I saw a post over here earlier today about someone data mining the Reddit app code and finding monetization options for top contributors. Literally paying people to shitpost.
Hopefully someone not on mobile can link it here. Seems like it’s already set in stone.
technically you aren’t wrong…
there was an APK teardown once the API changes happened that showed the following information because Reddit broke for a bit:
Android authority page on it here: link to article
Fake internet points are finally worth something! Now redditors can earn real money for their contributions to the Reddit community, based on the karma and gold they’ve been given. How it works: Redditors give gold to posts, comments, or other contributions they think are really worth something. Eligible contributors that earn enough karma and gold can cash out their earnings for real money. Contributors apply to the program to see if they’re eligible. Top contributors make top dollar. The more karma and gold contributors earn, the more money they can receive.
Not just anyone can be a contributor. To join and stay in the program, contributors need to meet a few requirements: Be over 18 and live in the U.S. Only Safe for Work contributions qualify Earn xx gold and karma each month Provide verification information. You must have at least 10 gold and 100 karma to begin verification. NSFW accounts aren’t eligible for the Contributors Program
Provide the following information to get verified for the program and start earning: Email Personal Information Tax and bank account information</code><code>Once you hit the payment threshold, you’ll automatically be paid out via your Stripe account. Approximate calculation before fees. Exchange rate and payment thresholds are subject to change
apparently these are already active in r/cryptocurrency and r/eth or w.e the Ethereum subreddit is…
definitely not looking good and I’m glad I switched to lemmy when I did
My bet is a “buy karma with money” program, mirroring the “sell karma for money” one, but geared towards advertisers. That means native, built-in advertisement in the platform, that you can’t block through ad blockers because it behaves the same as the content there.
Maybe some day they’ll get that the more processor-hungry-techno they pour in the mix, the costlier the server gets.
Hence, reddit gets more addicted to money; so more ads and other corporate agreements.
This is half-confirmation for what Android Authority discovered in the app as the incoming “Reddit pays you for your content”.
For that to work, they have to remove coins and awards.
What? Could you elaborate this is very intriguing
If that ends up being true it very well may pull me back to Reddit, but only to write comments that I think people will upvote. When Reddit gave out auto-generated avatars in the past, it gave me one that said it was for writing funny comments that get lots of upvotes, so they must have some logic assessing how the community responds to individual commenters.
I’d still be pissed off about how they rolled out their recent changes, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they actually had a halfway decent plan here but bungled it all by rolling it out too slowly without making it clear how one dot (keeping users in an ecosystem to make sure they see ads) connects to another (creating a community that can support a model to pay contributors).
YouTube pays contributors who attract audiences. Why shouldn’t Reddit? That’s the best possible thing commercial social media can do for its users.
It would change the Reddit community, though. I wouldn’t be there to hang out, I’d be there to work and create content tailored to… what Reddit likes.
But I can’t deny that it would attract my interest.
“Create content”? Just use a repost bot. Scrape the top 100 posts of each subreddit, check which hasn’t been posted in the last X days, repost it.
Because it will be done unorganically. I can just shove ChatGPT to make articles and post them weekly around content.
You can’t, at least not now, AI your way out with a YouTube video.
Also, while it looks good for content creators, there are better places to create written content and be paid for it. Medium rings my bell, and surely there are others too.
If people start churning out upvote-worthy AI-generated content and posting it on Reddit, then Reddit will be happy with all the extra views coming from Google. They won’t mind.
The upvotes are bots too though. A decent sized server farm could churn absolute garbage out and game the upvote algorithm and bingo, a front-page full of complete gibberish. Faking YouTube views is harder since YouTube knows how long you’ve actually watched the video and toss out any errant signals. Upvotes are too basic any bot farm can do it for cheap.
Hm, but it sounds to me like this will be a problem for Reddit’s plans regardless of AI.
Could I train a LLM off of your comments and the source posts then use a few bots to make passive income from this policy?
If they don’t do anything to prevent that (as YouTube does) then sure
If that ends up being true it very well may pull me back to Reddit, but only to write comments that I think people will upvote.
I feel very safe in saying that even if you’re able to generate enough positive response to be a part of this program, it will not be in any way worth your time to do this for the money. I’d be incredibly surprised if you managed to pull in even a reasonable fraction of minimum wage, and if you’re doing it for money and not because you enjoy the participation, it’ll be worse than just putting in extra time at your job in all likelihood.
That said, you do you.
Not to mention, it will require attached a name and bank account to your reddit handle. This is the real trojan horse here I suspect. Reddit’s ad impressions are probably less valuable than other social media because of the pseudo anonymous nature of the platform.
Not to mention the psychology study that showed kids paid to draw were less likely to draw spontaneously.
“Supplementing” an intrinsic motivation with extrinsic reward destroys the intrinsic motivation.
Of course the knobs that run reddit probably don’t understand what intrinsic motivation is or how anyone could make choices based on anything other getting paid to do something.
It’s an absolutely terrible idea for a thriving community of creators working for free, to start paying them. Like the science says “this kills the platform”.
I like writing stupid Reddit comments. If they want to pay me to do it, now matter how much or little, that’s more than I’m getting paid to shoot the shit in my downtime anywhere else.
But “residuals” are where it’s at. Old comments that never die because people keep gilding or replying. Views on that content can be (and we’re dealing with Reddit, so they very well could screw it up) turned into ad dollars. Companies are turning more of their tv ad dollars to social media.
Idk. I don’t disagree, but I think the cynicism may prove wrong here. But the cost of participating is zero if it turns out I get residuals on a comment I wrote 9 years ago.
I like writing stupid Reddit comments.
The quickest way to take something you enjoy and turn it into something you don’t is by making it a job.
Based on their early description of the feature, you can’t just rely on residuals to make money. You have to be getting a critical mass of upvotes and gold (which is an interesting inclusion given they’re pulling awards - they either didn’t think it through all the way and redesigned it already, or they have some other method for how that’ll work) each month to even qualify in the first place.
Haha good life advice nonetheless
I bet new Reddit gold is going to be their crypto platform that runs on Ethereum. Just a guess.
The cost of participating is that you have to give Reddit your identity, complete with bank account and tax information.
Yeah, I don’t see how anyone other than repost bots, serial reposters and karma farmers will benefit in any meaningful amount.
The question for me is, how are they going to stop the grains of rice?
And this is what will fundamentally kill reddit
I mean, I guess enjoy being monetized by white supremacist sympathizers
Wow, how they gonna get rid of all the karma farming bots after this outstanding move?
For those that don’t want to give Reddit traffic, this is the post by the reddit admin:
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!
This is only good news for the lemmiverse
Yeah got this pm from Reddit:
* I only have premium because I was awarded Platinum. No way in hell I’d buy it.
Just like reddit to include the entire, long email after assuring you the following is the TLDR.
Ugh, they’re gonna replace awards with NFTs and crypto aren’t they?
It’s possible. But another possibility is that they gave up the idea that users would give Reddit money, and instead they want advertisers to buy upvotes with RL money.
Fake currencies like Reddit coins are useful when you’re milking users, as it’s harder for them to determine the real cost of their actions. For example: how much money would you need to spend to award your own post to become the most awarded post of a subreddit? (A: it depends on which coin package you bought, which award you’re granting, in which sub you’re posting, etc.) It’s probably more expensive than the user thinks, i.e. the “sucker tax”.
This backfires for advertisers because they will run the maths and notice your outrageous prices, and they won’t pay the “sucker tax”. And any additional loop between money and service raises their suspicion, thus the risk that they associate with your platform. When dealing with them, you’re better off streamlining everything, and getting rid of things that they might see as risk-increasing uncertainty.
And one of those risk-increasing uncertainties is the value of awards vs. votes in the visibility of a post (i.e. a potential ad). How many users sort by “top” vs. “awarded”? Are you better off buying awards or upvotes? Reddit just removed those two uncertainties, plus one loop (buy Reddit coins to buy stuff → buy stuff directly).
If my reasoning above is correct, bots running rampant in Reddit will be the least concern. Expect stuff like the top post in r/linux being Microsoft “informing” you on the “risks” of running Linux, and the moderator responsible for correctly marking as spam to be “relieved” from his “duties”. r/cooking will be full of nothing but advertisement for food chains, r/youtube with an “exclusive promotion for Snoos who buy YT Premium”, stuff like this.
What you’re calling “sucker tax” is also just having different values. Someone buying reddit coins is trading money for something else they value more than the money.
Like this cheeseburger isn’t gonna make me any money so it’s a bad investment, but I want the cheeseburger for non-monetary reasons so I’m trading my money for it.
What I’m calling “sucker tax” is only the difference between the actual price versus the “eyeballed” price of something inside one’s head, because the person didn’t bother to run the maths. This is an actual thing when fake currencies are involved.
For example. A platinum award should cost 4~7 dollars. If we told this to two different users, who just gave someone a platinum award:
- Alice: “wow, that’s too expensive. I’m not giving awards any more.”
- Bob: “I know, I’m fine with this.”
Alice is paying the sucker tax; Bob isn’t. Bob’s case is a lot more like your cheeseburger example.
This is relevant here because the sucker tax usually requires some in-game “fake” currency, like Reddit coins, to mask the real cost of the action. It’s a piece of user-hostile design that you see often in games full of microtransactions.
Ah I see the difference now. The intermediary currency is where the strangeness comes in. And conversion to the intermediary currency is always nonlinear. You get bulk pricing on bigger conversions.
It hurt itself in its confusion
