Reddit kills awards and coins

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.
- Official reddit posts are always cringey. They unironically call people "Snoos".
- 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.
- 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.
Empowering users to give us money

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 world
Great 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
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.
After that: Subscribe to r/NSFW - $.89/post!
none of which goes to the mods of course, they should just be grateful for their landed gentry status after all

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?

They want to allow you to monetize your karma. Gotta first start by removing the current currency people are used to.
I'm gonna risk it, and say that no, you are not dumb 😄
They're TRYING to make a sale, here. Do you mind?
https://lemmy.world/post/1451554
We’re not earning enough revenue, so what we need to do is remove the ways we currently earn revenue!

Comments are saltier than expected

Zero percent chance this isn't a cover to launch something more predatory for monetization reasons.

Awards were always super jarring when I accidentally ended up on "new reddit". I could never tell who actually liked them. But to just remove the feature, and take coins immediately (that people paid for) away with no alternative is shitty.

I guess management wants to get rid of those nasty ad free benefits.

☺️🙃😲😇😎🌜🤎💓💝💛😹👄👄🦿💪🦶🦴🚶🧍🏌️🧑‍🌾🧑‍🌾🧑🌸🏖️🏖️🏜️🌋🌌🌕🙊🦮🐸🦕🐣🦔🦩🫒
Yeah, awards were definitely jarring.
- 🦍😅🫘🪖🐈
  🐈🍌🫘😜🐌
  🐌🐒🫘🤠🐦
Hell, most of the people using it were indeed trolls, I actually met many of them and they said that they really used awards to troll heartbreaking, nsfl, or depressing posts by giving them the wholesome, helpfull awards etc. And the other half was basically karma bots. But as much as it was a crap feature, It really did gain reddit server time and revenue
See that's something else I liked about Sync for Reddit, it only showed gold awards. They never got on board with all the wacky shit they added later.

Makes sense to remove things that people can boycott. They have a graph on someone's computer where income from awards points straight down. That looks really bad for potential buyers so it's better to remove it and claim the dip was intentional.

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.

Thats a non existant notice period and frankly either a knee jerk or the plan from the start. Its also in line with the new "core vision" of reddit. Goodbye, reddit.

so this is a particularly tough moment for me as we wind these products down.

Products, ey? Their intentionally designed to not feel loke them.

we want to both make Reddit simpler and a place where the community empowers the community more directly.

redditors be able to express themselves in fun ways and feel joy when their content is celebrated.

You cant do that directly, you need to give people a reason to trust you. Trust your not twisting their words for your ends. This wouldnt be so bad if you didnt burn up all that trust. New Reddit, to be blunt, fake paridises are utterly disturbing to almost all humans. New Reddit, go ahaid, use tools to make users beleave there in a room of attractive people all giving you welcoming smiles, most are going to run for the hills

Note: As indicated in our User Agreement past purchases are non-refundable. (Fuck you)

We took your digital stuff that you paid for in actually useful green papers

If you’re a Premium user and would like to cancel your subscription before these changes go into effect, you can find instructions here.

~~Now, NOW!!!! KILL YOUR TIES TO REDDIT~~

EDIT: Yes, do chargebacks instead

The comments are suggesting everyone do charge backs.

What happened to them being so desperate to make money that they'd charge third party all devs $20 million a year for API access? Surely removing ways to give them money won't help that situation, right?

I know the API thing was all about control and not the actual money, but they're just being so blatant about not giving a fuck about the site or the users. What a dreadful company.

I'm enjoying being able to watch that ship sink from far away.

I'd compare more to the Titan situation. Every day there is an expert explaining how they are doomed,
I'm not really watching anything because I don't visit reddit, but from time to time, news appear saying that it's sinking. Sometimes a starved seaman shows up talking about how the ship had split in half during a sunny day and they are currently attempting to use silver tape to glue it back together before a storm hits them. Then another one shows up a couple days later saying they no longer have food...

I found Reddit Gold and Discord Nitro's gifting systems to be smart ways of monetization.

There are people who, despite what you try, cannot or will not pay you. Gifting allows you to keep the people that positively contribute on your platform while still earning money from elsewhere.

Amazing how swiftly they're progressing with their enshittification. Makes me re-think all those 9 years spent there.

- Meh, AFAIK they're all genuine updates. I mean, you can read the patch notes to see for yourself. They're actually really amusing patch notes always full of jokes. I can't fault em for wanting to regularly push their subscription considering that you get so much for free. Software development is expensive.
Dont worry... They are replacing this with almost direct monetary contributions.
There was a leak about how contributors will be able to earn money from updoots.
I agree, the "award" systems, are one of the least offensive monetization strategies I've seen.
Keep in mind that awards don't have to behave like Reddit and Discord have implement them. I'm sure there's room to innovate in a community focused manner.
Reddit however, has decided that they need to crush everything and go full Silicon Valley vampire in order to squeeze a lifetime of upper class earnings into a get rich quick payout scheme.

Listen, gold was cute while it first happened, and the evolution of silver was hilarious, i believe a crappy Jpeg with a Microsoft paint style silver coin, hilarious. In my opinion it should have never moved pass this point. It was clutter, a quick visit to mlmym gave me a kick of nostalgia as its like Reddit used to be when i started 11 years ago.

You dare link me to that vile place?!

Right? At least give me a warning.
- You are in a community that focuses specifically on that website. ;-)
To be honest, I do enjoy pointing and laughing from afar.
we need URL filters ;)

Totally agree. The majority of my searches when I'm doing research into a new purchase would include reddit so i could read other users experiences. I've made the transition to Lemmy recently after trying the platform a few months ago and then transition for me atleast has been seamless.

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.

I bet they replace awards with some NFT crypto bullshit

Well I just spent the rest of my coins (7k) on promoting lemmy in that thread lol. I was done with reddit before, but now I know reddit is really done.

Gold was introduced as a way to help sustain server costs, then it was a money grab.

Gold was introduced as a way to help sustain server costs
Surely it was to reenforce the idea that Reddit is the online equivalent of the street corner where crazy people ramble on about nothing, with gold replicating the bystanders who toss coins into their cardboard boxes/hats out of pity?
- Yes but in a good way

I know the timing lends itself to dogpiling, but honestly? Good for them. Throughout the fog, reddit made a solid choice - awards and coins were absolutely fucking stupid. I had posted regularly on reddit since 2011 or so. The coin shit distracted from the original sorting system - upvotes/downvotes.

Of course, hindsight belies that even that algorithm was bullshit the entire time. Alas, fuck reddit. Good riddance.

I thought awards were fine. Though I used Apollo, and it tastefully displayed them and never had giant highlight boxes around comments or any other adornment nonsense.
In smaller communities they had symbolic value. In massive ones it was kinda just noise. But like I said, not really an issue on Apollo.
- Describing the various ways in which you mitigated the intrusiveness of reddit's awards is not exactly corroborating your argument that the awards were fine. I'm also struggling to see the symbolic value of a badge that indicates you paid the administrators. The award system did not build upon the original sorting mechanism of upvotes in any meaningful way.

They're just gonna push their stupid crypto, aren't they? The awards have been dumb, especially once it moved beyond the community and was embraced by corpo-reddit. But they are absolute morons so they HAVE to be pivoting to crypto in the year of our lord 2023, because of course, that's what an absolute moron would do.

The crypto they promised to give the community for free like a decade ago then was like actually it's too hard

They have no idea what they're doing. It's kind of hilarious but also really sad.

they are trying to do capitalism on a site that literally only exists because of crowd-sourcing
Neither do most people who find themselves in leadership positions at enormous multinational corporations, governments, NGOs etc. Usually it's fine to bumble through but unfortunately the morons often destroy the thing they are tasked with running. It's really annoying and frustrating that one or a handful of people can destroy something and fuck it all up for the millions of customers and employees etc.

What is happening with reddit lol

They activated Elon mode.
- They went Full Elon. Never go Full Elon.
- Oof. This is now a thing isn't it?
Hey, you know the only perk you get with Reddit Premium that isn't available through a free browser extension?
Yeah that's going away in 60 days.
It will be replaced with something so awful we dare not mention it while people are still pissed off about the other popular thing we killed with little notice.
We here at the Reddit management understand you have concerns about the destruction of the global hub of collaboration, but you'll get over it.
Peace!
- Reddit going downhill so fast , sad I still have to open it daily coz my country subreddit is not migrated yet
Greed and hubris!

Mostly I don't understand why they are announcing this without sharing what they're doing instead

Incompetence.
Maybe they want to give 60 days grace period instead of 30 days grace period this time.
It's so stupid though. "We will remove the stuff you bought. We won't tell you what we plan to do instead though." smh
Maybe they hope people will come back and give away golds or do something with ?? It's quite confusing indeed.

I think they dont like the fact that these awards also grant reddit premium to the user who receives them. But they cant just remove that feature of the rewards without killing rewards otherwise they look really bad. So the new award system will just be a community highlight. Maybe something that changes the background color of the post to highlight it on the front page. Like gold background. Then they will allow advertisers to also pay to make their "paid advertisements" also have background colors to generate a dark pattern where they trick you into clicking ads because you think they are awarded front page posts.

Thats my guess at least.

Probably, but that is a horrible business plan for Reddit. The awards system ended up being a great idea for Reddit to gain revenue; a mega upvote.
- Honestly I don't think they care. I think they are only concerned about the immediate sale.
There’s rumors that Reddit may launch some new cryptocurrency. Based on code in the Reddit’s Android app, 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.
- remember dogetipbot?
  well it's back, in shittier reddit form!
- They've kind of already implemented that on the cryptocurrency subreddit as Moons - and yes, it's about as bad as you'd expect.
Maybe something that changes the background color of the post to highlight it on the front page. Like gold background.
Oh, if only it was that.
My guess is that as bot activity goes up, and real users go down the amount of gold given goes down and they don't want one of the three ways they earn money to show that it's decreasing on their IPO docs.
They already look really bad. Fuck Reddit.
otherwise they look really bad
When has that ever stopped them?

They can keep shooting their own feet all they want. I'm glad to be done with it. I thought I wouldn't manage to keep away, but Lemmy is an adequate replacement. In time, it may even come to be okay.

And, honestly, I haven't been staring at my phone nearly as long as I did with Reddit.
- Same, Lemmy just seems less addictive but at the same time more enjoyable, with (relatively) friendly users and the ability to simply blacklist the posters and communities you don’t like from your feed, instead of having to lose brain cells scrolling past screeds calling parents “breeders” or cars “pedestrian crushers” that clearly indicate a lack of contact with monocot plants in the Poaceae family.
- exactly. lemmy is fine but i really don’t use it that much. just enjoying my time not sucked into reddit anymore.
Reddit made its own competitor. There was none to really speak of, until the exodus. Enough people left that the new site was sustainable. They've created their own downfall.

I can 100% guarantee that the replacement system has already been designed and it's over the top scummy.

They are spreading out the negative news to leasen the PR impact.

It's gonna be either loot boxes or reddit blue. Twitter blue, but reddit.
- It's definitely crypto. 2021 called; it wants its retards back.

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.

Is this self sabotage at this point?

Always has been.

What is next, I really wonder...?

Changing name to Fuckit?

Never really was a fan of the copious amount of awards to begin with. Gold and Silver were fine enough, and they got a point across. If I saw them on a post or comment, I'd have an indicator that someone really liked it, and wanted to praise it beyond giving it an upvote. Silver and Gold were two tiers to this, which coupled with upvotes, was more than sufficient in giving users a metric by which to value posts or comments.

It turned to shit when I start seeing diamond-clad medals, seal heads, unicorns and rainbows, and shooting stars flying across my screen. It took the simple approach and turned it into a clusterfuck of visual noise because the people designing them had no clue about the basics of a user interface.

And then they kill the entire thing because (shocker) it just doesn't work. Typical.

It looks like the brain drain from Reddit is now in full swing!

I'd been subscribed since it was an option. They kindly reminded me today to cancel it before it renewed. Thanks for the reminder reddit!

I have feeling that whatever ends up replacing them will almost certainly be worse.

Reddit's Contributor Program could earn you real money for your Reddit karma [Android Authority]. This mirror's Twitter's experiment to pay select top contributors [Washington Post].
This would just accelerate Reddit's plunge into "bots upvoting karma farming repost bots".
Reddit not announcing the replacement for awards/coins yet totally makes sense if it will be something like this or crypto related, though they're just uselessly kicking the backlash can down the road.
Reddit rewards program? https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/13/23794403/reddit-gold-awards-coins-sunset
My guess is they're wiping karma so everyone starts at 0 for the rewards program.
- Ironically my karma is the only reason I didn't straight up delete my account.
  I know it's just fictional internet points, but I had a long running dumb game with myself to see how fast I could hit certain amounts.
  That, and I managed to create my account exactly one year before my son was born, so they shared cake days, kinda.

What's reddit?

Tis a silly place.

yooo it'd be neat if we could have our own community custom awards that can be used to help fundraise the servers the community is on

DISTRACTION TIME DISTRACTION TIME DISTRACTION TIME DISTRACTION TIME

Just resign spez

Why would he when he milk the platform for everything that's left

Why is everyone so negative? Good on them for killing some stupid feature that nobody really liked. Yes, they'll bring another even worse feature but luckily no one here is impacted by that.

They are taking a page out of Musk's book and making Reddit way worse for no good rea$on

Well spez did say he admired what Elon's doing with Twitter so...
I mean let's be honest, coins and awards were literally just a means to siphon cash out of their userbase willing to spend money on the platform. Their status in the community is rather mixed with some enjoying the flair of them and others seeing them as little more than microtransations for people with more money than common sense.
Their removal just means less revenue for Reddit, which probably isn't a bright idea at the moment.
- Right but people paid a lot for them. Hell I had 5k coins stored before I left reddit.
  I'd be pissed if I didn't leave

After the API changes announcement, I cancelled my premium renewal. I'm still on premium.

The best feature was that I'd get coins to give away as rewards every month. There were other benefits I enjoyed, but the ability to gift someone gold on a whim from the coins I had gotten was very nice.

Now, all the coins I have stockpiled will be worthless.

Gg Reddit. I'm sorry to see it end this way, but you've done this to yourself.

Another person in their thread said that they used the remaining gold or awards to support Lemmy. If you feel so inclined.
- Not sure where to spend my 10k coins to do that. any suggestions?

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.

Reddit gold gives premium = no ads = no revenue. What theyve already failed to understand is no users = no revenue

Reddit gold gets rid of ads (for a month), but also costs money to offset the lack of ads...
- Ublock Origin seemed to do the job for free well enough.
- And wasn't their revenue/user something like $1.50 per month while gold is $5 iirc.... seems like they'd be making an extra $3.50 if a person was gifted gold

Its a good decision but man, the execution is horrible.

In a vaccum, yes but the way reddit is talking and acting makes me think that it's taken the same cyinide pill only fans almost took and the one tumblr and imgur took
Horrible execution seems to be the common definition in everything they do.

Why are all these high profile sites making all the stupidest decisions to ruin their sites? It doesn't even make sense from a monetary perspective.

the site used to be so good but now its just going downhill, welp it was fun while it lasted

Its such a shame that a once great platform is heading downhill. I'm still an occasional user of the site I'll admit, but i guess Lemmy is my goto these days.

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...

Wonder how that’s going to work with this

Yes, please. The more changes Reddit makes that people dislike the more likely people will be to move to Lemmy.

As long as they honor what people have currently bought, honestly this is the first time they've made a change I agree with. Awards were usually used for trolling from what I saw

A little crazy theory:

Maybe they hope that by disabling awards in September there suddenly will be a lot less premium users. Gold and platinum gave a week and a month after all. So there will be a sudden spike in ad revenue just before the planed IPO.

One thing that I can't wrap my head around:
You, a random internet anon, decoded a potential financial strategy.
So do the big capital funds not have analyst teams who also decode that? Why would a big-time investor fall for a ploy so simple it can be explained in 3 sentences on a non-financial forum?
- It would still show higher potential earnings, which is all investors care about. Even if they tell investors exactly why revenue is up, and they probably will, investors will see that and say "great! Guess premiums not coming back!"
- They won't. If they didn't disclose this fact then it would be fraud.
Not sure that people willing to spend real money in order to remove ads, will be unwilling to use a free ad blocker.
- I think you misunderstand the theory.
  If you are gifted gold or platinum, you get short term Reddit Premium for free. You didn’t pay for it, but you get to not watch ads.
  Reddit removes to ability to gift gold and platinum, and this removes the ability to be gifted out of seeing ads, and now your eyeballs are in poverty Reddit full of ads.
  It’s kind of a dumb because Reddit could keep gold and platinum awards and just make them not gift premium features to the recipient anymore, but put no stupid plan past Reddit.
  I think like the other comments here it’s going to be some kind of self-paid promotion bump to shoot your own comments to the top of threads.
I always felt like the people who paid for reddit premium were the same people in high school who bought the pool pass to the pool on the roof.
- Wait, your high school had a pool? And it was on the roof?!

I remember back in like, 2013 when getting gold was actually really cool, or maybe it was just me so easily made happy at that point.

I've never followed the updated bullshit with the awards that came out thereafter. It was right around the time reddit really turned to shit.

Anyways, I guess it was inevitable.

I'm not opposed to this, though I generally think that the move towards awards overcomplicated the site. It was better when it was just Gold and there was a simple tracker to say how many days of server time had been paid for.

If they were to go back to that I agree. I would bet that whatever they reveal is objectively worse than the old Gold system and seeks to extract more money out of users under the guise of “awarding valuable content”

This is brilliant. Instead of advertisers making sponsored posts that are ignored or trying to sneak an ad into a community, they can outright buy engagement. Utilize subliminal advertising, then advertisers buy their own "tips" (or whatever they end up being called) and they get back a portion of the money spent. There's been an uptick in those types of posts lately and reddit's just leaning into market trends. Not to mention that bots can earn real money by reposting top/all time content!

I think we’re skipping right past subliminal and into superliminal advertising strats.

Just used the last of my coins to award a piracy post lol.

Lol I used like to promote lemmy
- You've one-upped me.

As part of this, we made a decision to sunset coins (...) and awards (...)

(...) all awards and existing coins will continue to be available until September 12, 2023.

"sunset".

two months time.

Longer than the warning they gave for the API changes!
Gotta rush for that IPO money!
Reddit sure loves it's two month notification period.
verbed the shit out of that noun

But why?

If you got an award, you could get free premium for a month. Of course, that's a no go if Reddit wants you to pay them money.
- I hadn't considered that. For a moment I thought maybe they were actually doing something for the community by stopping award spammers from inflating their own comments. But no, it's just because they think they can squeeze $2 more out of a user if no one has the option to thrust premium on them and they actually have to buy it themselves.
  Except that makes no sense in practical terms because not enough people care about premium to offset the fact that a person can purchase gold awards as many times as they can afford.
  Reddit corporate sure does like shooting itself in the foot
For the cult "Alegria Reddit" to form and flurish of corse!

Reddit is nothing but an another advertising platform now.

Oh yeah! News sites come out and say a reward system is found in the app code and a day later, they come out and say they are taking away features without really giving a replacement.

Another fantastic decision among all other fantastic decisions… if your goal is to destroy the brand.

We mentioned early this year that we want to both make Reddit simpler and a place where the community empowers the community more directly.

..and because that we took away the power from our communitys by banning moderators of communitys, closing down communitys, and forcing users to be our bitch who does everything we ask them to.

Wonder if this is connected to that leaked contributor/paid karma thing that got leaked a few days ago

Lemmy chads just can't stop winning

I never knew how any of that stuff worked and never cared... until I made a dumb comment and someone gave me an award for it. Dammit, I was proud. But I still feel sour about the API changes, to the point where I don't care what they do. Maybe drive more people out to other platforms. I'd like to see some of my Fandom communities migrate to other places.

I saw the writing on the wall when they dropped the occasional free awards.

But nothing would have gotten me to purchase premium so shrug

I forgot that giving awards gave the recipient premium. I'm gonna have to use my old coin stockpile then... Hopefully on accounts that don't have premium but are active, to hit reddit in the wallet. 🤔

Been giving mine to r/lemmy

Its fine more users on lemmy then

Well, I never paid for Reddit, but this must suck for people that did it.

I think the protest over this idiocy will eclipse the blackout.

We should add awards to lemmy :,)

Honestly, I'd be really happy with that. Be a good way to help pay for server/maintenance costs. I have no idea how it would be possible to make it work across instances.
- This is how gold started on reddit back in the day and devolved into this.
- Bitcoin was invented exactly for use cases like this one
I expect awards to be the next big addition to this platform. Not necessarily purchasable through coins (that will come in the future) but perhaps an option available to every user that you can use once every three months.
- Could be a direct donation to your instance
Started doing just that.
✨✨💰 ✨✨

peeks at comments

Mildly disappointed that no one mentioned leaving reddit for lemmy, but also mildly impressed at the level of commitment of these redditors.

I saw one! Another mentioned kbin
- You have better eyes than me. :)
Maybe the people who would leave have already left?
- Ahh if that’s the case, then I have no sympathy to those who choose to stay. They deserve whatever half baked idiocy reddit will throw at them.
- Pretty sure I haven't posted in a month. And I used to post a ton
why would they? this whole stunt is a distraction. and look how well it works, even on lemmy. half the comments are golf claps.

It’s become clear that awards and coins as they exist today need to be re-thought, and the existing system sunsetted.

Has it? 🤔

... and no one cared

If anyone has any coins they want to dump, r/GoForGold has reopened for challenges.

If you want to get rid of them quickly, a challenge could be like "first 5 commenters get a platinum", you could award a community award. GoForGold have a 5,000 coin "Golden Bracelet Award" which gives 1,000 coins to mods to give out on behalf of the sub. (10,000 also gives them 1,000 so 5,000 is better value. same for the 40,000 coin award, only giving 4,000 to community). The GoForGold mods have a summer bonanza lined up and i think they'll find a way to make use of all community awarded coins.

If you want to get rid of them efficiently, the timeless beauty award gives the awardee 100 coins to spend and the community.

Giving a gold medal gives the recipient a week of ad-free browsing and giving a platinum gives a month of ad-free browsing.

On the new scheme, A while ago i had Reddit app installed and noted there was an option for a "vault" in the menu bar where you could share stuff with other people, it needed a sign up for something else and i didn't look further into it, but think it could be related.

Since all the 3rd party stuff kicked off, Reddit feels different. Also i noted they kicked up a stink saying that DNDMemes and NCD were both SFW when people joined and its unfair that mods changed it to NSFW. When i signed up i could award people coins and without a replacement scheme out for us to judge it feels a bit hypocritical.

"Business as usual" lmao what is this then

Most pepega move I've ever since since the APIcalypse

It hasn't been 2 months already lol

Yep I just got my message from them saying if I don't use them by September, then they will take from me. I still have Reddit as a couple of subs I'm not happy to leave

I was given them by someone who gave me a gold award. I hardly ever bother with them, so do I start giving them out or let them steal them from me?

Edit :Giving them away on r/lemmy

"thanks for gold, kind stranger" is no more

I still visit a few subs that haven’t really built a solid community here yet, so I’m still on Reddit a good bit.

You can already see a change in the user base and they way people talk in the comments. Reddit has changed a lot over the years but man, it really seems like most of the interesting conversation has left the site; outside of very niche communities.

Just my 2¢

There are some great comments on that thread absolutely ripping the piss out of Reddit. I almost wish I hadn't deleted my account, just so I could upvote them ;-)

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.

Guess the datamined stuff about cashing out on karma and awards from others is true then. Makes me honestly glad I jumped off of that shit show. There's just no way that isn't going to backfire hard, if we can even call it that, because I guess it will just be by design.

a new direction for awarding that allows redditors to empower one another and create more meaningful ways to reward high-quality contributions

Lmao wut

So they're sunsetting current payment features, right now, just for the hell of it without having an answer to fix it for months yet?

Good God, they've gone Musk.

I've got 14600 coins to spend. What should I do with them? Don't want to benefit Reddit...

Probs so spez can bury the fact that he gave a bunch of fucking pedo mods from the jaibait subreddit custom awards

TIL - I had been adding them all to the uBlock rules!

Haha, I’m glad I wasted all my (gifted) Reddit Gold on Christian’s farewell to Apollo posts.

Obligatory fuck u/spez, as we used to say on that old site.

I really wonder what @ChristianSelig thinks of this

They are making it easy to move here.

Lemmy is the new old Reddit, Reddit is the new new Twitter.

At first I was all "I dont care. Nothing to do with me" and then I noticed a new email.. fuck off reddit!

Killing awards, after killing awards, is bloody stupid. Like ffs.

I wonder what this means for r/cryptocurrency and their precious MOONS

I'll show them my moon.
- Username checks out.

Thats a great thread to get people to move to lemmy lol

Especially now that the Memmy app is on the app store and its so similar to Apollo

As much as I hate these awards cringey bullshits I have to say it is indeed a bad implementation

This should shock no one everything they are doing is to create a Facebook clone of sorts where they can easily feed people information and garner their attention in the form of ads. This truly marks the hour in which everyone needs to start looking for and at more open systems. When reddit went public and Tencent bought some of the company the writing was already on the wall.

NO WAY HAHAHAHA

Awards are nothing in value. Awards could be used for harassment.

I didn't know I had any. Only used the old reddit and Joey (which just died today 😢)

I dunno. Part of me thinks they have a plan. I have no idea what, but if the entire boardroom is just going along with all the crazy, it makes me think there's a reason. Maybe there's a thing that happens if reddit just tanks. Or maybe they all just want it to end and just want to watch it burn.

I'm not saying this is the case, it just wouldn't surprise me that in a year or so, something comes out to explain all the batshit decisions.

W

I feel they're gonna replace it with some blockchain/crypto BS.

Could be worse, could have gotten exit scammed on a shitcoin!

Just when you think the dumpster fire can't possibly burn any brighter, u/spez comes running with a barrel of gasoline.

Banning coins that people paid for, hmm something is fishy and since the announcement they just nuked all my accounts. For ban evasion on main page sub that I never visit. I said F it and I'm here now. I have a nasty feeling that they are going to ban all the porn pre IPO. Some of my accounts were mods on some NSFW subs that weren't too big. Start small and work your way up from there.

They can go the way of Tumblr/Digg/Etc I'm done.

I will be curious if they nuked my accounts at work. I have never cross pollinated between machines (no upvote/comments between work/home). If I do have bans then they might be using AI to look for common misspelling/writing patterns/ect

This actually makes sense and I predicted this a while back. Having that type of stuff requires a much more complex database setup. It's very inefficient. I'm assuming that's the reason they're getting rid of it.

yeah a whole extra table is basically rocket science lol
I don't think so, there was a post the other day with a supposed leak about how they are planning on a monetization system. The details were vague, could be anything from direct upvote counts or something else... but what was clear is you need to enroll on their program and hit certain metrics and thresholds to qualify.

As we saw with Reddit gifts, anything that could help develop an audience or good publicity is not destined to last forever.

This will be related to the recent news that there are plans to pay contributors for posts. Will update with a link when I find it...

I don’t understand why Reddit would do this, but this definitely feels like most users would appreciate it. I always hated awards and premium. Hiding awards was the best feature in Apollo.

Can someone explain why everyone is attacking Reddit for this awesome, user friendly decision?

Removing a system that some people used and reddit premium users paid for, while offering no solution for the people who (god knows why) have 15k coins saved that will literally disappear in two months, and having apparently no replacement in mind other than tipping people for "quality" posts? Screwing the users yet again to increase the number of people seeing ads?
Something will replace it, they've clearly said this. That along with rumors about directly rewarding users with cash for earning karma does not bode well for me.
I would say suddenly removing a product that people paid for (like coins) is not very user friendly. Especially with only a 2 month notice.
Note: As indicated in our User Agreement past purchases are non-refundable.
This to me reads like a big fuck you to the people who were spending money.
That being said, had they gone for a longer timeline with warnings as they got close to the deadline, I think reception would have been better.
Personally I think that this is just user friendly theater. Reddit shit the bed, and is now engaging in tactics to remove the turd. But the stain is still there, as is the need to make money. They'll replace awards and coins with another revenue stream that I am 110% confident will not be user friendly, but instead a clever cash grab to tickle the testicles of their investors.
Reddit is dead, they're just trying to make its corpse dance.

Wow, and pretty shitty of them to still be selling those coins for months ahead when they very well know that they are useless.

I used baconreader, it was always ad free, so gold never actually did anything at all for me, they were always useless.
I thought that was the whole point of killing 3rd parties... either you get the feed full of ads that pay them via clicks, or you pony up for the gold.
The gold system allowed reddit to collect revenue from payers to give premium to non-payers. Basically it meant a non payer could pay. They're eliminating that aspect. They're reducing the number of people that can have paid access...
I don't know what their intent is, but removing gold isnt logical, and it's doubly illogical since the disabling of third parties increased the relevance of gold dramatically.
It's like they went out and set up a T-ball stand and put the ball on it to set themselves up for a nice home run, and are now walking up and kicking the tee out from under the ball. Dafuq are they thinking?

I am actually okay with this. Now what are all of the gilding farmers going to do? Oh no...anyways.

Never really liked the clutter anyways.

yeah I've had awards hidden in RES for about a year now
- Yeah. I've used rif and it does not support the custom awards anyway

Twitter and Reddit seem bent on crashing popular social media sites. If they vanished completely tomorrow along with Facebook, what would be left?

What is next, I really wonder...?

Changing name to Fuckit?

Haha

Remember when people just said "reddit silver" to imply it was Reddit gold but they had no money, and then they made it into a paid thing and everyone stopped saying it. Now there is a bunch of meaningless icons on every front page post and reddit is removing them because??? Lol.

Someone in the reddit comments mentioned you can use awards/coins to bypass ads. That makes sense. In a stupid way. I guess

They’re just straight up making shit up about excuses for getting rid of awards.

Interesting how I can’t find this anywhere on /r/all

It’s like the API thing didn’t piss off enough users, so now spez is switching to Plan B.

If he isn’t trying to destroy the company, though, I have no idea what the goal is.

I hate to be this guy but isn't this a good thing? I mean fuck reddit to death and all that jazz. But getting rid of all those oversaturated awards does not sound like a too bad of a decision to me. At least not to the consumers.

Somebody make an image merging Spez and Musk faces please.

That's seriously surprising, what of reddit is going to still be reddit by the time their IPO starts?

I thought you had to buy awards to give out (or included as part of paid or “premium” Reddit). So they are killing a source of income or reducing the feature set?

Lol. Glad my only contribution to that site was shit posts and whatever ad revenue they can squeeze or get past my ad blocker.

tldr: they're trying to implement more expensive awards and coins

and now premium is even more useless than it already was

not even surprised, just sitting here watching spez's dumbassery slowly kill off the website

Sounds like they're actually going through with the leak saying they'll pay high karma users much faster than I thought.

I’m very curious why they would do this. Curiouser and curiouser.

They can't remove awards from a particular comment without people noticing.

Seems like an overall bad change. Feels like these platforms are trying to drive themselves into the ground all at once.

Comments on Reddit about people unhappy. Yet, they’ll still login again tomorrow. Nothing will change. Like the protest that did nothing.

Reddit is dying, but only in the way twitter and Facebook "died" back around the early 2010's. User count will continue to grow, but the community will lose its identity.