Recently, Reddit announced that they may be discontinuing awards/coins on September 12. However I'm skeptical and I think this may be just a deceptive announcement for them to make a quick buck from awards/coins. What are your opinions on this?
Nah.
Firstly, you no longer can buy coins and awards. Three days ago they posted this:
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.
So currently they can not make any quick bugs with coins and awards as they no longer are buy-able.
Additionally, since all coins/awards expire on that date, there is zero reason to get more. Right now you want to get rid of what you have, not stock up just so Reddit can delete your inventory of coins.
This would be different if they announced some beneficial exchange rate for real money or their new system or kept coins you own available indefinitely (or at least way longer), which indeed would trigger some people to stock up "just in case I want to award someone later on".
This is a clean cut, meant to renew the system by first tearing down the old one completely, without leaving anything in place, and then introducing something entirely new. I don't necessarily agree with their communication and deadlines but I don't think there is anything foul at work here. They just want a new system and follow their current trend of rushing everything.
Not a rumor, just they announced it. Cash for high profile posts. Kinda like Elon paying all that cash to human rights trafficker, rapist, and all around disgusting human Andrew Tate, for bringing in advertising revenue one day before announcing that they have lost over 50% of advertisers on their platform.
I don't think that after this announcement people will still buy coins / awards. A lot of them have coins and by default awards through premium membership or because they actually bought it. What you see now is really angry people gifting awards and through this spending coins before they vanish in September.
Because of this stunt even more redditors cancelled premium. And you see a lot of people who lose trust and wont spend money on the platform in the future.
Jokes on them either way, been on Reddit for 12 years and I haven't bought a fuckin' award or coin or nft or dingle-dangle or bingle-bongle from Reddit yet and that ain't changing today lol
Any revenue stream for reddit starts with real human eyeballs, and not bots. Bots can post and inflate activity numbers (which is good for ads), but they're not going to buy gold.
So you get rid of gold so that it doesn't look like that revenue stream is drying up, especially if you need to fake that selling ads to real people is going really great.
If you had just pissed off a massive portion of your users and they went to lemmy and elsewhere, but you knew they'd be pissed off and you were already ready to replace them by catching fewer bots, then you have to do this to keep up the sham.
Eventually all shams get caught, but you really only have to survive to your IPO this fall. VC money and CEO are all on board with this sham.
They starting to sell out or most like make more microtransations like subscription and stuff. Removing the awards its to make it more cleaner. Discontinuing is the right word, awards and coins are just the begin.
I feel that Reddit needs to be less greedy with money, it seems like some of the community has jumped skip to Fediverse based projects such as Lemmy and Kbin as others seem to get stuck not wanting to lose there Karma & Awards and it's sick that Reddit is trying to keep them onboard. I really do hope they take Rewards away as that's one less thing for Redditors to want to hold onto keeping them on the platform.