Reddit Tries to Get Users to Pay by Making App Icon Ugly

This is getting so stupid, it’s beginning to sound like The Onion. Why don’t they just start charging for reading posts.

Here’s an idea: Every day you get 5 Reddit Emeralds for free, and you can use them to read 5 posts. If you want to read more, you can get more emeralds from Common Reddit Loot Boxes. You can buy those boxes with Reddit Rubies.

You can get Reddit rubies from Rare Reddit Loot Boxes, and in order to get those, you have to use Reddit Diamonds. If you have 19 Common boxes you can also craft 1 Rare Loot Box. Doing so will also require 10 rubies.

You can also buy Reddit Diamonds with Superior Crypto-Augmented Money (SCAM), and getting those coins requires real world money.

Ok, so now that you have all these gems, you can put them to good use. Emeralds are used to read posts. When you comment, there’s a 50% chance that it will be deleted within 30 minutes, but you can improve your odds by spending 1 Reddit Ruby. For each Ruby, the odds improve by 10%. Posts have the same mechanism, but you need to spend Diamonds instead.

I wonder whether the average person is really as retarded as they are made out to be by large corporations.

VC money very likely dried up and the IPO was the opportunity to raise more funding. all they needed to do was put ads in 3rd party apps and they take a cut of revenue…

I honestly thought that after all these things they would spring back but I honestly now feel like they’re going to go the way of Digg

I also hate the inclusion of the u/spez freakout about employees not wearing reddit colours in public for fear of physical harm. It is a full-on propaganda tactic, in the vein of Elon Musk or Trump's bullshit. It immediately puts shade on the userbase. These "journalists" should get their shit together and either write about how ridiculously stupid he was to say that or just not present it at all, it's barely relevant to the article. For anyone who has actually been following along, the way the article presents that tidbit is inane and completely false at best.

There's this super frustrating trend where instead of making the paid version of things better, they just make the free version worse. Like how you used to be able to do background play on the YouTube app. It's like they know these features are good so implement them to attract people to use their service, and then later take it away to force the subscription.

This title is exceedingly misleading. This icon is not “ugly” and is an obvious marketing stunt to bring awareness to the return of r/place. Wether or not you think r/place should come back is irrelevant to this discussion. Reddit didn’t “make the icon ugly” so people would pay to fix it.

I‘m just glad seeing this place more and more active. Old stupid Reddit, you’ve made the Digg-move.

Do iOS users not have free icon packs? I'm so confused by this...

Anyone paying for reddit premium has to just be the biggest sucker. Then again I don't understand anyone paying for a similar privilege on twitch either. Batshit insanity.

Reddit can go fuck themselves. I’ve been gone since Apollo stopped working. Have never & will never go back.

Just more subscription hell. It's ridiculous anymore. I'll need a subscription to flush my toilet at some point. I mean how much of this are consumers willing to put up with. Anyway Reddit is well on the path of monetizing themselves to irrelevance.

I was expecting this was just OP making a dumb joke.

The fuck.

£5.99 a month...

i cant believe people actually pay that for what is essentially a forum.

it'd probably be decades before they made that off me in advertising.

They could have had my money too if what they were asking were reasonable and i retained the ability to use RIF

Ok so this is just desperate right? Like chasing 3rd party devs off could theoretically force more people to use their app, the reddit gold thing could be them paving the way to put in something more abusive. But this? Hoping to annoy your users to the point that they'll pay you a ransom to make you stop? How is this anything other than embarrassingly desperate?

imagine paying for an app icon... what next ? paying for a ringtone like in the good old days?

Spez has already made it very clear that he has went full Elon and will stop at nothing to make the company profitable. I expect much worse from Reddit in the future.

Imagine spending money on reddit premium

Spez is a fucking clown... I hope reddit dies soon.

Yes! I definitely used to go to Reddit for their amazing icons! /s

Interestingly this may piss off more people than the real issues. Most people didn't seem to care at all about the API / 3rd party app support issues as long as they got their Reddit doom-scroll fix. But I bet whole bunch of these will be upset at having an ugly pixelated icon on their phone, muhawhaw.

what are you guys talking about? an r place themed icon wasn't put there to get people to pay money? it was put there because there is gonna be a new r place. this isn't some evil plan conjured up the criminal mastermind u/SPEZ that you just uncovered.

I can't believe they push third-party devs away and then try to make Reddit as unappealing as possible! Like, I used their stupid app and I CAN'T HANDLE how much that stupid app LAGS!! If they want people to pay, they better be a damn good app. Like, this is just evil at this point!

I'm just saying, but Reddit is just becoming a money grab. I appreciated third-party devs because they made Reddit more enjoyable. My favorite app to use Reddit on is no longer effective due to Reddit's changes. That's why I'm on Lemmy now :/

What if they only introduced the API changes to get rid of the aware users and make it easier to monetize the rest...?

Insane that on iOS you can't just change the icons to whatever you want

That is genuinely funny.

Holy fucking shit, spez is really pulling out all the stops isn't he? Fuck that guy.

While we all hate reddit, them changing the app icon to make a reference to what used to be a fun event shouldn't be our main point.

This won't work on android because changing icon is trivial lmao

Anyone brain dead enough to continue using that awful app is probably brain dead enough to pay for an icon.

Ahh the Free To Play playbook. Have to pay to not be frustrated. Ironically what Apple ushered in

Wow. That’s just crazy.

They might get a few gullible suckers to pay up.

I would never pay for changing an ugly icon.

This was honestly the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I used to check reddit every now and then, but after this I just couldn't justify it to myself to use it. I used to post a lot of stuff, and I modded a relatively small community, but it just feels wrong to use it.

Joke's on them I like retro logos

Lmfao burn that shit to the ground.

haha jokes on them, I never used the app, I just used the web view which also blows.

oh my god my bet with a friend that reddit will die within 5 years is going SO WELL! i never thought they would go this fast though

lol the implosion continues

Stable geniuses.

They should just buy the icons from Apollo if this is all their designers can muster up 😬

Quick question... Using the jerboa app, if I click a link... What happens if I accept cookies?

With RIF I knew they wouldn't be saved.

What's the situation for me now?

Glad I used a 3rd party app since March 2021

They should pull a Howie, and do a prolapse icon.

Why would this matter to anyone? You can change any icon you want on your phone with a management app. I use 3K SR Black for mine.

I saw this way before Reddit went batshit. I had the pride doge one, it was one of a couple of free ones.

Yes, Reddit is a shit show. But this isn't a new thing they've just done. So I don't know why it's being brought up as ammo now. It's been around for ages. Reddit are assholes, but bringing old stuff into this as if it's brand new, not cool.

Oh I love that every lemmy post is about reddit it's so new and cool to be part of this (NOT)

I would probably pay tbh. I hate my home screen looking bad. I'm on Android and use custom icons, but if I had no other options I'd pay for it.