Reddit brings back its old award system — ‘we messed up’
The company said it’s golden upvote system “missed the mark.”
Cool, now do the API and I'll consider not actively avoiding your website.
I won't. They'd have to fire Steve with no golden parachute, then maybe.
I don't really care how much Steve gets out of it, I just want a not-terrible platform. So I'm cool with a golden parachute if that's what it takes to get rid of him and get someone better for the platform.
That's not happening though, so I'll just avoid the platform.
And they also have to let people use a VPN. And make UI load faster, it's way too bloated.
I tried going back for a while, but when I couldn't connect on VPN, I left again.
So they can train openai on your comments? No thanks. Its done for good IMO.
They're going to do that regardless, they'll just scrape instead of using the API.
I want an open API so I can use third party apps. I'm totally fine with them requiring an API token or something with a sensible rate limit to limit abuse by parties like openai (they'll have to go through a sales contract).
Nah, too late. Now that I’ve finally migrated to the fediverse, I’m staying here.
Not even the API. Just a usable page that doesn't feel so broken and bloated.
Did they switch off old.reddit.com in the end? That was the only useful front-end on desktop.
I'm done for good, myself. Moved to Lemmy and there are far fewer dimwitted Nazis here.
Fail shitlers
Users who had their coin balances removed will be given silver turds.
So, while awards are coming back, the phrase “thanks for the gold, kind stranger” is still effectively a retired piece of Reddit history.
Reddit is a retired piece of Reddit history
beloved features — like the ability to “gild” posts by donating a Reddit Premium subscription — are not returning.
That was like more than half the point of gold. Some random comment getting lots of gold would mean the recipient, in turn, could give out gold too.
Now...
Yeah, like the point wasn’t a “here’s how much i like it” it was “here’s a reward for providing such good content”. I would never give someone this, but old gold, maybe
"great, I got upvoted by reddit "blue" subscribers...this is so special :/" energy
I've got all the awards we need right here.
Lemmy Bronze: Hitting the little star on the post.
Lemmy Wooden Nickel: Upvotes
Would be nice if authors could see the amount of stars their content has.
Value!
You messed up worse than just getting rid of awards.
People spend real money on reddit. What a bunch of loosers.
That's what I thought when I first saw gold back in 2010...
While I’ve never given Reddit a penny, it was totally different back then. In those times, the site was much smaller, and buying gold got you r/lounge access and supported the site. They felt more community oriented and weren’t aggressively monetizing the service. Nowadays it’s like paying for Facebook or twitter, absolutely not.
Still doesn’t fix the ill will from when they abruptly killed Apollo, in a stupid way that screwed both users and an indie dev who actually cared and had dedicated significant effort to the platform.
Also, I absolutely cannot wait for when Reddit itself becomes meme stocked. Somehow, both GameStop and AMC are still alive, but the crazies are back, and Reddit seems like an excellent candidate.
They don't care about ill will, they care about money. They made nothing from third party apps and millions from gutting the API and selling it to AI companies.
not only did they gut the API for actual people, they carved out exceptions for "low volume users" to keep the bots inflating activity
now they've literally stolen from the people who paid to support the site in the first place. absolutely shameless
It's okay, Reddit. I don't post anymore.
Deleted my 15 year old account. I'm not going to let that weasel spez make $3 a year off my time. I hope something else can take over that is not for profit someday. A reddit like link sharer is important for the health of the Internet.
I'd delete my account, but then people wouldn't see my advertisement for Lemmy in my profile. Plus my repeated 'FUCK REDDIT's.
Oh, they're being cute with this. You need to pay money to get what reddit is calling "gold" (formerly known as coins), which you can use to give awards with. But one of the old awards you still can't give is the old-style reddit "gold" (premium). So they want ever more money without even giving the minor account boost you used to get, just for some skin for a comment. Fuck those guys.
Why have a thriving community when you can kill the nice and/or helpful ones with a lead pipe and then try to squeeze money out of the remaining morons?
I almost thought that closing awards, taking the money, then opening awards was a scam to defraud people of their money.
Then I realized awards was a scam all along.
Ok, we are not coming back anyway
Meh, it's just another publicly traded company now, it's just trying every PR trick going after stonks signals.
I'm happy to be here
Have you seen the abomination that is the layout for reddit now? https://www.reddit.com
Thankfully you can still access the old "new" layout at https://new.reddit.com , and of course https://old.reddit.com still exists too.
I only go there for a few communities that don't exist here, but that is where we are at, at this point.
Wow they are actually copying what digg did, and expecting a different outcome.
Edit: Changed DIGG to digg for correctness.
Hoho man, that naming scheme made me shiver. Bonus points since old and new exist at the same time
Edit: Oh, it just redirects immediately
It did that initially for me as well, I had to clear the cache and cookies for reddit. Goto new.reddit and login again.
Dude I can't even run the website anymore. It lags, won't click links, can't even get into my settings. I thought I had malware but it was exclusive to every time I opened a reddit link.
I get lags too. Interestingly (and not relevant to the topic) I can access reddit okay (but it has huge pause on initial load) on Windows with Chrome (or Opera), but reddit fails to load correctly when I am using Linux with Chromium. Tried other browsers too, reddit seems to not like Linux at all (well my install of Linux anyway). I can't even log in successfully.
I'm not sure the old new one is that much better than the new new one tbh. I always found it to be bloated af, especially with time it got worse and worse. Also, why are both sites so slow?
I'm no html type code expert, but I do code a lot in other languages. I used f12 on a browser to look at what was going on, on the reddit sites and I have never seen such spaghetti code and layers upon layers of adjustments. I have no idea what they are using behind the scenes (php/js etc, again not my expertise) but it has to be an absolute shitshow.
On old old, and old new, I used to use an element picker in uBlock origin etc, to just remove all the bullshit that annoyed me. This actually sped things up! But its not perfect.
Oh this reminds me, if you are trying to get to new.reddit, for the old-new page, I had to delete all those elements as well, then goto new.reddit fresh and sign in. Then do the element pick again.
Quiet falls around the boardroom table. One analyst breaks the silence. "Well, you see, you have investors now. And, well, they've kind of noticed that quality of your content is contrastically downhill over the past couple of years". An unnamed C staffer blurts out "I told you getting rid of reddit gold was a bad idea, let's just break it back and everyone will come back and contribute again!"
Reddit sucks balls
So true.
I don't think the award system is the only place where they messed up...
"rrred-dit"... that sounds familiar... 🤔
Meh
They knew it promoted karma farming. It helps them make money so I doubt this is an "oops".
Why did they remove it in first place, was it to promote their in-house cryptoscam?
🥱
lol
I am not interested in talking about my ex.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
And then there’s coins — the tokens Reddit users previously needed to purchase with real money to buy awards.
As such, the platform is compensating users who had their coin balance removed with a “number of exclusive awards” that they can give out for free.
Instead, users will now need to purchase gold, which starts at $1.79 (or $1.99 via mobile) for 100 gold, and was introduced as part of Reddit’s Contributor Program to award other users with “golden upvotes.” Reddit said the golden upvote “wasn’t as fun or expressive as legacy awards,” and will sunset the system now that the old awards program is back, though eligible creators can still use gold to earn money via its Contributor Program.
Unlike golden upvotes, Reddit says its Contributor Program has attracted plenty of interest and is now being expanded to cover 35 countries.
The company acknowledged user concerns about the potential for the program to be abused for spam, fraud, and karma farming, but says it hasn’t seen an increase in such behavior since the system was introduced six months ago.
So, while awards are coming back, the phrase “thanks for the gold, kind stranger” is still effectively a retired piece of Reddit history.
The original article contains 432 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 53%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
