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draxil ,

Honestly, not furious. But I guess I don’t count as a reddit user any more. Still, did anyone ever care about these features?

For me these already came in after I wished the reddit devs would just do maintenance.

Clbull ,

I’m gonna make an outlandish prediction that Spez will no longer be CEO of Reddit Inc within the next six months. He’s made some incredibly bone-headed decisions and if the IPO does happen, Reddit are either going to be valued really low to the point where they could face a hostile takeover from a more competent tech giant, or Reddit’s existing shareholders are going to oust him in a revolt.

Either way, Spez has pissed off a lot of angel investors and has driven a good chunk of people towards Tildes and Lemmy. When this place (and other Lemmy instances) looks like an increasingly viable alternative to Reddit, it’s going to eclipse the main site once we get decent apps like Sync and Boost.

cantstopthesignal ,

In early June, there was like 300 users on Lemmy.

metalligator ,

some execs get hired specifically to do all the negative stuff so they can be a lightning rod of ire

amendment64 ,

And then theres spez, who does it for no other reason than being a child molesting piss drinker

yuki2501 ,
@yuki2501@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t get it. Wasn’t the whole API thing supposed to be about money? Reddit is killing one of its sources of income!

That doesn’t even make business sense! What the hell is going on inside Spez’s mind?

QQuixotic ,

I’ve seen rumors that api leaks have indicated that the new thing will be tipping posts directly.

Which is EXACTLY what that site needs - repost bots being financially incentivesed. I guess that’s one way to get your usage back - Reddit started as just two dudes posting links to each other and will end as ten thousand bots reposting those links.

Clbull ,

There’s a blockchain-based Reddit clone called SteemIt that I had a cursory glance at. The idea of it is that you can make money (specifically their cryptocurrency) from posts because of how site activity mints more stuff on their blockchain. Unsurprisingly, SteemIt is also unusable and has been astroturfed by spammers.

Reddit would kill their platform overnight if they allowed users to tip posts whilst simultaneously chasing away community moderators.

blueskiesoc ,
@blueskiesoc@lemmy.world avatar

Remember kids, don’t let the news tell you how to feel. Watch out for words in the title like “outrage” and “furious”. Anger increases engagement and they know it.

dtxer ,

We could use AI to remove the clickbait from headlines automatically. 🤔

Metatronz ,

That’s a fun idea 💡

SpaceCowboy ,
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca avatar

Yeah internet “outrage” is a weird thing.

I scrambled 10 years of my reddit activity, which would appear to be outrage. But in reality it was more like “meh, well reddit sucks now, I guess I’ll go somewhere else. I’ll just remove whatever value I may have added to the site on my way out since I don’t want to reward a corporation for bad behaviour.”

I guess some people may be outraged, and they’ll be the most vocal ones. But most people are probably like “this kinda sucks, but meh whatever” and move on. You just don’t hear a lot from these people.

Da_Boom ,
@Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

Honestly, I never liked all the additional rewards they added to the system anyway, seemed really superfluous.

I actually preferred it when it was gold only. No silver, bronze or any of the other 10+ “coins” they had.

You paid for gold to support their server time, you could also give others a month of gold as well - it had a similar feeling to subs and gift subs on a twitch channel. You gave others gold not only to support the servers, but to say, “I want to give you more than an upvote for what you said” it was a way of going above and beyond.

Sure the lounge was crap, but that wasn’t the point, that was an intended reward for donating.

I honestly don’t know why they’re killing it, as it’s a known fact that having a subscription system with the ability for people to pay monthly is a far better, more consistent source of revenue than ads, and it’s less invasive. It’s why musk is pushing twitter blue so hard.

Unless they’re only killing the awards part of it and still allowing people to subscribe to premium, I can kinda see some of the logic in that - by making it impossible to access premium features through gold gifts, you make it so everyone has to access those features by subscribing - the hope is more become willing people sign up to it after losing their free gold. Honestly I think they’re misjudging how much value Reddit premium actually has, especially given the recent alienation by Reddit staff, and therefore removing the ability to give awards is misleading. Sure if premium had more value than it does, it might actually have the intended effect, but I think it’s just gonna result in a precipitous drop in revenue.

Honestly Lemmy kinda does donations better, as it doesn’t turn donations into a fake award you can give other people. Instead it’s just that, you donate, the server stays running and we get to continue having this space. And the admins are actually careful enough to turn off registrations when growth starts to increase too quickly.

d4rknusw1ld ,

It’s almost like spez secretly enjoys Lemmy. Doing the work for us.

sangle_of_flame ,
@sangle_of_flame@lemmy.world avatar

on one hand, reddit gold is useless and a waste of money imo

other hand, they just keep going for making the most controversial decisions with zero thought lmao

irotsoma ,
@irotsoma@lemmy.world avatar

Sure but they could have left the awards in place for a while even if no more could be added. And instead of making everyone lose all the coins they already spent money on, they could have allowed those coins to be used for whatever the next thing is. Just throwing out everyone’s money is never a good practice.

Like what if Minecraft decided they were going with a new monetization strategy and said everyone’s minecoins would expire in a couple of months and any skins, texture packs, etc., you bought with them will also be gone. And no refunds of course.

anonono ,

reddit gold used to be how the community helped with server costs back when reddit had only a few employees

drcobaltjedi ,

I still have my reddit account, only to malicously mod one community and update a secret community about a move to lemmy, but I only use reddit now to do a quick check in on those subs and then a glace at the front page.

Anyway, i saw the reddit post and a bunch of people were livid and said they were doing chargebacks now. I informed them that chargebacks cost reddit more money than they initally spent (spend $5 they have to return the $5 and pay a $20 fee), and if tok many users do a chargeback then credit card companies would stop paying them wink.

EDIT: in response to telling people that it would hurt reddit finacially I got a 2 gold and 2 platnium awards which i hope were paid for with chargebacked credits.

Gestrid ,

EDIT: in response to telling people that it would hurt reddit finacially I got a 2 gold and 2 platnium awards which i hope were paid for with chargebacked credits.

They were probably just throwing leftover Coins they had in your direction.

drcobaltjedi ,

I know. I’m just saying I hope

Skellymax ,
@Skellymax@lemmy.world avatar

It might be that they’ve given up on the visuals and are now making all the changes all at once. They’re ripping off the bandaid overhauling their site and are banking that the damage will be recover in time.

With the current state of dissatisfaction from the community, now might be a good time to plow through and make all the changes that are already undesirable for the old user base.

Maybe even more of these big changes to come? More popcorn for the Fediverse I suppose.

ipkpjersi ,

They are really trying hard to piss off all their users lol

Pumpkinbot ,

Well, Spez did say he admired what Musk did with Twitter…

Dozzi92 ,
@Dozzi92@lemmy.world avatar

What if Spez’s intention all along was to tear down the machine from the inside. Anyone who was on it 10+ years ago could see it had perhaps grown a little too big for it’s britches.

HardlightCereal ,

Glass onion, mate. There’s a human psychological blindness to see the rich as fundamentally competent and smart. To believe there are layers to it. But fundamentally, it’s transparent. It’s just incompetence.

Dozzi92 ,
@Dozzi92@lemmy.world avatar

I definitely subscribe to Hanlon’s razor, as well as the idea that for every rich person who earned it there’s a hundred, or a thousand, that were given it.

I was just being sarcastic though. I don’t know anything about spez either. I just like to joke about everything.

xc2215x ,

Redditors care about their coins a lot. Not really a shock.

Imgonnatrythis ,

Do they? I used RIF and honestly don’t recall a way to even see or use coins on there. If there was I never touched it.

briongloid ,
@briongloid@aussie.zone avatar

My belief is that they want to tokenize Karma and any other reward/currency will compete against their new tradable currency.

I believe they had already said years ago that the r/CC moons was a test run for something site-wide.

Personally I made $300 after moons first tanked, just from some lame comments in the subreddit that was ruined by the scheme.

I will likely use my 150k+ Karma account for profit if this happens and it won’t be for the benefit of the community like the last decade of my activity used to be.

Lemmy is now where I participate in a positive way.

Varcour ,

Because the karma whoring wasn’t bad enough as is. What could possibly go wrong with a scheme like that?

But if they want to throw a bit of money my way to quit, I’m not going to say no either…

JesusTheCarpenter ,

Precisely, karma whoring was already rampant and detestable.

KreekyBonez ,

reddit’s oldest profession

SpaceshipPanda ,

Talk on the main post on Reddit that discussed these changes is that some of the API change documentation included information on what change will actually happen now that they’re sunsetting coins. Tipping replacing coins and karma having monetary value. If thats true Reddit is truly dead. Read that post and made a Lemmy account!

Wolf_359 ,

I said this in another thread - I bet they’re going the YouTube route and are going to start allowing content creators to make money.

Might sound good on the surface but it’s absolutely going to shred what Reddit used to be. Goodbye discussion forum and hello new social media.

kescusay ,
@kescusay@lemmy.world avatar

I can’t think of a single good reason for anyone to actually want that. Reddit isn’t a site for content creation, it’s an aggregator. It works for YouTube because, well, it’s YouTube. It’s practically synonymous with content creation. But exactly zero people are on Reddit for that.

AlexWIWA ,

Also its a forum and its appeal is asking questions to real people. Paying users will destroy that appeal.

Holyginz ,

The company doesn’t care. They don’t actually understand what reddit is/was and have decided they want it to be something else that they can squeeze money out of. Whatever they end up with is going to be bland and nothing like what it was before. Doubt it will get them what they want in the end.

tony ,

They don’t seem to realize Reddit isn’t that special. It’s a forum… Digg and Slashdot thought they were special too Myspace before that…

They’re just where most people are at the moment. That can and likely will change. Whether it’s Lemmy or something else entirely.

AlexWIWA ,

Yeah it’s not like Facebook where I need all my friends to move. I just need a few thousand people to move to Lemmy and I’ll never need Reddit again.

Bozicus ,

And since Lemmy is already at, iirc, the 200,000 mark, and is only part of the greater fediverse… I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t feel lonely here.

AlexWIWA ,

Same. Honestly I’m getting more responses and conversations than I do in Reddit. And they’re way more positive

ziggurism ,

Didn’t Reddit gold start as just a user-run bot, that kept a tally of how many times it had been invoked for any particular recipient?

And then Reddit forced the bot to retire so they could offer a paid version. And now they’re retiring their mandatory replacement. Good job Reddit.

jonne ,

Are people really upset about it? To me it was always pointless, and the few times I got gold and was allowed to peek into r/lounge it was just full of the most insufferable users (just people that thought they were special because they got gold).

toxic_cloud ,

I think the point is more that it’s something people paid real money for just to have them rip it away with basically no notice and no replacement.

LUHG_HANI ,
@LUHG_HANI@lemmy.world avatar

That company is so badly run it’s laughable.

rivermonster ,

That Capitalism is so badly run it’s laughable.

baggyspandex ,

Capitalism is fine as long as people aren’t complete scumbags about it. Rare, I know. It’s a human morality proposition.

ChatGPT ,

Capitalism could be amazing if the psychos of society didn’t constantly rise to the top then again the same could be said for communism and just about every other system we’ve tried.

DampSquid ,

That’s because Capitalism rewards exploitative psychos, essentially by design

FediFuckerFantastico ,

Doesn’t communism do the same? In fact why the fuck do the crazy psychos rise to the top seemingly everywhere? Is this one of those “nice guys finish last” kinda deals or some phenomenon I’ve never heard of?

Action_Bastid ,
@Action_Bastid@lemmy.world avatar

It’s because people are too focused on who controls the capital and not focused enough on what the capital itself is actually doing.

It doesn’t much matter whether it’s controlled by a Capitalist or a Communist if the person controlling the capital is a fucking idiot. Hell, it honestly doesn’t even matter that much if they’re smart, because the actual driver of growth has always been competition, which is only very indirectly connected to who controls the Capital, largely because it’s pretty much always been taken at the point of a gun for all of human history and likely will be for as long as we exist unless we somehow manage to decide on post-scarcity society rather than infinite growth society.

grte ,

You’re putting the cart before the horse. Capitalism incentivizes people to be scumbags.

baggyspandex ,

So does any other economic model.

grte ,

That is an absolutely meaningless statement.

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@lemmy.world avatar

As is capitalism incentivizing people to be scumbags, as trendy as that perspective is.

grte ,

No, the competitive nature of capitalism definitely incentivizes people to do very shitty things to each other for personal gain. Or have you not heard of the Gilded Age? Or our current climate crisis? Or strike breaking? Or the incredible wealth inequality we are seeing today?

[edit] The Irish Potato Famine? The Bengal Famine? Belgium in the Congo? Sweatshop labour? Coups in South America for the benefit of fruit companies? Wars in the Middle East for the sake of oil? Clear-cutting of the Amazon? Any of this ringing a bell?

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@lemmy.world avatar

Can you prove capitalism is the source of any of those problems vs just plain human greed?

If we want to attribute every negative event to it, well what about the positive events? Did it cause the light bulb to be invented, the telegraph, the computer, the printing press, satellites, etc, or was it just the economic system at the time?

Capitalism doesn’t make people greedy, lots of people just are.

Beyond that, you can beat on capitalism all you want but until someone comes up with a viable alternative, it’s what we’ve got.

grte ,

Literally the point of capitalism is to utilize greed and enlightened self-interest to (supposedly) drive innovation and expand production. Greed is central to the whole ideology. “Greed is good”. You are making a false distinction. How can you support an economic system you don’t even understand?

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@lemmy.world avatar

I’m just going to block you…

Edit: Using a movie clip as if it’s some kind of enlightened source is just absurd. There’s no part of capitalism that says greed is good. Capitalism is a system not an ideology, let alone an ideology that can be captured by a freaking movie clip.

Guess what, still no better system proposed, still no answer for whether the good things get credit or just the bad.

astropenguin5 ,

There are many better proposals. Communism, anarchism, socialism, etc. What i personally think is best is some form of democratic socialism, where literally everything is controlled democratically. Companies/firms all fully employee controlled, democratic government obviously, etc. Nownininow you’re gonna say “oh but socialism and communism have already been tried and failed look at xyz countries” and to that: every instance of socialism or communism has either been authoritarian and therefore always going to be bad or got fucked over by outside influences, or sometimes internal ones. Probably the best historical example that was good was the Soviet union in the very beginning in the first few weeks or months when worker control flourished, but then Lenin fucked over everything and became authoritarian.

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@lemmy.world avatar

If you think anarchism is viable I literally don’t know how we could ever in a million years agree. That is a ridiculous proposal to me beyond words, up there and equivalent to free speech absolutism.

Ignoring that, explain to me how you’re going to keep democratic socialism from going off the rails if we can’t even keep democratic capitalism from going off the rails?

Edit: In capitalism at least greedy people have an outlet that isn’t the government. In a socialist society, the only way to be greedy is to control the government. I don’t think it’s coincidence that every socialist society has turned into an authoritarian state, I think it’s an inevitability.

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn from socialism or anarchism, but they are firmly non-viable strategies by themselves.

astropenguin5 ,

I don’t personally, but it is another proposal, that’s why I mentioned it. There are some parts that seek decent but I have not read up on full explanations enough to understand the theory behind it.

The question was very open and there’s a lot to explain, so sorry for the text wall I ended up making

As for keeping stuff “on the rails,” more or less just more of the stuff we should be doing to try keep capitalism on the rails. Regulations and regulatory agencies and government bodies, and better electoral and government systems. And on top of that, the workers being in control will eliminate a lot of the motivations for businesses to do ‘bad’ things. Treatment of workers and profit distribution most obviously, but also things like quality of product or service, because the workers are also likely either direct consumers of it as well or more closely linked to direct consumers.

As for government and democratic improvements, since I’m assuming we are comparing against the US, we have a pretty shitty democratic structure and even governmental structure to some extent. First and foremost, the two party system and first past the post voting. Systems like ranked choice allow for a much broader set of parties and corresponding values to be expressed in governance. Other things like how shit of an institution the Supreme Court is, the electoral college, etc. A more European democratic model is much better. Also, a great example of how Europe has an much better control on capitalism is to look at how a lot of tech and internet protections and regulation is almost exclusively European. Things like requiring all devices to have USB-C, all of the GDPR which is the giant data privacy regulation that requires things like letting users obtain a copy of all their data, and also delete it among many other things. Also something I’ve seen recently is that by in think it was 2027 all smartphones will have to have removable batteries which is amazing.

Basically democratic socialism would be taking all the good stuff Europe does and cranking it up to 11, plus a few other things.

Edit to respond to your edit: perhaps, but how does a greedy person then get elected? The whole point of democracy is that you elect people who represent you, and also have checks and balances in place to limit any given individual or group from overstepping their power, a can be removed if they are causing harm.

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t personally, but it is another proposal, that’s why I mentioned it. There are some parts that seek decent but I have not read up on full explanations enough to understand the theory behind it.

There are many better proposals

You literally claimed there are “many better” proposals, and listed two… One of which you yourself don’t agree with, but only listed because “it’s another proposal”? That’s not a proposed better system, that’s a red herring.

but how does a greedy person then get elected?

The same way they always have? They run for office and people vote them in? Do you think anyone in Ohio actually thought this guy was going to take 60 million in bribes?

justice.gov/…/former-ohio-house-speaker-sentenced…

Why aren’t people removed currently when a majority of the country seems to agree a lot of politicians that are in Washington shouldn’t be?

As for government and democratic improvements, since I’m assuming we are comparing against the US, we have a pretty shitty democratic structure and even governmental structure to some extent. First and foremost, the two party system and first past the post voting. Systems like ranked choice allow for a much broader set of parties and corresponding values to be expressed in governance. Other things like how shit of an institution the Supreme Court is, the electoral college, etc. A more European democratic model is much better.

Sure, but these same improvements could be made to our current system; why can’t we even get that done?

And on top of that, the workers being in control will eliminate a lot of the motivations for businesses to do ‘bad’ things. Treatment of workers and profit distribution most obviously, but also things like quality of product or service, because the workers are also likely either direct consumers of it as well or more closely linked to direct consumers.

[needs citation]; genuinely not to be rude, but this is literally the same spiel everyone that’s anti-capitalist gives. It’s nothing of substance, it’s entirely unproven. Even assuming it’s true, you must assumes that you’ll even be able to put and then keep the workers in power. Also, which workers, all the workers? Representatives for the workers? etc. That’s a lot to take for granted.

muertinez ,

i may get some flack for this but i honestly think reddit had it’s best years when alexis was most involved.

LUHG_HANI ,
@LUHG_HANI@lemmy.world avatar

Who’s Alexis?

Diffuser5593 ,

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and married to Serena Williams.

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