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Reddit's replacement for Gold (with "Reddit Premium" and "Coins") has now rolled out
We talked about this about a month ago, and it looks like the change is now actually being enabled. The remaining creddits I had have now been converted to "Coins", and the site's updating with interface elements changing over.
Here's the announcement post: https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/9ik900/hey_rchangelog_were_starting_to_roll_out_some_of/
Here's the new page for Reddit Premium: https://new.reddit.com/premium
And the page for Coins: https://new.reddit.com/coins
The interface for giving an award (what used to be "gilding"): https://i.imgur.com/xvExuIn.png
The Platinum and Silver awards don't seem to be enabled yet, but here are the icons for all 3 awards: https://i.imgur.com/m7iUhmB.png
I'm not sure why they decided to revamp Gold by replacing it with a new name and a new price. It doesn't seem like it gives any new benefits except for making the system more confusing.
That has consistently been given as feedback, but due to the fact that Reddit actually could not care less about the person on the other end of the screen... it's been ignored.
Reddit only cares about turning page views into money now.
Yes. It's clear it's about money but is it so difficult to make money while also providing some sort of feature? Like how on Medium, they have "claps" which is somewhat like an upvote but gives a percentage of your monthly fee($5) to the user you clapped. Of course Medium makes money from this transaction but it also encourages writers to continue writing and creating new content for the site. A cycle.
Reddits new system is simply giving money to Reddit to gain a feature (adless) that anyone with a browser that supports add-ons can get.
I think that most of the reddit developers don't really use reddit much, so they tend not to understand a "reddit-y" way of doing things that is still profitable.
Plus, I don't think "profitable" is enough anymore - it has to be the maximum potential profit, often to the detriment of the users.
Redditors are the product now, not the consumer.
Edit: I know how "jaded edgy teenager" this sounds, but I think it's true. For what it's worth, I'm almost 40, and I'm still probably going to use reddit (though I find my caring about any socializing site decreasing, quickly).
I'm 40 and work on the finance side, and let me tell you, that's exactly how I see it too.
I didn't realize there was a monetary value associated with claps. Clearly I'm not a member of that site. Not long ago we discussed the merits of clap-style voting here on Tildes... all I recall was the explanation of the clapping UI (click and hold to give multiple claps). It definitely changes something to know that more claps actually equals more revenue for the content creator.
I honestly don't think a subscription system like that would be a bad idea for Tildes. The small cost of entry keeps away people who only want to troll, and encourages use—you want to use what you pay for. Although that hasn't really translated for Netflix, which I continue to pay for despite the fact I rarely watch it.
I'm having trouble articulating why my intuition is to hate this. Obviously websites need to monetize somehow and this seems pretty not obtrusive.
Maybe it's something about how it resembles lame cellphone games. Maybe it's that I resent reddit for trying to profit off the content submitted, written, organized, and moderated by their users. I don't know, something about it rubs me the wrong way.
Changing the currency of the purchasing menu from USD to digital coins is a tactic used to get people to think less about the money they're actually spending on an item, commonly used on mobile games targeting the elderly and children.
Heh, it's hardly just games. Been to any music festivals lately? Seems like all the big ones now want you to buy their tokens/tickets/whatever they call them, and use that as the only currency for everything at the festival - and like you said, it's just so you don't think about the money you're spending. It seems like such a silly hassle. I wonder if it does actually increase spending, has anyone ever published any numbers on this sort of economic abstraction? Or is the oft-cited spending increase just BS 'common wisdom' that gets everyone jumping on the bandwagon without checking?
I think it's the same insidious logic behind gift cards, but a step further:
At every step along the way, the company has rigged the game in their own favor, and you the consumer end up paying more than you would have otherwise.
The angle I've seen festivals pushing here is:
I'm not saying these reasons justify it, I just thought I'd chime in with some of the supposed advantages.
Personally, I like ACL's system-- link your cc to your wristband and just tap it and say your passphrase. You only spend as much as you spend, no prepay required.
Still makes you think less about the money, but still a much safer system for all parties involved.
In fact, one of the places I've worked (a waterpark) uses the same kind of system for employees/season pass holders, except employees have a 4 digit PIN in addition to a passphrase.
Cashless is an excellent system for large, spread out physical locations where you either can't easily carry money, or it's not a good idea to carry a real cc or money. Coins/tickets/other bs is never a good system except for loyalty points.
That's the one that gets me. They literally don't even run the site, dedicated users have been managing things for years and the content is user created. Yet they think they have a right to profit off of it.
I have no issue with reddit gold, I think gold is a great way for users to reward each other and reddit to keep the servers running.
I do however have issue with this new premium system, the redesign and its new hardcore forced advertisements. Both are designed to be predatory and serve the single purpose of manipulating and taking advantage of the userbase for profit.
Which we've been talking about for likely years now but still hasn't happened.
Reddit has to seriously, very, very seriously fuck up for them to start losing users. Because, even if you don't like some of the stuff they do, where else are you going to go? Tildes is the closest thing I know, but there's not going to be memes here, or NSFW content. So, essentially, there's still no reddit alternative.
Plus, reddit is just so big now. The bigger it gets the more powerful they are, and the more stuff they can allow themselves to do knowing the users will have to put up with it.
I'm probably in the minority with this one, but: if the Reddit redesign on desktop was made mandatory, I find it so insufferable that I'd rather not talk about things than talk about them through that interface.
Reddit's size has made relatively niche subreddits like r/Formula1 and r/sailing interesting places to me, but if using the site is such a hassle, it's hard to bother...
They could have just upped the price of gold, and it wouldn't have been an issue.
Instead, this seems like monetary min / maxing that obviously doesn't benefit users. It seems like it only possibly helps Reddit.
Reddit has to get better at at least burying the fact that the things they do are entirely about maximizing profits now. Consider the redesign, which is also obviously only designed with this in mind.
I wonder if this was what it felt like to watch Digg self destruct. I don't like the way Reddit's been headed recently. From going closed source to some of their recent subreddit shutdowns (I mean stuff like GunDeals that wasn't even breaking the rule it was shut down for) just to make advertisers happy, it's just slowly burning down it seems like.
I was there for the Diggpocalypse. Not as a site member, just a frequent reader. As I recall its demise was sudden and catastrophic. They launched the "redesign" all at once and refused to revert to the old one when the users rejected it. I think Reddit is scared of that outcome and that's why this rollout is happening so painfully slowly and incrementally, with (obviously temporary) concessions like old.reddit.com. I don't think Reddit's motives are purer than Digg's, they're just deliberately trying to boil the frog.
This was an interesting article from a couple of months ago about the Digg v4 launch: https://lethain.com/digg-v4/
It sounds like they did it in such a way that rolling back wasn't even an option.
That's one of the most terrifying sentences I've ever read.
No shit. Rule zero in systems administration - you never do anything unless you've already tested how you're going to undo it when it fucks up. Always be able to roll back. That used to be really hard to do, until VMs came along and snapshots/etc made it rather trivial. I guess it's less trivial when you'd have to pay to temporarily double your cloud hosting just to keep a copy of the old stuff on ice, though. Yet another reason to stay the hell away from the cloud.
I was there too. In fact, the two situations are so similar that I think reddit would be hurting a lot more if they'd gone ahead and broken third-party apps. I feel like the redesign didn't impact a lot of people as much as it could have because those users (myself included) simply continued using whatever was already on their phone. I know people who didn't even know there was a redesign because they never use reddit through a browser! Digg didn't have the benefit of apps to insulate their changes. Of course, it remains to be seen whether eventually forcing the first-party app is in the cards for reddit...
I deleted my reddit account a couple days ago after getting into an argument with an idiot on open access and related activism. At one point I was like "what's the point of being here, what does it add to me?" , and the response was, nothing. So I just deleted the account. It felt so good, like a nice haircut. Every other day it becomes harder for reasonable people to exist on reddit, even in rather reasonable parts of it.
This is where I am with reddit. I stick to my little corner of reddit, I do comment still, I just disable inbox notifications for any comment I make.
Doesn't seem to be working, people are still being pushed away at a pretty good speed. I think the only thing holding it together at this point is inertia. It's too established to be instantly dissolved unless they do something drastic like Digg.
I see this claim occasionally, that Reddit is bleeding users and is on the verge of collapse. But I've yet to see anyone post any numbers to back up the claim.
In fact, if the Total Subscribers graph of the most popular subreddit is anything to go by, Reddit is gaining new users faster than ever before.
Total subscribers is more or less a useless metric for a subreddit that was (and possibly still is) a default subreddit for every single new user signs up for. Deleted users are removed, but any accounts registered once and then abandoned are still there, inflating the numbers. That said I'm not sure if new users are automatically subscribed to /r/announcements under the newer signup process.
There is no such thing as a default subreddit any more. That concept was retired over a year ago, following the introduction of /r/popular for subreddit discovery.
Anyone who has subscribed to a subreddit since then is doing it of their own volition, rather than being pushed into it.
Yes, I know there are no default subreddits anymore. I modded two of them. However, I was not sure if /r/announcements was included in that. Since it is an official channel for communications from the reddit admins, it would not be that unusual for them to auto subscribe all new users to it during the onboarding process..
You could reverse engineer the comment and post IDs (it's just an auto incrementing number in a higher base), query for one in every 10,000 comments for the created at date, then estimate the comments and posts per month over time.
There are already various sites doing statistics like that and making the data more easily available. Reddit's overall activity is certainly still increasing: https://pushshift.io/reddit-statistics/
It looks like that site hasn't been updated since Jan 10th. Not sure what to make of that. I'd blame it on the redesign, except that wouldn't be rolled out for another 2-3 months.
In any case, /r/announcements now has 29,786,845 subscribers, up from 21,352,277, measured 258 days ago, or 8,434,568 new users since then.
258 days before Jan 10th was April 27, 2017, which had 16,296,188 subscribers, or an increase of 5,056,089 in that same time frame.
So, yeah, the rate of growth over the past 258 days has been 1.67x higher than the 258 days before.
Huh, you're right. I didn't notice that.
If Reddit's going to keep going down the microtransaction path, they should just add the hats from April Fools 2013 back and make them obtainable in loot boxes.
I see a few people in the thread mentioning this, and they make a good point. The current values for buying gold just seem like they went for the bigger numbers to make it more interesting.
My understanding is that they're planning to literally add purchasable hats for "snoovatars", as well as various other things eventually.
They'd better let me stack hats like this or I won't use it.
Hey, that's me in that screenshot! I ended up with so many hats that day the entire site was unreadable.
wow, you're famous!
Hard to believe that was half a decade ago. Things were simpler back then when reddit wasn't chasing eyeballs and growth backed by obscene amounts of VC money.
Oh well, at least we'll have ~.
Oh. My. God. Seriously? That is not only predatory and mercenary but also astoundingly inane. Is Reddit now just some crappy mobile video game where you buy pixels to dress up your characters?
That last one looks like a well . . . butthole. Not really a good choice for an icon
It's "Reddit Silver", so it's supposed to be the crappy one.
Either I'm reading this wrong or they have it poorly worded but on the setting page it says:
It seems like as it's worded, ads will show up on the mobile apps?
My understanding is that it's just very poorly-worded/misleading, and ads are always hidden on mobile if you have gold. So the switch only does anything on desktop and there's no way to enable ads on mobile if you have gold/premium. It being really confusing was brought up repeatedly and acknowledged when they deployed the new settings page, but has never been fixed.
Are you talking about the mobile site or the app? I'm pretty sure the app has ads, though I've never seen them personally because I have Reddit Gold.
(Funny story, that — back in 2016 when Reddit bought the Alien Blue app, they bribed the app's existing user base to switch to the new official app... with four years of gold. Personally I'll never spend a dime on it, but I was happy to claim this uncharacteristically generous freebie and I've been enjoying it since then. Looks like now they're gonna start giving me free coins every month for the duration, too.)
Oh, the app definitely has ads, a lot of them. I mean that if you have gold, ads are always hidden on the app. On the desktop site, you can choose to show ads even if you have gold, but that option only applies to the desktop site, not the app.
You are correct. Clarification from a Reddit admin here.
Nonofficial apps (paid versions, or open source ones) seem to be ad free. These apps use reddit API.
Which means, of course, that it's only a matter of time before Reddit starts making decisions that are hostile to the experience with 3rd-party clients, just as Twitter did.
Luckily, this doesn't affect me: I stopped paying for my gold subscriptions a couple of months ago (I'm letting the remainder just run out), and switched my "social media" spending to Tildes instead.
I purchased another year before they hike the price up because 30 dollars isn't bad for what you get with gold, but I doubt I'll be renewing that.
Especially if ~ keeps going well like it has been, we've had weeks without any major meta drama! Might even be close to a month!
I find it confusing when people use punctuation to refer to this website. I had to read your sentence twice to make sense of it, because I read the words rather than the symbols.
My eyes immediately skipped the ~ too, dismissed it as a hyphen.
The majority of these changes seem relatively harmless, but it is worrying that reddit is using points to obfuscate the cost. As others in this thread have said, it comes off as manipulative and is reminiscent of the way a freemium mobile game plays things.
Reddit has had 'creddits' for a long time now, I don't think this is all that different from creddits for now so I'm not too worried about that.
I would begin to show concern if they actually started selling things other than silver/gold/platinum for coins like I've seen people talk about, sadly. I saw that they were thinking of adding some cosmetic type stuff for custom snoovatars which I would disagree with and I think would be greeted terribly especially on reddit, given how /r/gaming treats microtransactions.
This seems like an indication that Reddit is looking for a more consistent method of profit. I'm interested in what this change in business model could have been caused by.
If I had to venture a guess, I'd say some investors aren't seeing a good enough return on their investment and want reddit to make an effort to make more money.