An undoubtedly horrific subreddit that always seemed to comply with reddit TOS and the admins has been banned, probably related to the NZ shooting video that was in the subreddit yesterday until it was taken down by admins. Looks like they're getting ahead of MSM discovering that this shit exists on the site?

Will add any updates here.

r/gore is gone as well.

From @nacho:

It's not ahead of controversy, it's in response to the Reuters article calling out /r/watchpeopledie.

Members of a group called “watchpeopledie” on internet discussion board Reddit, for example, discussed how to share the footage even as the website took steps to limit its spread.

Reddit - which has over 20 investors, including Conde Nast owner Advance Publications - said it was actively monitoring the situation in New Zealand.

“Any content containing links to the video stream are being removed in accordance with our site-wide policy,” it said.

My friend and I are considering finishing a prototype of a Reddit app. We've already agreed to the following features on first release (if we keep going).

• Similar urls to current Reddit website (so you can change the URL to reddit.com and see the same page)
• voting, commenting, posting selftexts and links
• Directly uploading image posts may come later if it looks complicated
• Masstagger integrated.
• Dark theme (other options in later releases)
• Primary use case: desktop and mobile web.
• Performance first. Reddit's 1 minute load time on default mobile, missing/broken features on i.reddit.com/.compact, and a few tiny complaints on the desktop site are the primary reasons we are considering writing this app. Native is not in our collective skillsets or radar, so we're going to go the extra mile to make sure the app respects both your time and your battery where possible. We did do some research and found that Reddit has actually been negligent in this regard on mobile web, meanwhile we have years of experience in the subject.
• Mailbox (send/receive messages, orange icon on new message/comment reply/thread reply).
• No infinite scroll
• View source JSON of comments/posts.

What are some features/ideas that members of this community would really like in a Reddit app?

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 dislike reddit's mobile site, as it is slow, filled with app popups, and my content blocker ends up creating software gore situations.

On the other hand, i.reddit.com is faster, simpler, and the one popup it has is easy to block with element hiding.

Unfortunately, tapping on a username or subreddit link automatically redirects me to the newer mobile site, and I have to add /.compact to the end of the url.

On Android, this is easily fixed by installing an Firefox extension to always use i.reddit, but iOS Firefox doesn't support addons.

So is there anyway to avoid going to reddit's new mobile site? Maybe use a pi-hole to redirect www.reddit.com?

If you missed it, Reddit recently announced some major planned changes to Reddit Gold. It's pretty vague and confusing, but my summary was:

The current gold system is basically:

• When you have reddit gold, you can disable ads and have access to a few extra features.
• You can buy gold for $4/month or $30 if you buy 12 months at the same time. You can also buy "creddits" for the same prices, which are basically stored months of gold and can either be used on yourself or to give gold to other users.
• Giving gold to other users is called "gilding". You can gild individual posts on the site, which puts a gold icon on that post and gives the author a month of gold.

---

Now, from what I can understand, this is the new system:

• Reddit gold is now called "Reddit Premium". You can buy it for yourself for $6/month. There are no bulk discounts any more, so a year of Premium will cost $72. Existing subscribers can keep their current pricing as long as they're subscribed before the change.
• When you have Reddit Premium, at the beginning of each month you will be given some amount of "Gold Coins". These Coins can be used to give "awards" to other users' posts.
• You can give 3 different types of awards to a post, which each cost a different number of Coins:
  • Silver Award - costs the fewest number of Coins; adds a silver icon on the post; the author receives no further benefits
  • Gold Award - costs more Coins; adds a gold icon on the post (same as current icon); the author receives some small number of Coins (not Premium)
  • Super Gold Award - costs the most Coins; adds a "spectacular" icon on the post; the author receives a month of Reddit Premium
• Gold Coins will be purchasable in bundles separately from Premium, pricing not announced.

Today they released more info in /r/lounge (here's the post if you have reddit gold to be able to view it). The summary of the new post is:

• "Super Gold" has been renamed "Platinum"
• If you have any creddits, you have the choice to convert them to months of Premium membership before Sept. 10. If you don't, they'll be converted to 2000 Coins per creddit.
• You get 700 coins per month for having Premium.
• The awards that you can give to posts have these coin costs/benefits:

And there will be the following "Coin Packs" available for purchase:

I originally posted this as a comment here but thought it might deserve it's own discussion.

I think that the rise of megathreads/ultrathreads/collections of threads on reddit has been a large detriment to the site.

I'm a mod for a few large subreddits that utilizes them (and I know a good portion of people reading Tildes right now are as well), and as time goes on I've started to dislike them more and more.

At first they were great - they seemed to silo off all the posts and noise that happened around an event, and made the lives of mods easier. Posts that should've been comments could now be removed, and the user could be pointed towards the megathread. Users could go back to the post and sort by new to see new posts, and know that they'd all have to do with that one topic.

I believe that this silo actually hurts the community, and especially the discussion around that original megathread, more than it helps. As modteams I think we underestimate the resilience of our communities, and their ability to put up with "noise" around an event.

The fact that we are in a subreddit dedicated to that cause should be silo enough - each post in that subreddit should be treated as an "atomic" piece of information, with the comments being branches. By relegating all conversation to a megathread we turn top level comments into that atomic piece of information, and subcomments into the branches.

But that's just a poor implementation of the original! There are some edge cases where this might make sense (take /r/politics, it wouldn't make sense to have 9 of the top 10 posts just be slightly reworded posts on the same issues), but I think this can be remedied by better duplication rules (consider all posts on a certain topic to be a repost, unless the new post has new or different information).

There is something to be said about the ability to generate a new, blank sheet of conversation with a post, that is not marred with previous information or anecdotes. New comments on a megathread post don't have that luxury, but new posts do.

Additionally, I feel like the way reddit originally conditioned us to view posts is to view them then not check them again (unless we interacted with someone in it or got a notification). This prevents potentially great (but late) content from gaining visibility, as a non-negligible portion of the population will still be browsing the subreddit, but will never click the post again.

I imagine that I'm not the only one here now that was part of the Digg exodus to Reddit many years ago and I wonder what you all think we can learn from the rise and fall of these platforms to better design our new community.

Is it inevitable that our social networks degrade with population until a new one rises from Its ashes, so to speak?

What can we do to protect ourselves from this pattern and maintain a healthy populace?