Reddit Kills Awards and Coins | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Kills Awards and Coins

old.reddit.com

58 pointsMarcellusDrum17 comments

>First, many don’t appreciate the clutter from awards (50+ awards right now, but who’s counting?) and all the steps that go into actually awarding content. Second, redditors want awarded content to be more valuable to the recipient.

So, nuclear option, of course.

The "clutter" of rewards is something recipients take great pride in. I have never, ever, been privy to a convo where a user griped about there not being enough payoff for an award that was GIFTED.

The "steps" involved hitting the "award gold" button, and being taken to a very standard e-commerce checkout process. What "steps" are there to complain about?

my 12 plus years on Reddit says this is fishy. Awards slow the doomscroll down, is what I suspect the problem is.

Apparently from inspecting the Reddit app APK, they are planning to allow rewarding contributors monetarily (probably with crypto)

https://www.androidauthority.com/reddit-contributor-program-...

This will likely turn Reddit into a (even bigger) cesspool of karma farming spam/bots and bullshit AI posts now that they can make a quick buck off it.

My reddit use and dropped dramatically with the death of third party clients, but this I think will push me off entirely. That just actively encourages reposting old threads and their comments wholesale.

Many years ago I made the laziest shitposting bot for 4chan ever, called trolldozer. which did almost exactly this, simple keyword matching and some homegrown weights assigned to a couple dozen known sequences. the bot just kept a roling snapshot window of posts made between 150-190 hours before the current time, found the oldest one that was most similar to a sequence of popular keywords in a given thread, and reposted to the end of iit but with no image link. Of course being anonymous this worked pretty well even if it got saged frequently, presumably when someone spotted their own post being reposted.

People used to award others Dodgecoin and a few others for a while. At some point it even became worth a bit, before losing value again.

This is the stuff they're working on, instead of making the apps better >< What a disastrous time as CEO spez has had.

Reddit complains about not being profitable and then shuts down people paying to literally put a digital sticker on something? An incredibly popular feature?

It wasn't that long ago that they were consistently bringing in enough to pay the bills from these coins alone. ex: https://imgur.com/VCjfaYO It looks like they stopped showing the daily goal amount about 5 years ago, so what happened between then and now that made them decide to abandon a revenue stream that paid their entire costs on its own?

That screen shot says "A month of gold pays for 231.26 minutes of reddit server time." Was gold bringing in just just enough to pay server costs or did it manage to cover payroll costs too?

(Not that it makes sense either way to eliminate a revenue stream for something as subjective as "decluttering" the experience.)

The only way they’re taking that away if it is being replaced with something even more micro transaction-y

Watch. It’ll be something that actively & artificially restricts users that aren’t paying in some way.

Yes and no. I agree with you there's no way they'll refuse to take millions of dollars users basically just hand to them for nothing in return. More likely though they will do what they've announced in the past and have been planning for ages. The "gold" will become onchain tokens which users can trade and sell. So the rewards would have actual monetary value. Basically it introduces a financial incentive to be online, for even more addiction potential.

This would be my guess because that's what they said they would do in the past and they've already run trial versions in selected subreddits for a long time.

It's telling that Old Reddit is still preferred over the "new" interface.

I wonder if it's just a matter of time until they make the redesign mandatory. Hopefully NewPipe for Reddit is built by then.

Or that we’ve stopped relying on Reddit and moved to Lemmy etc.

Consider r/redditseppuku

Wow…. They only let you view that subreddit via the app.

https://postimg.cc/8fPL4WzL

Is this new or am I out of date?

They've been doing it randomly for a while.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com