Technology

“Mind Your Business,” Declares Man, Seen Repeatedly Throwing Himself Down Up Escalator

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.

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.

My account is just gone. I wasn't a big time poster or anything, but 10 years of use and my account doesn't exist. I only went back on to delete it.

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.

This just feels like the inevitable next step of Reddit becoming a 'monetizable' platform for influencers. It's annoying but it's a tried-and-true method of getting paid engagement; get influencers(marketed/advertised personalities) to engage and build a following.

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?