Reddit is ending Reddit Gold and users are furious::undefined

  • ziggurism@lemmy.fmhy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    145
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Bagel
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      64
      ·
      1 year ago

      There was at least reddit silver that worked this way.

    • sijt@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      61
      ·
      1 year ago

      That’s what’s great about all these companies. They take credit for, and try to derive value from, things they didn’t actually create. Reddit keeps on talking about “their” data that was created by users, for free, and moderated by other users, also for free. Yet it’s somehow theirs and they can sell it?

      Twitter didn’t invent hashtags. They were user created annd eventually incorporated in to the service.

      These services add very little value, but they believe they add it all.

      • pips@lemmy.film
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        What they’re good at is seeing trends kind of late and then making everyone believe they invented them. They’re quite good at that. Most would call that a grift.

        What they should be is platforms and tools for people to interact, with some controls to prevent Nazis and MRAs from ruining things for everyone.

      • whofearsthenight@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        Lol twitter didn’t even invent calling it “tweets”, @ mentions, retweets, etc. Like reddit, most of product development past the very basic idea came from the community.

      • ziggurism@lemmy.fmhy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Hashtags were invented by the Twitter community. And the @ sign account linking was invented by Twitter third party apps, which Elon musk killed

    • jonne@infosec.pub
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      23
      ·
      1 year ago

      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@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • treadful@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        1 year ago

        The benefits of receiving it were meh. But it was a way to show recognition for people and supporting the site. One of the few ways they would even receive revenue, for little to no effort. I don’t know why they didn’t just lean into it harder.

    • dan@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      1 year ago

      That story is so common. They destroyed Secret Santa that way. User-run thing that got some traction so they built redditgifts around it, then decided redditgifts wasn’t sufficiently profitable so canned it and took the user-run part down with it.

      • ZapBeebz_@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        1 year ago

        I will continue to be bitter about them killing secret Santa. It was such a great tradition, killed off far too soon because it “wasn’t profitable enough”, nevermind that the point of the event is to celebrate the holiday season and the spirit of giving

        • CoderKat@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Didn’t it also start off as an entirely user run thing before Reddit admins took over it?

          • ZapBeebz_@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 year ago

            Yes it did. And then they ran it for a handful of years. And then they killed it. Brutally.