Firstly, they de-valued upvotes and the equality that every user’s opinion had before they were introduced.
And secondly, they were so abundant that they didn’t mean anything anyway.

  • BedSharkPal@kbin.social
    16·
    1 year ago

    I think they would take on a new meaning if the money went to actually running the service and not to corporate profiteering though.
    Like if or not unless we go full wikipedia model, as these sites grow they’ll need some sort of income to pay the bills.

  • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.mlOP
    11·
    1 year ago

    ‘This person deserves praise for what they wrote so I’m going to pay Reddit money’

    I suppose this design may make a bit more sense in the Fediverse, where the money could go directly to the user, or at least to the instance or, say, a charity of the user’s choice, but I still think that having awards would clutter comments sections. /rant

    • Melpomene@kbin.social
      3·
      1 year ago

      Hmm, maybe instead of pay to play awards, we could give each user X number of “boosts” per day to vote on content to be featured? Perhaps with older / more active accounts getting a few more over time?

      • metaStatic@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        they had/have something like this in Black Desert and while any MMO general chat is always a toxic cesspool that somehow made it worse

      • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.mlOP
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yeah I’ve thought about this before too. If you had a limited amount of upvotes per day, or per amount of posts viewed, it would make them actually meaningful as there would be scarcity that you’d have to use sparingly.

    • bionicjoey
      3·
      1 year ago

      Back before Reddit was mostly being run by VCs, Reddit gold was actually able to cover the site’s running costs. They used to have a meter on the front page that showed every day when enough gold had been bought to pay for the day’s hosting costs. They probably could have kept up that dynamic forever, but instead they insisted on going after even more profit.

  • EvilMonkeySlayer@kbin.social
    9·
    1 year ago

    Honestly, I didn’t mind them. If they had them on kbin I wouldn’t mind as long as that money went to server upkeep etc. Somebody has to pay for hosting.

  • RheingoldRiver@kbin.social
    8·
    1 year ago

    I have to say, I like discord’s reactions quite a bit. But I hated reddit’s awards with a violent passion. I’m not sure what the difference is, or if there would be a way to have a reaction-like feature in a public forum. Like, maybe a couple more options than just upvote & downvote (and maybe settable by the mods?) idk.

    But anyway, yeah, I agree. I hated the awards, a lot.

    • 50gp@kbin.social
      3·
      1 year ago

      discords global reactions is actually a smart way to monetise: a vanity feature that many frequent users may want and drives subs but doesnt ruin the platform

      meanwhile reddits pointless award spam is just so atrocious and tacky I used script to hide them lol

      • bionicjoey
        2·
        1 year ago

        On RiF the only awards I ever saw were silver, gold, and platinum. But it didn’t stop Reddit from sending me DMs every time someone slapped some stupid free award on my content.

        “Very dapper” my ass!

    • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.mlOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      Do you think you’d hate them less if they were all free like the reactions on discord (and so wouldn’t set aside payers from free users)? I lowkey think it was Reddit trying to make me feel jealous of the people paying that made me hate them.

      • RheingoldRiver@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        yes, but also no, they were all sparkly and obnoxious and I didn’t know what a single one of them meant. There’s a standard set of emoji for a reason lol (even if it’s been augmented by a bajillion custom emoji that 50% of popular servers implement at least 10-25% of).

        Has any discord server implemented any emoji for a single discord award? Genuine question cos like I said I don’t recognize a single one so I wouldn’t know if I came across one.

  • can@sh.itjust.works
    7·
    1 year ago

    It wasn’t as bad when there were hundreds. Remember when reddit silver was an image someone made?

  • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
    5·
    1 year ago

    Edit: thanks for the gold everyone! I never thought I’d make it this far! I’d like to thank my family, friends, and pet snail for this amazing accomplishment

    • qtieπ@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      1 year ago

      I hate how reddit silver went from being a community meme to a real award they made to get more money from people’s pockets

  • Haunting_Tale_5150@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    It was fine when there was three (some comments here say back when there was one…or two which I guess depends on joining point haha). But I personally found the balance between gold, silver, and platinum the sweet spot. Gold for really good posts, silver for posts that, while not as good as gold, were still pretty helpful/decent, platinum being the best of the three, where the post was so extraordinary it deserved more than gold.

    When they added more rewards it removed the whole flow. All of them were the most worthless, cringworthy memes, and a lot of them were given out for literally free. To make things worse, they were often misused as well, there were a ton of posts marked with the cringe “wholesome” award that were very not wholesome because the users awarding didn’t have any of the other free awards and couldn’t pay.

    Getting reddit gold beforehand was already having a perception of being “cringe” but I think the addition of the many “meme awards” only made things worse. I think it would have been better if a system was implemented where awards could have been voted upon to posts that truly deserved it or were considered “historic” in some way.