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.

  • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.mlOP
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    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
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      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
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        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
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        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
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      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.