I bet they just don’t like seeing all the awards go to fuck u/Spez posts.
I think that’s actually closer to the mark than many realize. Awards are great when they are not directed at the company or it’s rep in a negative manner as they show positive engagement and help the company with sales marketing. When awards and upvote/downvote counters are used to highlight that the users are having a negative experience then it hurts the platform image. Similarly to how YouTube removed the downvote tracker because their marketing team realized it hurt their sales revenue with business partners.
TBH, I don’t think they care. It is monetization and engagement of their microtransactions…as smug as they may be, I think it’s all about $
Agreed, just because spez is getting repeatedly dunked on, he wouldn’t want to prevent them from paying him for the pleasure.
That would fit with the Musk comparisons
I was going to post, “Do they understand their user base?” but after reading your post, I believe they do.
They had the good part of a month to understand.
Most likely so.
That’s where I’m putting my money. They don’t want clearly shit dogshit admin posts to get poor awards
Pour one out for the OG.
I like how you didn’t even bother to crop out the dot 😂
The less you try, the more authentic it is
It’s as authentic as my very organic “Barbie” marketing campaign here.
Scuff is relatable.
Did you expect anything less from Margot Robbie, master digital artist?
Take my Lemmy Lemon 🍋
I’m going to adopt this as an award lol
We should make our own
Edit: I propose a Lemmy Green Bean Award
With hookers and blackjack.
Or beans and old ass memes.
I support this! Then all the new folks will be hella confused with the award system, expecting something rewarding, when it’s actually just arbitrary fun.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=WESgHPk9gyo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good bot.
My bad, everyone. I’m on mobile rn and use NewPipe and forgot that the links shared there are pure YouTube.
Is Pipe operating like a VPN, scrubbing viewer data from Youtube?
I’m not sure. What I can tell you, is that I blocked YouTube domains at home, but Piped still played, which makes me think that the videos aren’t served directly from the YouTube domains.
It’s the recognition that counts. :)
🏅
Sigh. Still not an Oscar.
I thought we all agreed on aLemmynium
Removed by mod
I don’t want to give Reddit any traffic so I’m reposting the content here:
Hi all,
I’m u/venkman01 from the Reddit product team, and I’m here to give everyone an early look at the future of how redditors award (and reward) each other.
TL;DR: We are reworking how great content and contributions are rewarded on Reddit. As part of this, we made a decision to sunset coins (including Community coins for moderators) and awards (including Medals, Premium Awards, and Community Awards), which also impacts some existing Reddit Premium perks. Starting today, you will no longer be able to purchase new coins, but all awards and existing coins will continue to be available until September 12, 2023.
Many eons ago, Reddit introduced something called Reddit Gold. Gold then evolved, and we introduced new awards including Reddit Silver, Platinum, Ternium, and Argentium. And the evolution continued from there. While we saw many of the awards used as a fun way to recognize contributions from your fellow redditors, looking back at those eons, we also saw consistent feedback on awards as a whole. 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.
It’s become clear that awards and coins as they exist today need to be re-thought, and the existing system sunsetted. Rewarding content and contribution (as well as something golden) will still be a core part of Reddit. We’ll share more in the coming months as to what this new future looks like.
On a personal note: in my several years at Reddit, I’ve been focused on how to help redditors be able to express themselves in fun ways and feel joy when their content is celebrated. I led the product launch on awards – if you happen to recognize the username – so this is a particularly tough moment for me as we wind these products down. At the same time, I’m excited for us to evolve our thinking on rewarding contributions to make it more valuable to the community.
Why are we making these changes?
We mentioned early this year that we want to both make Reddit simpler and a place where the community empowers the community more directly.
With simplification in mind, we’re moving away from the 50+ awards available today. Though the breadth of awards have had mixed reception, we’ve also seen them - be it a local subreddit meme or the “Press F” award - be embraced. And we know that many redditors want to be able to recognize high quality content.
Which is why rewarding good content will still be part of Reddit. Though we’d love to reveal more to you all now, we’re in the process of early testing and feedback, so aren’t ready to share official details just yet. Stay tuned for future posts on this!
What’s changing exactly?
Awards - Awards (including Medals, Premium Awards, and Community Awards) will no longer be available after September 12.
Reddit Coins - Coins will be deprecated, since Awards will be going away. Starting today, you’ll no longer be able to purchase coins, but you can use your remaining coins to gift awards by September 12.
Reddit Premium - Reddit Premium is not going away. However, after September 12, we will discontinue the monthly coin drip and Premium Awards. Other current Premium perks will still exist, including the ad-free experience.
Note: As indicated in our User Agreement past purchases are non-refundable. If you’re a Premium user and would like to cancel your subscription before these changes go into effect, you can find instructions here.
What comes next?
In the coming months, we’ll be sharing more about a new direction for awarding that allows redditors to empower one another and create more meaningful ways to reward high-quality contributions on Reddit.
I’ll be around for a while to answer any questions you may have and hear any feedback!
First, many don’t appreciate the clutter from awards
“Hide Awards” in settings?
It’s almost like they’re allergic to working on their app.
They could have fixed the clutter and still accumulated money. They’re really bad at business
They could have fed ads through the API instead of shutting down clients. They aren’t very smart over there.
They could have required 3rd party apps to sell Reddit Coins and Avatar NFTs in order to use the API.
Not surprising considering what it is. I’ve seen people claim that the API is quite bad, to say it nicely. Can’t imagine the app’s code to be much better :)
They literally bought out one of the best apps, brought it in house, and actively made it the worst app. It’s almost amazing how consistent reddit’s management failures have been.
They developed a GraphQL version of the API like 5 years ago… then marked it as “internal”, obfuscated it, and didn’t let anyone access it. Except the official app.
Hate to beat the dead horse but Apollo had that
So did sync. You could hide awards completely, display them all, or have it just show that the post had been awarded, but no detail on what the award was.
Keep bringing it up. It’s clear that Spez was annoyed and offended by Apollo and we shouldn’t let him drop the topic.
Apollo automatically refunded everyone for the money they had spent for a full year. Reddit isn’t doing anything at all. It says a lot.
Not disagreeing but I hated the stupid awards. It was one the things I hated most about the official app.
Reddit has recently become allergic to taking Ws as well.
I browse on old.reddit and used unlock to block .awardings-bar a long time ago. It’s amazing how much nicer it is not seeing all that junk.
I’ve never seen this be an issue for anyone.
I hated the clutter and many people mentioned it when they talked about 3rd party apps being killed.
I’ve now seen one person complain about it.
I only used 3rd party apps to navigate, so it was never an issue.
Sounds like R×ddit’s solution for a barking dog is to run it over with a steamroller.
People tend to not like ui clutter. It’s a universal sentiment outside of this discussion. NFT style monetization and clutter can get fucked. RIP to the garbage. Best move they’ve made in years.
I mean, sure, but…
— gestures vaguely at the rest of the entire site —
I use a minimal UI 3rd party app that behaves and looks just like Apollo did. No clutter. It’s exactly how I like it.
It’s good that Reddit did this today because the memes on the fediverse have been extremely good lately. Reddit Remainers checking it out will find a fun, active community
If I was more paranoid, I’d say that the fucking stupid bean meme bs that happened right when the Reddit api shut down was awfully convenient for Reddit.
I thought it was hilarious and made the community feel fun and alive, which Reddit hasn’t felt like for a long time.
It’s bean o’clock
(link)B E A N S E E A A N N S S
I upvoted everyone I saw with PRIDE! It was dumb and hilarious. The things that modern internet silliness were founded on.
Yeah, Reddit just doesn’t feel good anymore for me. Lemmy does.
The beans lasted all of like three days. It was hardly a problem
Beans are a solution, never a problem.
If anything, it reminded me of early Reddit.
I agree. Early Reddit was pretty shitty though. A totally different kind of shorty than it is now, but best reddit was shortly after subreddits.
I thought it was very redditesque
Bean memes are a tradition in shitposting meme groups, its to be expected
Here, please enjoy this lemmy lemon award 🍋
You’ve been authorized to post on c/lemonparty 🍋🥳
🍋 🍋 🍋 What a time to be alive! 🍋 🍋 🍋
You can always tell when a community is going downhill when they say they’re “empowering users” with their latest changes. They’re never actually empowering anyone but the shareholders to make more money.
Comments are saltier than expected
And these are the people who stayed…
At least the bots that stayed
Bots would just say it’s great.
Did you see that thread with LLMs telling us what they thought of Reddit? They didn’t say it’s great.
Most of them still won’t do shit about it.
It’s always hilarious watching a group of people getting fucked over and over and still doing nothing about it.
It’s also very sad because watching mad redditors is like watching spousal abuse.
Sad but accurate comparison
Eh screw it, thine to break the redditless streak.
good.
I feel like I’m standing on the shores of sanity while I watch Reddit sail off into the sunset.
Except the whole ship is on fire and everyone is fighting each other.
What happened to them being so desperate to make money that they’d charge third party all devs $20 million a year for API access? Surely removing ways to give them money won’t help that situation, right?
I know the API thing was all about control and not the actual money, but they’re just being so blatant about not giving a fuck about the site or the users. What a dreadful company.
As an advertiser, I suspect they’re trying to give us more groups of people to target. Ads are expensive, and generate a lot more money than Reddit gold
Oh definitely. Killing third party apps means everyone using Reddit gets served ads now, so they’re going hard on that.
They though, “hey, we don’t make money off these users anyways” and disconnected us. Not realizing many of us were mods, content creators, and active users. You know, the reason people go to Reddit.
I’m more than happy here and learning Mastodon.
They knew. They did some back-of-the-envelope math and concluded that they’d be fine. The IPO is the only thing that matters to them. They’ll burn the site down getting there and then fuck off with their big payday.
You can patch a few third party Reddit apps with revanced. If that tickles your pickle.
It won’t matter soon. The apps are now abandonware.
The way Reddit is going it won’t matter I’m just using it to ween myself off spez’s teet.
As an advertiser
I have a serious question for you, if you have a moment. Do advertisers have any way of knowing what percentage of the views they’re paying for are actual humans, and what are bots?
Because it seems to me that this is an excellent scam on a corporate level: Reddit ditches users and mods in favor of bots interacting with bots, the number of accounts and views don’t dip dramatically, and Reddit, Inc. continues to pull in all that sweet advertising revenue because there’s no way for advertisers to know the difference for sure, or the ratio of bot to humans on the site or in a sub with any kind of precision.
I’d appreciate your thoughts on this, because I’ve been pondering this for a while but do not have any knowledge of advertising metrics, or what would stop a dishonest/bad-faith board like Reddit’s from doing this to some degree just because they can.
Not an advertiser but they generally know % of views (“impressions”) to clicks (called click through rate) and percentage of clicks that turn into sales (called conversion rate).
For that reason, I don’t think they’re trying to get rid of human users completely, just the “troublemakers”.
I think they want to lead the “silent majority” users into a bot advertorial content hellscape where they control all the levers of power and everything is for sale.
Thank you, I think you’re right. Interesting you mentioned click thru rate though, because another commenting advertiser here on Lemmy noticing weird shit with Reddit lately brought that up, saying his click through rate was good but then when he looked into there were many immediate abandons, and someone else explained that’s because people were getting tricked by the ads that look like posts and immediately backing out once clicked.
I’d be happy to find the comment for you but I have no idea how to find shit here yet, lol. I’ll look; if I find it I’ll edit this comment with a link.
EDITED TO ADD I think this is it: https://lemmy.world/comment/644214 (see the other posts by the same guy also if you’re interested, like this one https://lemmy.world/comment/652045 and https://lemmy.world/post/837198)
So basically Reddit sucks at ads too 😂
Yup, I can echo what that commenter said. The bounce rate (when someone clicks on your ad) is atrocious, and there is extremely high competition for getting ads to US/Canada/Australia/other high income countries, which drives up the price further.
I only advertise on Reddit because I have a really great discount, but even then it sucks and always has.
Ever clicked on a link and noticed that the URL ended in something like
?campaign=twitteror something? Advertisers regularly track which advertising campaign got a user to click on a link, and they’ll also track what proportion of those users eventually lead to a sale. If Reddit eventually has no users and just bots, advertisers will quickly notice that ad spending on Reddit isn’t producing profit and kill it.Not really (at least at my company). You pay for the campaign (display this content in this location for these dates) and you track your outcomes (number who viewed the ad, number who clicked, number who shopped, number who purchased). If the number who shopped and purchased and is low you might not be interested in continuing that partnership.
I always recommend based on shop and buy (heavier focus on buy) outcomes so I wouldn’t know bots but they’d need to be able to make purchases.
…so the endgame here is bots that can make purchases, but immediately return what they bought for refunds?
Lol I guess maybe! My industry isn’t set up that way (I don’t work in retail e-commerce) but that’s obviously the bigger ad targets on social. Retail can definitely track return metrics though.
I think it would be hard to get bots past most sophisticated purchase data tracking, but it depends on what you target for that tracking. Like I know a lot of TikTok marketing is built around understanding you aren’t going to get a lot of click throughs on the ad but it is about building brand awareness. If you are just looking at impressions it is a lot easier for bots to sneak in.
I would definitely expect purchase tracking to be stricter than ad view metrics, yeah. And I know a lot of companies that used to have customer-friendly return policies have rolled back most or all of those policies (with or without non-enhshittification reasons). So I was at least partly joking, though I am getting less and less surprised about what bots are able to do. AI technology advancement just keeps accelerating.
Good point about brand awareness. In all seriousness, I think there’s psychological research suggesting that brand awareness is valuable in and of itself, though I think there’s a limit to how negative the publicity can be and still be valuable to brands. Otherwise, I don’t think there wouldn’t be the concept of “brand safety” for ad placement.
I feel like bots are basically the optimal tool for cheating automated systems, since it seems reasonable to fight automation with more automation, like the cat-and-mouse development race for captcha. I don’t have the technical expertise to back that up, though, just a general feeling that Murphy’s law applies to all engineering.
Are they that good per view(and hence per bandwidth cost) though? Everyone I’ve heard who knows more than I had been saying that internet ads have always only marginally paid the bills and that purchases for microtransactions make way more money.
I cannot imagine that ads do not generate more revenue than me buying Reddit premium and buying coins for awards.
Ads are brutally expensive. I’ve mentioned this before on Lemmy, but some campaigns I run hit a dollar per click
Are they that good per view(and hence per bandwidth cost) though? Everyone I’ve heard who knows more than I had been saying that internet ads have always only marginally paid the bills and that purchases for microtransactions make way more money.
It’s different when the ad network takes a cut. Reddit gets it all
Who cares. reddit has killed reddit. Just be here now. Ready to move on.
wish me luck :) I’ll keep you updated.
I see the “follow twitter” business model is proceeding.
“We’re having cash flow issues? What should we do?” “I know! Lets cancel the one thing that we’re doing that people are just giving us money for!” “Brilliant!”
Next: Subscribe to /r/Pics - $.89/month!
If I was a VC, I would want a glut of ad-sensitive, lowest common denominator users. Think your Aunt on Facebook, or your sister on VSCO, or your young nephew on TikTok. I don’t think those people are necessarily attracted to the overall community attitude(s) currently on Reddit.
I would never call the ex-Hacker News/Digg Redditors smart. But.
Those users do have certain proclivities that make them EXTREMELY unattractive to investment dollars. Strong interest in anti-mainstream topics, including the 3Ps (Privacy, Piracy, and Pornography) doth not good ROI make. This exodus of users and elimination of features, outside looking in, seems like a misstep. I’d be skeptical.
That 3P hits too hard haha
Very true. It seems like a solid plan to flush the current users and replace with more gullible ones.
Very often in such schemes the old users leave and the new ones never come.
With the collapse of social media, there’s not going to be many new users to claim.
I’d have a hard time believing that anybody still on reddit isn’t like that.
I found Reddit Gold and Discord Nitro’s gifting systems to be smart ways of monetization.
There are people who, despite what you try, cannot or will not pay you. Gifting allows you to keep the people that positively contribute on your platform while still earning money from elsewhere.
Amazing how swiftly they’re progressing with their enshittification. Makes me re-think all those 9 years spent there.
