I’m not sure if this is new, but when I clicked on the /r/pics protest post link from the frontpage here, I was redirected to this: https://old.reddit.com/premium
I’m not sure if this is well-known or not that they’re pushing it now, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it, especially on old.reddit.
The irony is that I was mentally prepared to have to pay for Premium to keep BaconReader. All they had to do was add an “API access” badge to that screen and none of this would have happened, plus they would have gotten a bunch more new sign-ups. I am at a loss to explain what Steve is thinking, nor why his decisions are better for profitability.
Yeah, I’d gladly pay the sub for Apollo if reddit had decided to charge a modest price for the API and Christian could make a buck off it and reddit could also make a few bucks off me.
Reddit could’ve probably 5x’d or 10x’d the money they make off me that way, but now they 0x’d it.
Same here. If they’d have just framed it differently and put the onus of paying for api access on the users (at a modest fee), almost none of the backlash would have happened.
Then I’d still be oblivious.
I prefer the world the way it was before all the consolidation. I like the ideals of the fediverse and want it to succeed.
Then I’d still be oblivious.
I prefer the world the way it was before all the consolidation. I like the ideals of the fediverse and want it to succeed.
Exactly, this is better overall I think, at least when it comes to the health of the internet as a whole.
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I have seen the same issiue with individual, niche forums: going down because of one person. It was just a matter of time for that to happen with a bigger site.
You underestimate the power of addiction.
The official app isn’t a bad thing because it’s buggy and has ads, that sucks but I’ve used much worse apps that offer less. The amount of ads and how easy they are to click accidentally is ridiculous though
It’s bad because it’s built to do what Facebook did - it always gives you something to see and a reason to keep going. Have a nice, curated mix of science and shit posts? Let’s throw some crap from the front page in there along with the ads! No one responded to your comments? We’ll make suggestions look like someone is interacting with you! Haven’t used the app in a few hours? Here’s some posts delivered in a notification to get you back in there
I left Facebook for Reddit because I realized I didn’t really enjoy it and often ended up feeling worse after using, and when the experiments they were doing came out I payed close attention. It was a real slap in the face when I saw Reddit doing similar stuff, and I checked out alternatives like tildes but nothing else was scratching the itch so I put it on the back burner.
For those of us who aren’t going back, this wakeup call was a blessing. It’s a strong reminder that corporations not only don’t care about us, they can’t - they might act friendly sometimes, but they wouldn’t hesitate to poison the water supply if they thought it would bring greater profits
Thats an interesting point, all that shit just turns me off and makes me disengage. I avoid Facebook for precisely this reason.
I have to interact with LinkedIn for professional reasons, but always do it from a PC and don’t install their app. When I get a LinkedIn message, LinkedIn helpfully emails me to let me know it’s there, but doesn’t tell me what’s in it. Then after I check on it, I get another email reminding me that LinkedIn is better on the app. They are constantly trying to get that app on my phone, which makes me wonder exactly what extra data these phone apps send that is worth so much.
It’s worse than that, because the official app spams your phone with tracking requests. I know most apps do some tracking, but users with apps that track the trackers have reported as many as 500k requests in 24 hours.
This is not only an invasive breach of privacy from a link aggregator forum, but also straight up murders your battery life.
I just got a brand new Pixel 7a before this nonsense started. I installed the reddit app because Baconreader is like twelve years old and I’d figured I’d see if their official app had gotten any better since I last used it. It hadn’t, of course, but I also noticed my brand new phone wasn’t holding a charge at all. Like, 20% battery left at 5pm while I’m still at work and barely using it.
Reddit was using over 40% of my battery while fucking IDLE. I brought this up over there and a few other people looked at it. Someone reported it was using 60% of their iPhone’s battery in the last week. It’s repugnant.
I paid for premium every month for at least 5 years. I would have probably even paid a little more to keep using Apollo. Just pure greed running the ship over there.
Why did you pay for premium?
I wanted to support something I liked. They are a business and I figured if I paid the way they were asking to be paid I’d be free to use the service as I pleased (via Apollo).
Yes. I was paying for reddit gold just to avoid seeing ads. I don’t understand why they couldn’t just have passed this kind of thing on to the end users.
Yep, I would have happily paid for the ability to keep using Sync, just like I happily paid for Sync Ultra. I’m probably not in the majority though
Leaving that garbage website was the best decision I’ve made for my mental health since pot
Leaving pot or starting pot?
Yes
First one and then the other.
Pol Pot?
Man, I signed up reddit premium in like April because I wanted to support the site that I’d been using for 13 years. Just two months later, I’ve got so much regret lol
You can always donate that money Lemmy devs instead.
Saw this post and that’s exactly what I did.
Reddit got greedy and arrogant. They forgot where their money came from.
“Pay us and we’ll give you all this junk you never wanted in the first place”
I don’t want more stuff - I want less of it. That’s why I used RiF and that’s why I’m now leaving.
Honestly. Avatars? Coins? Awards? I just wanted to stay up to date with the world and have conversations with people about it every once in a while.
If I wanted avatars, I’d be on Gaia online…
Now there’s a throwback. I bet my kiki and Koko are worth their weight in gold now.
Exactly. They have zero awareness of their own product, I doubt they even use it anymore
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Reddit used enshitification. It was super effective!
just reminded me to cancel premium, thank you!!
I’m not paying for social media. Unless it’s a donation to my server.
based
Id rather pay for a subscription for a forum site or something. I know echo chambers are dangerous, but sometimes you just need a gated community. Money makes it really easy to keep the lunatics out.
You can’t stay anonymous if you use a credit card to pay for social media.
The very same anonymity people use to get away with terrible behavior on free sites. I don’t see the downside here.
You can’t hurt anyone by saying things online. But you can be hurt if the government does not like what you are saying.
Lunatics also have money.
A site you pay for has incentive to keep you on their site for ads and data collection. One way to do that is to keep serving data you engage with. So, keeping you in a bubble.
Diversity your sources.
I don’t really understand this sentiment, I’d rather pay a subscription for a service like fb / insta / reddit than have ads and my identity sold to the highest bidder.
Social networks are expensive to run, the idea they should be “free” is half the problem.
Though of course the enterprises behind them make far more money through advertising and mining user data than they would through a subscription model.
Delusional to think a paid subscription would keep them from selling your identity to the highest bidder. Even if you sued them on GDPR bases they’d gladly take that loss if you somehow won so they could keep abusing you.
It’s just another revenue stream to make people feel better about their poor financial decisions.
You will pay a subscription and have ads and your identity sold to the highest bidder.
YouTube has been shown recently to be sliding ads into premium user feeds so I can only expect the same, if not worse, especially from a company so blatantly caught lying.
In the case of Reddit, apparently yes. By which they also spit in the face of their most loyal (paying) customers.
The problem is that selling your data + targeted advertising is always going to be more lucrative than a subscription model. So even if you are willing to pay a subscription, it’s usually only a matter of time before the social media company in question changes tack. Especially if they have shareholders and/or venture capital investors breathing down their necks. If you run it like Wikipedia is run, I’m pretty sure you can operate a social media company on subscriptions/donations, but as a business model that doesn’t make sense as it is not the least effort way to make the most money.
Yup, agree totally. Only way it can work is if the org running it is a not for profit with great transparency, which hopefully is what we will see with the likes of Lemmy etc.
There is an argument to make that things like reddit or even Facebook (original fb, not what it is now) should be publicly owned services. They CAN provide value to society, similar to how a town hall can.
Paying for social media forces you to doxx yourself. It’s impossible to pay anonymously.
According to that logic, I’m doxxing myself every time I go to the supermarket.
I doubt you discuss your political opinions in the supermarket.
Paying for social media would allow companies and governments to associate every opinion on the internet with a credit card.
And even if you did discuss those opinions, the only person who would see that discussion are security guards monitoring the camera.
Then force the companies to accept convenience-store gift cards…
It’s easier not to pay for social media.
I have no problem paying an app developer to remove ads.
But I’m not going to pay an organisation that has just hiked it’s API prices which means it’s now going to be earning a fortune from the likes of Google/Microsoft.
Fuck u/spez
you have grown up in a broken age
I’ve used reddit for a decade and never once did I feel that paying for it would benefit me.
I thought they were introducing something new among all this other bullshit but as soon as I saw it I realized that yeah, thats been around awhile.
As a fellow old.reddit user, none of this does me any good. My adblockers are sufficient, half the time I completely forget I have an avatar, and…i have no idea what the rest of that is. So thanks, but no.As a fellow old.reddit user, you probably also remember when buying/being gifted reddit gold was a big deal. One stupid little gesture, very few actual perks (beyond an “exclusive” subreddit no one used), but the money went straight to reddit and it was so popular it was a staple of reddit’s early culture. Being gilded was a massive honor.
Now it’s just one of a handful of paid reaction trophies you can give, and it’s not worth paying attention to at all. Reddit was so money hungry it cannibalized the process through which people gave money to reddit for basically free
this just reminded me you could also send a post card to get a month of reddit gold too
I think I got gilded twice.
I barely remember that exclusive sub.Someone gilded one or two of my comments (shitposts), and I felt so grateful to them and so proud of myself that someone thought it was worth spending money to reward a dumb joke I’d made. That stuff makes an impression. But I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw a gilded post because it literally doesn’t mean anything now
What I hate about those award crap is they basically gave you a paid way to highlight the fuck out of posts with changing the background, making it shoot rockets, or whatever else.
Yeah the "Thanks for the gold kind stranger " and the original silver . It was a very different time, I really miss it.
Paying an optional subscription fee is a great idea. It helps pay for servers and personal.
Paying to give special rewards is a horrible idea. The wealthiest can now decide which opinion is best. Everyone wants to reply to the rewarded comments to be more visible for upvotes. It’s terrible.
“exclusive avatar gear” I didn’t even know there are avatars on Reddit. I’ve been using Sync for so long I never knew they added them.
That was the best part of Sync, all the terrible new stuff they tried to push out wasn’t visible
One of the reason why they are killing the api’s. They cannot push you this shit through them.
avatars
They rolled those out when new.reddit became a thing. Before that people with Gold/premium could customise their snoos but they weren’t displayed on your profile anyway.
That exclusive avatar gear it probably NFT-based, so it can be traded independently of Reddit. (Alhough if you think navigating the Fediverse is hard, try navigating how to transfer and sell those NFTs on a marketplace).
There are certain subs where they have crypto-based community points, like r/cryptocurrency, based on participation. I have posted there, and have been give some of their token, which is inexplicably worth something.
Reddit’s foray into crypto has been interesting to watch, and puts me in the position that if I decide to leave Reddit for good, they have given me a severance package. I will be sure to sell every bit of it before leaving, except for one token , which I will carefully monitor to see what Reddit does with community points from deleted accounts.
I think the avatars were somewhat of a cool idea, if it was just a character creator. Not a fucking NFT marketplace
I canceled my premium a few days ago, I guess if they are charging apps millions for API access, why do I need to pay for premium to help Reddit.
Imagin paying for the privilege of generating free content for others to monetize.
I tried to look at a reddit link via mobile web browser and it said something really stupid like… we can’t show you this on the web you need to use the app.
Dafuq? Hell no. I guess I’m not looking at it then. Jumped the shark, well and truly.
I had add free browsing on RIF u mother fuckers.
I kind of understand reddits problem with that part though, if they would have allowed third party apps with Premium, or added a “premium lite” API access tier for like $2 I think this would have gone over better
Charging for the API makes sense. Charging as much as Reddit wants to per API call is ridiculous.
100%. Third party app access requiring premium seems like a fairly reasonable solution of money is the real issue.
Nice idea, but you have forgotten about CORPORATE GREED
Which is why they shut it down.
