this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 448 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (14 children)

This is getting so stupid, it’s beginning to sound like The Onion. Why don’t they just start charging for reading posts.

Here’s an idea: Every day you get 5 Reddit Emeralds for free, and you can use them to read 5 posts. If you want to read more, you can get more emeralds from Common Reddit Loot Boxes. You can buy those boxes with Reddit Rubies.

You can get Reddit rubies from Rare Reddit Loot Boxes, and in order to get those, you have to use Reddit Diamonds. If you have 19 Common boxes you can also craft 1 Rare Loot Box. Doing so will also require 10 rubies.

You can also buy Reddit Diamonds with Superior Crypto-Augmented Money (SCAM), and getting those coins requires real world money.

Ok, so now that you have all these gems, you can put them to good use. Emeralds are used to read posts. When you comment, there’s a 50% chance that it will be deleted within 30 minutes, but you can improve your odds by spending 1 Reddit Ruby. For each Ruby, the odds improve by 10%. Posts have the same mechanism, but you need to spend Diamonds instead.

[–] Rolive@discuss.tchncs.de 184 points 1 year ago

/u/spez is violently taking notes.

[–] DeriHunter@lemmy.world 118 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Be careful or you might get a job offer from reddit

[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 80 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Black_Gulaman@lemmy.dbzer0.com 40 points 1 year ago (1 children)

too late, Twitter has got OP to sign a contract already.

[–] JokeDeity@lemm.ee 26 points 1 year ago

Meh, Twitter doesn't take contracts that seriously under Muskrat.

[–] Renacles@lemmy.world 37 points 1 year ago

Write that down! Write that down!

[–] lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Dear God they'll have this implemented within a week. Why did you do this?

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[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Twitter only lets you read so many tweets without paying, so this is entirely possible

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[–] zacher_glachl@lemmy.world 208 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I wonder whether the average person is really as retarded as they are made out to be by large corporations.

[–] nerdschleife@lemmy.world 190 points 1 year ago (21 children)

Unfortunately, yes.

When Netflix clamped down on password sharing I expected a mass exodus back to pirating and more people self hosting like I did.

Instead they complained for 3 days and brought out their wallets.

[–] x1gma@lemmy.world 89 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The difference is, that Netflix (or Spotify, or whatever) does bring value on its own. I am paying money to comfortably and legally stream content, which itself is paid for and licensed by the streaming provider. From the perspective of a lazy end user, it's worth it, because you do not need to care about downloading, finding releases, opsec and whatnot. I don't want to protect Netflix, fuck corporations and subscription services, but password sharing was always only tolerated at most. From the same end user perspective, reddit is just an empty platform. The content is brought in free of charge by the community. And now not only they want the same community to pay, but also for an objectively worse experience? I don't think that you can compare that.

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[–] Frog-Brawler@kbin.social 51 points 1 year ago (21 children)

I can somewhat understand both perspectives. Although I too sail the high seas, if you don’t have the aptitude to self host, and you only care to binge a show over the weekend, $12 (or whatever it costs now) is a somewhat justifiable expense. I mean, 1 comic book is $4-$6 on average these days. One of those might provide 15 minutes of entertainment and a month of anticipation. $12 is a good value.

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[–] SpicyPeaSoup@kbin.social 33 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Obviously yes. Reddit could change the app icon to a swastika and hide the real icon behind a $50 paywall and people would still use the app because of convenience.

[–] lemmylommy@lemmy.world 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don’t steal Elons ideas!

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[–] nostalgicgamerz@kbin.social 117 points 1 year ago (4 children)

VC money very likely dried up and the IPO was the opportunity to raise more funding. all they needed to do was put ads in 3rd party apps and they take a cut of revenue…

I honestly thought that after all these things they would spring back but I honestly now feel like they’re going to go the way of Digg

[–] penguin@lemmy.fmhy.ml 68 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Or just require an account to have reddit premium in order to use the API.

[–] Killgannon@lemmy.world 61 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I mean I honestly don’t understand. I’m just going to assume that they aren’t actually retarded and want the best for the company, but this sounds like one person over there is making the decisions and everyone else is terrified of calling out the bad ideas. How else does a company just implode like this? I’ve worked in creative tech environments with super dominating bosses that was scary to even ask a question let alone call them out. So sad.

I was a daily (hours) Reddit user for the past 15 years and I quit…completely. I have not gone back. The hour Apollo shut down I was done. I said I would leave and I keep my word. Been here ever since. It’s taken some time but this is filling my Reddit need.

Only problem is looking up tips on video games always links to a Reddit discussion and I just refuse. Fuck u/spez

[–] andrew@radiation.party 35 points 1 year ago

It’s crazy how easy this recent drama has made leaving Reddit for me. Saw all the user-hostile changes and just deleted my Reddit apps and have only been visiting it via google searches on very domain-specific knowledge.

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[–] empireOfLove@lemmy.one 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Well you see, finding a way to reliably deliver ads via the API would have taken far too much developer brainpower for a company that can't make a functional video player or a mobile app that doesn't annihilate battery with ridiculously excessive cpu use and keepalive requests...

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[–] dottedgreenline@lemmy.ml 94 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I also hate the inclusion of the u/spez freakout about employees not wearing reddit colours in public for fear of physical harm. It is a full-on propaganda tactic, in the vein of Elon Musk or Trump's bullshit. It immediately puts shade on the userbase. These "journalists" should get their shit together and either write about how ridiculously stupid he was to say that or just not present it at all, it's barely relevant to the article. For anyone who has actually been following along, the way the article presents that tidbit is inane and completely false at best.

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[–] usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca 74 points 1 year ago (9 children)

There's this super frustrating trend where instead of making the paid version of things better, they just make the free version worse. Like how you used to be able to do background play on the YouTube app. It's like they know these features are good so implement them to attract people to use their service, and then later take it away to force the subscription.

[–] Funwayguy@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Oh it was so much worse than that. Google indirectly banned every 3rd party app on the Play Store from streaming videos in the background to push that feature. Seemingly overnight every app that could do it vanished or cut the feature. Sure you can sideload a fix but your average non-savvy users got screwed into paying up.

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[–] Rexios@lemm.ee 53 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This title is exceedingly misleading. This icon is not “ugly” and is an obvious marketing stunt to bring awareness to the return of r/place. Wether or not you think r/place should come back is irrelevant to this discussion. Reddit didn’t “make the icon ugly” so people would pay to fix it.

[–] countsickness@kbin.social 37 points 1 year ago

Two things can be true at the same time.
The fact that there really is an icon named “Original” that is locked away does not help. The old icon simple isn’t there at the moment as far as I could see.
So even if they changed the icon for /r/places the fact that you won’t even see the old icon in the selection and that it’s nowhere mentioned that that is the reason for the (temporary) change will properly lead enough just buy premium. Hopefully users that forget to cancel once the normal icon is back.

[–] kthxbye_reddit@feddit.de 50 points 1 year ago

I‘m just glad seeing this place more and more active. Old stupid Reddit, you’ve made the Digg-move.

[–] gon@lemmy.world 45 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Do iOS users not have free icon packs? I'm so confused by this...

[–] TwinTurbo@lemmy.world 69 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can’t change icons from the system/launcher settings. Individual apps can offer icon options, but they are internal to the app.

[–] gon@lemmy.world 58 points 1 year ago (11 children)
[–] thablkafrodite@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago

But you can do what I did and use the shortcuts app to set custom icons and app names.

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[–] Gyella@lemmy.world 37 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Reddit can go fuck themselves. I’ve been gone since Apollo stopped working. Have never & will never go back.

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[–] iegod@lemm.ee 36 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Anyone paying for reddit premium has to just be the biggest sucker. Then again I don't understand anyone paying for a similar privilege on twitch either. Batshit insanity.

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[–] rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee 35 points 1 year ago (18 children)

Just more subscription hell. It's ridiculous anymore. I'll need a subscription to flush my toilet at some point. I mean how much of this are consumers willing to put up with. Anyway Reddit is well on the path of monetizing themselves to irrelevance.

[–] JshKlsn@lemmy.ml 23 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I’ll need a subscription to flush my toilet at some point.

It's called a water bill. You pay it monthly, even if you don't use any water!

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[–] Magicianfox@lemmy.world 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I was expecting this was just OP making a dumb joke.

The fuck.

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[–] Invertedouroboros@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Ok so this is just desperate right? Like chasing 3rd party devs off could theoretically force more people to use their app, the reddit gold thing could be them paving the way to put in something more abusive. But this? Hoping to annoy your users to the point that they'll pay you a ransom to make you stop? How is this anything other than embarrassingly desperate?

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[–] PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@lemmy.ml 34 points 1 year ago (6 children)

£5.99 a month...

i cant believe people actually pay that for what is essentially a forum.

it'd probably be decades before they made that off me in advertising.

They could have had my money too if what they were asking were reasonable and i retained the ability to use RIF

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[–] yopyop@feddit.de 33 points 1 year ago (5 children)

imagine paying for an app icon... what next ? paying for a ringtone like in the good old days?

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[–] JH6@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago

Spez has already made it very clear that he has went full Elon and will stop at nothing to make the company profitable. I expect much worse from Reddit in the future.

[–] b00m@kbin.social 28 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Imagine spending money on reddit premium

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[–] zShxck@lemmy.ml 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Spez is a fucking clown... I hope reddit dies soon.

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[–] Vex_Detrause@lemmy.ca 27 points 1 year ago

Yes! I definitely used to go to Reddit for their amazing icons! /s

[–] ForbiddenRoot@lemmy.ml 26 points 1 year ago

Interestingly this may piss off more people than the real issues. Most people didn't seem to care at all about the API / 3rd party app support issues as long as they got their Reddit doom-scroll fix. But I bet whole bunch of these will be upset at having an ugly pixelated icon on their phone, muhawhaw.

[–] Trolled@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

what are you guys talking about? an r place themed icon wasn't put there to get people to pay money? it was put there because there is gonna be a new r place. this isn't some evil plan conjured up the criminal mastermind u/SPEZ that you just uncovered.

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[–] CandyRushSweetest@lemm.ee 22 points 1 year ago

I can't believe they push third-party devs away and then try to make Reddit as unappealing as possible! Like, I used their stupid app and I CAN'T HANDLE how much that stupid app LAGS!! If they want people to pay, they better be a damn good app. Like, this is just evil at this point!

I'm just saying, but Reddit is just becoming a money grab. I appreciated third-party devs because they made Reddit more enjoyable. My favorite app to use Reddit on is no longer effective due to Reddit's changes. That's why I'm on Lemmy now :/

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