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.
$50/yr and you get… Nothing i care about.
Avatars, coins, app icon im not interested at all. No ads isn’t necessary as none ever appear on my feed. Literally zero need for premium. But but you have access to r/lounge! < Wanking gesture>
I don’t think coins/gold ever really made money.
Reddit gave a shit ton out to mods to give to inflate the appearance people were buying them to give out. And when you’d receive gold, you got coins to give others gold.
It’s like a Ponzi scheme but without money…
I never paid a cent for gold, but had it at least 50% of the time on Reddit.
what the FUCK are “monthly coins”
Don’t answer that, I actually prefer not knowing.
I would have happily paid $50 p/year for Apollo. I won’t pay $0.05c for Reddit.
Before finding Lemmy and kbin, if 3P App devs had announced that they were gonna make a Reddit competitor I would have been the first to jump
100% agree. It’s so fucked that they are stomping out 3P apps. Even with greed and profit as the only motivation, financially it would have made more sense to charge reasonable API fees than die on this hill. I would happily pay for Apollo if it was necessary to keep it running.
Don’t forget spez lies
it’s so evident that they’re going to pump and dump the hell out of reddit, while some unknowledgeable investors are going to be left holding the bag. every move they make is a superficial show with no teeth. they’re trashing reddit while dressing it up in designer clothes. it’s blaring.
I don’t think the street is that dumb in current year. This isn’t 1999 where you could scream OMG LINUX and get a few hundred million. The VC purse strings are tight, the brand has been in decline for a decade, and all the political horse-picking won’t help them.
The stock subs want to short reddit…
I could see the price crashing to the point it gets “owned by users” but that could take years, and this is basically the end result already.
I just can’t see reddit ever bouncing back. It might never end, but it’ll be like Yahoo Answers
I’d probably pay the $50/year if it included an API key so I could read with any client I wanted to.
I opened jerboa and this was the top of my feed. I was extremely confused for much longer than I’d like to admit.
I was similarly confused when I saw a screenshot somebody had posted of another post in Jerboa. It was hard to tell where the screenshot ended and the app UI began again.
I think I ought to file a bug report/feature request that a thin border be added around images so they don’t take up the whole screen width and you can distinguish them as images better.
I was actually ok with paying them $50 a year for ad-free before they started de-modding people for protesting. Now they can go fuck themselves. I am sympathetic to their need to be profitable. But effectively taking over subreddits is totally unacceptable and Reddit is no longer Reddit.
The funny thing to me is that when Reddit Gold first became a thing, I happily joined because I wanted to help support the platform and help pay for the servers. They used to have a little meter on the sidebar showing how far we’ve gone towards paying server costs.
Gone are the days when they had enough good will to get away with something like that.
I was listening to the interview with the dev of Apollo on John Gruber’s podcast and they brought up the idea that if Reddit wanted to monetize 3PA users, then force them to get a premium subscription. If all I needed to do was pay $50/year to surf reddit comfortably, I would probably do it in a heartbeat tbh
I would pay $50/year to use Apollo. No question. I wouldn’t take $50/year to use their first party App. I would rather just not use Reddit.
That’s not new, they add this a few years ago after changing “gilded” to multi-tier award, which cost spez-buck, which you can get from either buying it like pay2win game or get this premium, and they will give you some spez-buck each month.
What infuriate me more is they didn’t have regional pricing, so reddit premium cost more than youtube premium in my country, which provide better content and all of what i subbed is OG content.
I can’t find myself paying monthly for internet regurgitator.
This is the way.
Reddit is so much an American business - screw that. But it’s not even doing a proper business model - screwing the stupid Yanks and giving a better deal to people who don’t feel the need to ‘pay more for quality’.
You know, I bought a HP printer which takes HP cartridges which print out (officially) 1500 pages each, and they cost the equivalent of $8 - but only outside the USA… as an answer (I think) to well organised resistance to the ‘maybe 300 pages or less’ leading to people buying modified ink-tank cartridges locally made (in Thailand).
My last cartridge (not heavily used) lasted for 5 years before being replaced… so HP gets my money with a smile.
Reddit can go whistle.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
Premium’s been a thing for a long time, it used to be Reddit Gold several years ago. It also used to be cheaper, $3.99/mo but it went up multiple years ago.
They might be pushing it hard right now, though. Not sure. Maybe they’re trying to entice the people who were paying for 3PA features to pay Reddit instead or something.
I currently have premium, ad free is the only way Reddit is palatable even before all this went down and I bought it ages ago when I wanted to support a thing I used every day and also have had a couple awards that extended it, it expires in August. I won’t be renewing.
It’s funny because if they did something like require Reddit premium to use 3rd party apps I would understand and honestly just pay it. Now I’m here.
Agreed. API access should be tied to the user anyway. 🤷♂️ And no issues with serving ads to 3p clients cause you pay to remove them .
It’s funny because if they did something like require Reddit premium to use 3rd party apps I would understand and honestly just pay it. Now I’m here.
This would have been such a good idea, quite literally a win/win for both reddit and 3rd party apps however that would require Spez to actually be clever and willing to work with others instead of role playing a dollar store version of Logan Roy.
It wouldn’t necessarily be a win for 3rd party apps because it still raises the cost to use them. $9 for Reddit is quite the ask already. 3rd party devs would need payment too and frankly social media ain’t worth anything over $5 to me
What about using old + an ad blocker?
$3.99/mo
Now that’s what I call inflation.
If I remember correctly, when it first launched, it was a one time payment actually.
Yeah, I was an original buyer on reddit gold. Then I got 2 years free because of the Alien Blue shutdown, and I never reupped afterward, because it didn’t really add anything to the experience.
And by the looks of it “avatar upgrades” and “Custom app icons” ain’t really providing anything else of value still.
What’s so great about r/lounge?
Not much that I could tell, I got gold a couple times and it seemed like people there were just the same except “oh it’s exclusive” but the memes werent any better.
I was gifted Reddit gold a few times over the years for random comments I made, which gave access to the lounge subreddit. It’s mostly nothing but dumb memes roleplaying as gilded age oil tycoons and the like. Definitely not worth paying anything for access to it.
ngl I always assumed that was a placeholder sub without any content, just to sustain the meme that /r/lounge was a thing
The other problem with Reddit premium, have multiple accounts because you want to keep something’s separate? Well you have to pay $50 a year for each account.
Just put it all in one account and take a gamble when you’re browsing in public
Once upon a time, I thought Reddit had the best, least intrusive way of doing ads, since they are essentially just pinned post and you can upvote/downvote and comment on them like any other posts, so the advertiser had to actually try to make good content like anybody else.
But the advertisers don’t want even a remotely level playing field, they just want to throw money at reddit to get eyeball on their product, and reddit obliged, thinking the most valuable about reddit to advertisers is the amount of info they can scrape from your profile to personalize your ads, not realizing the most valuable aspect of ads on reddit IS the human aspect of direct community engagement.
Which is one of the reason why TikTok started off so well, because they FORCED companies to make good content for their ads to be seen and engaged with. But now by having the companies close the comments on their ads they are slowing going down the same path as well.
