I thought that too. And then nothing happened when Reddit killed third party apps. The Reddit userbase will continue to bend and spread. As long as Spez spits on it first, they’ll continue to take it.
I’m not quite sure that’s true. Maybe in raw numbers, but we’re a living, breathing base of contributing users helping to keep a whole platform and community alive. It doesn’t matter if the Federation isn’t purely made up of former Reddit users as we’ve assimilated. Every contribution we make on this platform is one more that the last one doesn’t get. Votes, posts, comments, it’s all here and not there. I would very much like us to get to the size where the sports subs are active during game threads, but we’re still having an impact.
I could see cryptobros and the “investing” subs spending a lot on this. They were already buying tons of awards to hype themselves up.
Any unironic circlejerk cult will by buying these and pinning them on each other’s chest, same as the dumbass awards.
I think reddit knows their target audience pretty well; Rubes. That’s why they let all the toxic “stock”, crypto-scam and political extremist subs stay open until the media starts writing stories about them. Gullible idiots spend a lot of money trying to make their opinions look smart and popular.
This will make Reddit a lot of money in the short-term, but probably push more legitimate/casual users away as these “premium upvotes” will surely effect the algorithm and push more nonsense into people’s feeds.
Now that i think about it, this will probably help advertisers and political groups astroturf all of reddit.
Even if the former’s 99%, Reddit does not give a shit as long as they collect the revenue.
This is basically Citizens United for Reddit, but substantially worse because at least with CU, they’re required to disclose donors. Reddit allows these awards to be bought anonymously, so you’re rarely able to understand who is doing the manipulation.
They let basically any sub stay up back then because back they actually cared about free speech. It’s around the time they started censoring the platform that it really went to shit, too.
The reddit crash in userbase and content quality actually began earlier indeed, with the wsb explosion into big media and the gamestock madness and the influx of a large flock of dumb people hoping to get rich quick.
I think a lot of the quality did move away from there to here. Lemmy should grow, but not too much or too fast. There’s no rush, there aren’t lemmy investors waiting for their double digit ROI by the end of the month.
I just glazed over it but I’m pretty sure they took gold away and reintroduced it like this solely to get more people off the old desktop design and onto the mobile app
But like why would anyone do that? To see someone else giving someone else imaginary internet points they bought for real money? How doest that justify having to deal with a terrible UI, poor performance and videos not fucking loading properly like it is 2007?
I feel the same way but they probably aren’t targeting people like us. If 95% of people think this change is dumb and don’t download the app, there’s still 5% of people who’d consider downloading the app and it’d be a pretty significant number of people. It’s just my hunch that they removed the original gold subscriptions in order to remove the ability to go ad-free, brought it back as a mobile app-only thing to get more people on the app. IPO is coming up, any padding of the numbers will help, that kind of thing, even if it’s only a couple percent
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