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.
I’m not paying for social media. Unless it’s a donation to my server.
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.
based
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.
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.
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.
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
Imagin paying for the privilege of generating free content for others to monetize.
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’m not paying $50/y AND my personal data you fucking scumbags
I would have happily paid $50 p/year for Apollo. I won’t pay $0.05c for Reddit.
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
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
I’m just shocked at how bad that offer is, 6 dollars a month just for ad free browsing? Damn. All the other “benefits” seem completely worthless to me.
For real. You can literally install UBlock Origin in just a minute or two. Why bother paying $6 for useless features AND to support a crappy company?
Also ReVanced on the official Android app
Yeah Revanced is great. It’s the only way I watch YouTube on any android device
Huh, I didn’t realise there was a new vanced!
I used to be a Reddit premium subscriber, because I used Reddit a lot and I wanted to support them. Silly me.
If Reddit wasn’t going downhill I wouldn’t mind paying to not see ads - if it helps keep the site running. But 6$/mo is very excessive for what is essentially a forum + link aggregator.
Disney+ for comparison isn’t much more expensive and I feel that I get a lot more value out of that, not to mention streaming isn’t cheap.
Same although the ads were blocked, apparently a basic feature I use a lot, saving/bookmarking posts, was locked behind premium. That should have been a big red flag lmfao
Baconreader gave me the same functionality after a one time app purchase of like $3.
I canceled by Premium subscription when they canceled my third party apps.
I didn’t think anyone actually paid for that shit, like I thought it was a meme for the longest time.
I was a premium subscriber, simply because I used Reddit a lot, I could financially bear it, and I generally liked how the place was run so I wanted to support them. Now I feel betrayed and my trust is violated, like when your friend borrows money off you and then never pays it back and just laughs in your face for being so naive. So I went from ‘I love Reddit’ to ‘fuck Reddit’ in about a month. Impressive achievement.
Same here. On reddit for 17 years, signed on to Premium as soon as they offered it because I believe in supporting good services. I, too, feel betrayed.
Believe it or not there was once a lot of good will towards Reddit.
That’s the amazing thing. In about a month Reddit went from a well liked company to hated. I would love see the cross section of premium users used third party clients. Reddit just torched all good will for nothing.
I had a premium subscription for years. For as much as I used to use the site, it felt good to give a little back. Now they’ll never see another cent from me.
$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.
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
There’s literally nothing enticing in that package.
If they wanted people to pay for API access, why not include that in premium? Though not sure that would have gone much better.
Have been in r/lounge many times. Its crap.
That’s always the issue with whales right? They don’t make your service any better, they just consume it. So you don’t get the network effect that comes from having tons of people making your service great, where a lower barrier of entry is important.
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.
This is a pretty shit deal tbh. Ooohh ad free browsing and some free pngs you can tack onto your avatar or comments.
It sure is convenient that the second they kill third party apps they push a subscription model for ad free service on their ad riddled, barely functioning app…
Not just “some PNGs” this is THE. BEST. GEAR.
Which is still just some pngs. All that avatar crap is utterly worthless
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.
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.
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.
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).
Who the fuck cares about avatar gear and app icons?!
App icons were a big thing on Apollo. They were however designed by the users and added to the app as a quirky tribute to the community. The difference was that the users were glad to give their money to the dev, because the app you got for free was perfectly usable and awesome.
Redditors
whales
