It is quite crazy. People will have time until Sept. 12 to spend their coins on awards … and then Reddit will delete all gilded awards from every post. WTF? Why even use them at all from now on?
This thing reeks of control. Reddit is trying to prohibit people from giving undesired opinions more visibility. In the past sometimes comments received awards that were not in line with advertisers. Now by removing this feature, these comments can only receive an up- or downvote but do not stand out by gilded awards anymore. And the up- and downvote is something that can easily be twiddled with behind the scenes to the desired outcome. It was much harder to remove awards from a comment, as the person who gave them out, would recognize it immediately. But who can proof that their up/downvote was not counted correctly… it is the perfect manipulation.
See also: Guided democracy
In a guided democracy, the government controls elections such that the people can exercise democratic rights without truly changing public policy. While they follow basic democratic principles, there can be major deviations towards authoritarianism. Under managed democracy, the state’s continuous use of propaganda techniques prevents the electorate from having a significant impact on policy.[3] It is today widely employed in Russia, where it was introduced into common practice by Kremlin theorists, in particular Gleb Pavlovsky.
Yes, it’s definitely a tool of control. They can now basically choose what opinion they want to have visible on their site.
Also with the history of u/spez changing users comments, I wouldn’t be surprised if the upvotes can’t be trusted.
Give it a couple of month and this site will be run by 80% bots and advertisers.
I mean you’re assuming this isn’t happening more in reverse to platform disinformation: take a look at any trans related thread in a UK sub and you’ll see the most useless leap of faith transphobe comments receive 5 gold while the more scientific pro trans comments are buried far, far down the chain.
Also, equating gilding with democracy is odd - we live in a world where economic inequality is growing. Who can afford the most gold? It’s not the poor/disabled/other minorities who have important views that need to be heard - they can’t afford to give 5 gold to random reddit comments they agree with because they’re statistically earning less.
Buying gold is not democratic. There’s a reason you can’t just (directly) buy votes in elections. This is still a shitty move on Reddit’s part, but for a different reason than hurting democracy.
I do not argue with that. And I do not say gilding gold is a democratic tool. I just said, that when taking away the gold, all is left is a voting system. And if this voting system is not transparent but only in the control of a platform, the platform will use it in their desire. Here I linked to the wikipedia article, as after removing the community voice by gilding comments, all is left will be a voting system that is not transparent.
You are absolute right, that the gilded posts were and will be used for and against a certain goal and a gilded comment does say anything about its value of a comment (good or bad). The only thing I said was that a gilded comment is standing out. And that is something reddit would like to keep in control. I think you try putting words in my mouth.
I mean you’re assuming this isn’t happening more in reverse to platform disinformation
Well reddit allowed quite a lot of disinformation, far-right hate groups and such to flourish. So while this is a nice though, I doubt it’s so benevolent. Especially with how the US courts are trying to prevent the US government from limiting disinformation on social media, there seems little incentive to do this at all.
I’ll save you the Reddit click:
Existing awards will be removed from posts and comments; this will happen after Coins/Awards are sunset on Sept 12.
The changes we are announcing today will not have an impact on award-related trophies on user profiles, except that once awards are no longer available, those trophies will stop being delivered.
These changes also won’t have an impact on users who have already accumulated Premium via gifted awards.
For those who actually paid for gold and awards, chargeback time.
Like many places this will probably get your account banned. Which at this point, good?
Except that many large companies share large payment processors, and too many chargebacks (keep in mind “too many” is not a set number, it’s a changing variable depending on many factors) can get you banned from the using the entire payment processor and any companies that use them.
This is going to make reddit even more filled with spambots and ads, and I’m fine with that
I had some coins leftover from being awarded myself, and I applied them to the most harmful drop-shipping bots I could find in rising posts on my way out
So, not just removing awards, but deleting most of the history of their use. Did spez buy a collection of foot shotguns he wanted to test out?
