Why would they even do that T_T.
They vastly overestimated their users’ willingness to pay for content and put up with their bullshit.
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.
nothing happened when Reddit killed third party apps.
Well that’s not true. Reddit is definitely different than it was at the start of the year
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.
this will probably help advertisers and political groups astroturf all of reddit.
So it’ll work as intended then.
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.
And you’re vastly underestimating Reddit’s user base’s willingness to simp for porn stars and billionaires.
That’s basically the whole planet’s 12-28 year old demographic, it’s not exclusive to Reddit.
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?
