Why is this fraud?
They lured people into spending money on getting awards. Now they are not only removing the award system, but going back and retroactively removing awards that have already been given out, effectively taking peoples money and not providing the service that the money paid for.
Not to mention, people who have coins have 2 months to spend them on something that will go away after that 2 month period.
People spending money on something worthless and that’s what they got.
The terms were clear that these worthless awards were temporary by nature to begin with. There’s no argument for fraud, and I’m sure Reddit has a competent legal department.
(Civil) Legality aside. The remorse these buyers feel is healthy, imo.
Anyhow, fuck Reddit.
I was just contemplating deleting my account (vs. letting it rot) after I got the email this morning.
This topic has already been discussed multiple times. And why is this fraud? The definition of fraud is: "Fraud is an intentionally deceptive action designed to provide the perpetrator with an unlawful gain or to deny a right to a victim. "
In this case, Reddit is capitalist platform and it’s trying to change its model so that its shareholders are happy.
Because they are unilaterally removing benefits that people have already paid for, and are explicitly stating that they will provide no refunds.
If you paid for a year of premium, a good chunk of the benefit has been the coins to buy awards.
After they get rid of both coins and awards, well, you have still paid for premium in advance, but it is now worth a fair bit less to some people.
Also bad, but more arguably in regards to the law, they are choosing to remove all past awards on posts and comments.
Which means that people who have bought coins (or premium to get coins) are having all of that undone, again, without any possibility of refund.
Arguably, this is much more problematic for people who had purchased coins, but who had not used them all before the announcement. Because that’s taking the money, and then simply choosing not to provide the service that was paid for, while simultaneously stating that there will be no refunds.
You could try to argue that, well, they can use those coins up until they turn buying awards off… Except, well, one of the nice things about awards is that they last as long as the post or comment does.
This is… Problematic.
Extremely problematic.
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.
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.
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.
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
