https://www.reddit.com/r/beta/comments/9731n6/gold_will_become_reddit_premium/
created by I_am_Nic on 13/08/2018 at 22:55 UTC
150 upvotes, 64 top-level comments (showing 25)
Here's the message I just received:
To our Gold members,
Thank you for your patronage as you've supported Reddit through the years through your Gold membership. Your contributions have (and continue to be) much appreciated!
We wanted to give you advanced notice that your membership will be getting some updates in the coming weeks, which hopefully you will find are all for the better. Here is a summary of these changes:
We first launched Gold back in 2010 and gilding a couple years later. Since then, Gold has become a unique and beloved part of the Reddit experience—recognizing quality content, awarding a prize for community contests, starting a good ol’-fashioned gold train, and surprising thousands of users with a token of appreciation every day.
But in the years since we introduced Gold, we haven’t done much to improve the experience, which is why now we’re recommitting to making these experiences better. We'll be starting with the changes above (coming soon), which we hope are just the beginning of many more improvements for Gold in the future (coming less soon).
By allowing your Gold membership to convert to a Premium membership, you agree to continue to be charged for this membership. You also agree to Reddit’s User Agreement[1], which may be updated from time to time. If you would like to cancel your membership, please go here[2] to do so.
1: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement
2: https://old.reddit.com/gold/subscription
If you have any questions or concerns, please provide your feedback on our r/lounge thread on this topic.[3] Thank you once again, and we can't wait to show you what we've been working on!
3: https://www.reddit.com/r/lounge/comments/941tpo/hey_rlounge_were_back_to_share_some_upcoming/
Comment by Iliketopostgifs at 14/08/2018 at 11:39 UTC
126 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Why on earth would one rebrand such a recognisable term?
Comment by GuessWhat_InTheButt at 14/08/2018 at 11:58 UTC
91 upvotes, 2 direct replies
This reads like it will backfire tremendously.
Comment by Enduriox at 13/08/2018 at 23:04 UTC
289 upvotes, 6 direct replies
Last month was my first gold month. Bought a creddit because I enjoyed it. Nah. This is just a bunch of BS.
Asking for 3.99$ was an okay price for a website that brings me joy and I like to browse on. But paying more than for Spotify a month and almost as much as for Netflix? What the hell?
Comment by [deleted] at 14/08/2018 at 07:39 UTC
161 upvotes, 2 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by INeverPlayedF-Zero at 14/08/2018 at 10:23 UTC
129 upvotes, 2 direct replies
*Since then, Gold has become a unique and beloved part of the Reddit experience*
& In pursuit of doing everything we can to stop being unique so we're more marketable, we're fucking it up also.
Comment by majornerd at 14/08/2018 at 05:18 UTC
147 upvotes, 3 direct replies
And I’m out. After years of paying for gold reddit has just had the last of my money.
There is not nearly enough difference in the gold “experience” to justify a rate hike.
$6/mo is a joke.
Comment by ThePooSlidesRightOut at 14/08/2018 at 00:15 UTC
78 upvotes, 1 direct replies
This right here is why Reddit users are so adamant against change.
Comment by Mattallica at 13/08/2018 at 23:03 UTC
27 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Here’s the /r/changelog post announcing it from a few days ago
Comment by xlFLASHl at 14/08/2018 at 10:19 UTC
27 upvotes, 2 direct replies
I'm all for upgrading the gold. I don't see why the renaming needs to happen but I could live with it.
The price up however? Not enough is being done to justify it. This is going to really hurt the membership, less people will be guilded (or premium'ed) and you'd receive less revenue overall. Why are you doing this?
Edit:Spelling
Comment by brokedown at 14/08/2018 at 12:03 UTC*
26 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Reddit ruined reddit. -- mass edited with redact.dev
Comment by Norci at 14/08/2018 at 13:55 UTC
24 upvotes, 1 direct replies
TLDR; "We're raising price of Gold without any particular new benefits, and pretend like that's what community asked for".
Comment by Kinost at 13/08/2018 at 23:08 UTC
20 upvotes, 0 direct replies
How many coins are we getting per month for being a premium member? How much do each of the awards cost?
Comment by s1am at 14/08/2018 at 15:39 UTC
16 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Charter gold member here. Cancelled my auto-renewal after reading this.
I never saw much value in the actual gold membership but looked at it as a reasonable amount of money per year for something I get decent value from. Doubling the annual rate with zero actual enhancements and no discussion is a deal breaker for me. Besides the name being an obvious attempt at marketing the way this was rolled out seems emblematic of a cluelessly desperate desire to generate revenue. C'mon Reddit, do something wortthwhile first and then ask for more money. Don't take the only group of site users actually paying for the service and raise their rates while making it clear that money is the main goal....
Comment by losh11 at 14/08/2018 at 12:58 UTC
13 upvotes, 0 direct replies
fuck off
Comment by Idlertwo at 14/08/2018 at 10:54 UTC
61 upvotes, 4 direct replies
In case the dev team sees this, I'll just write some feedback.
Gold Membership will be rebranded as Premium Membership.
Has Reddit actually done any type of research into wether or not this wording constitutes a positive change? Gold membership is Reddit exclusive, it's branded and integrated into the reddit community. "If it ain't broken, don't fix it" is an actual thing. You don't have to look further than Apple's attempt to be "brave" by removing headphone jacks to see how removing features that already work very well can backfire. The anology is not entirely accurate since one involves physical objects, but the jist applies.
It might not seem like a big deal, but wording matter a great deal in brand recognition and user satisfaction.
Premium Membership is something *everyone* has, and I would think long and hard before deciding that wording my service this way is actually beneficial. If the decision to rename to "Premium Membership" was done in a meeting when someone suggested it, and eveyone said "yes great idea", start that process over, and give it a serious discussion.
Will the Gold wording completely disappear from Reddit outside of whenever someone is awarded "gold" for a post? Have you considered sufficiently if you want a integrated word and feature to disappear from your platform?
You will continue to have the same benefits as before (e.g. ads-free Reddit, highlighting new comments, creating exclusive Premium communities) but with a new name.
Premium exclusive communities are pointless. Its a pretend elite club that the enormous wast majority of Reddit never participates in. The participation of these communities in no way justifies the programming cost of including the feature. But I guess it works as a "filler" for the service to make it seem more special than it is. Reddit's content is and always has been the "normal" content.
New benefit - monthly Coins. You will receive a brand new good called "Coins", which you can spend to give Gold awards to others, just for being a Reddit Premium member. **You will receive these Coins on a monthly basis with your membership.**
How many coins? 1? 5? Coins. I've never purchased a membership to be fair so I don't actually know. I'll get to why in a bit.
If you are paying for a recurring monthly or yearly Gold membership ''($3.99 USD monthly or $29.99 USD yearly)'', you will be able to keep that price point if you buy it prior to our changes in the coming weeks. Once the new changes are rolled out, new memberships will cost $5.99 per month.
I don't see a pricing pr. year in this comment? $5,99 monthly equals $71,88 pr year. - Will you offer no yearly pricing? I mean, I get it if you don't. The recurring withdrawals from people who pay $5,99 and just forget to cancel the subscription is an essential part of Reddits future economy. The same with people who simply pay $5,99 for a few months. My guess is that the 1 year plan isn't attractive enough that enough people buy it?
As others have mentioned, $5,99 is more than people pay for Spotify. A service that offers more than Reddit can ever do due to its versitality and user accesibility. What type of research has been done into wether or not the service is actually *worth* this much? $6 dollars a month on top of all other expenses people have?
Who are your primary customers? Students? Kids with no income? Men 25-40? - Students and teenagers don't have large incomes, they are far unlikely to even consider wasting 6 dollars a month on a service that is at best cosmetic, with the hidden temptation of "Premium subreddits". A fun feature of a Premium Subreddit is of course that your access to this very subreddit will be removed if you stop paying your 6 monthly dollars for access to it along with Reddits other content. (This is an assumption based on the fact the service is pay to play, I don't know if you keep access when the sub runs out).
With all that being said, buying into Reddit gold, or "Premium Membership" as you want to call it now for some reason is voluntary. But hey, know what else people connect with Premium Membership? Pornsites. I strongly caution you guys to reconsider that wording. Absolutely nothing wrong with porn, but it's not a great connection for mainstream growth. Of course Pornsites aren't the only sites using "Premium Membership". I'm simply trying to point out that you should think twice before making a mistake in re-wording if there was never any need to. I guarantee you some prankster will manage to find a joke connecting Reddit Premium to Pornhub Premium and then you have a viral meme going.
But in the years since we introduced Gold, we haven’t done much to improve the experience, which is why now we’re recommitting to making these experiences better.
I am happy that you recognise that you have done nothing to enhance the experience yet. So what is actually justifying a price increase now? You have added nothing new, new words to existing features are not new features.
We'll be starting with the changes above (coming soon), which we hope are just the beginning of many more improvements for Gold in the future (coming less soon).
"Less soon". So at best, any changes to the Reddit gold experience have at best been discussed in meeting rooms, not actually been introduced to development yet.
So to sum this up: You are offering nothing new, but justify a price increase of 35%~ to your customers for changes that are coming "Less soon". or in Reddit development time, at least a year. On top of this you are fiddling with rebranding established features with no justification behind it other than doing something new? I understand that you will think this will make Reddit more understandable for most people, but I hope you have data to back that assumption up.
I think I bought gold one to give to a friend, a few years back. I got gilded a month or so ago, but I never bothered to make use of the Reddit gold experience, because I had no incentive to. So what exactly a $6 dollar price tag will give me today if I choose to buy it, say that's a very good question in my eyes.
Can someone post this to Lounge? I can't access it since I don't have a premium membership, and I don't want to pay to give relevant free feedback to the admins.
As a last sidenote: Reddit, if you need outside consulting to help you navigate the do's and don't of feature change, I've owned several websites and worked in product development for years, I am available for short term consultant hire to offer valuable advice with regards to building your brand and platform.
Comment by rguy84 at 14/08/2018 at 12:56 UTC
11 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Sounds almost like a start of a MLM scheme. "Once you get it, you can give it to your friends too!" and so on.
Comment by Beeardo at 14/08/2018 at 13:21 UTC
11 upvotes, 0 direct replies
As someone who has given out 15 gildings, this is stupid and I will no longer continue to do so. Price change and rebranding one of the most iconic things about Reddit for no reason? I'm good, thanks.
Comment by [deleted] at 14/08/2018 at 16:00 UTC
11 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by cciv at 14/08/2018 at 16:06 UTC
9 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Are we supposed to upvote this for visibility or downvote it because it's crap?
Comment by BadBoy6767 at 14/08/2018 at 13:57 UTC
8 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Wtf? Coins?
Not another shitty currency.
Comment by ShowToddSomeLove at 14/08/2018 at 15:55 UTC
8 upvotes, 0 direct replies
So because Gold was never worth it because there was no worthwhile features that came with it, you're going to hike up the price without actually adding any worthwhile features yet.
This is such a dumb move. All Gold had going for it was name recognition. "Thanks for the Gold" being pretty much a meme. "Thanks for the Premium" does not roll off the tongue at all.
Comment by frittenlord at 14/08/2018 at 14:08 UTC
8 upvotes, 0 direct replies
But in the years since we introduced Gold, we haven’t done much to improve the experience, which is why now we’re recommitting to making these experiences better.
Proceeds to make it more expensive without any actual change
which we hope are just the beginning of many more improvements for Gold in the future
Yeah... No. Probably never going to happen.
Comment by Georgy_K_Zhukov at 14/08/2018 at 14:26 UTC
7 upvotes, 0 direct replies
We'll be starting with the changes above (coming soon), which we hope are just the beginning of many more improvements for Gold in the future (coming less soon).
So they are jacking up the price without any significant accompanying increase in what you get for it beyond the vague promise of more "coming less soon".
Gold has become a unique and beloved part of the Reddit experience
So.... their decision is to rebrand it to the *totally* original and unique "Premium". Whoever they have in charge of brand should be fucking fired for that idea.
Comment by lalala253 at 14/08/2018 at 13:34 UTC
11 upvotes, 1 direct replies
award a post or comment with "Reddit Silver"
wew lad they take user created inside jokes and made it into a FEATURE. It's not how inside jokes work.
hey admins, I have several suggestions for you to further monetize reddit (not that you guys read r/beta anyway)
1: https://i.imgur.com/4BSuXQf.png
I have tons of shitty suggestions.
Comment by [deleted] at 14/08/2018 at 07:18 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Hopefully they add more premium features to justify the cost
