Reddit Gold Now Offers: Choose-your-own ads and Friends with Benefits | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Gold Now Offers: Choose-your-own ads and Friends with Benefits

blog.reddit.com

29 pointscing28 comments

The bigger story is that they've changed Reddit Gold from a feel-good, pay-what-you-want model to a standard, fixed-price model. It went from being the neighborhood self-serve coffee bar to Starbucks. It will be interesting to see if the Predictably Irrational prediction holds and payments actually end up dropping off.

I think they made the right decision. It would not surprise me if people stopped pitching money into the "jar" after a few months. There are actual continual expenses required to run a site, and I think a lot of people would fall into the "I contributed my share already, let someone else add more" mentality.

The first and most major hurdle is to convince people who are used to and still have the option of pretty much the exact same service for free that they should pay anything at all, and that needs to be very low. Letting people choose their price and giving them the little gold badge taps into their emotional response at a very low cost, so stick with it.

Beyond that, the Gold features that cost money to implement should require a minimum donation to make them sustainable, and the page that takes the donations should have a 'make this donation recurring' checkbox.

"We plan to make this more granular in the future, for those of you who want to see, say, house ads in the sidebar, but not third-party advertising that contains autoplaying Flash."

Why on earth would they require users to pay for better targeted ads? If ads target me better, the net effect is more money for them. It just seems like a bad business idea to require that customers pay for something that ultimately makes the company more money.

There needs to be real tangible benefits to the service. I understand it is early, but there aren't many benefits here (hide ads? friend notes?). Perhaps you guys should poll users on pain-points and alleviate them instead of introducing features. Otherwise I expect that very, very few people will sign up, and many more will be offended that you even offer it.

How about a benefit of Reddit it self as a community? $3 bucks a months provides way more entertainment to me then I could have gotten elsewhere for the same amount of money.

Yes, people will be OFFENDED that the web site they spend 1-2 hours a day on offers an option to subscribe and contribute something back to them for gasp $3/month.

personally, $3/month is the same to me as $30/month. The actual amount isn't that important at that level. But it's something else to keep track of. Something else to manage. Another hassle. So the actual cost in terms of time/worry/hassle of paying for subscriptions on the internet is much higher. That's the hurdle. Not the price, the fact that it costs something.

So saying $3 is cheap is irrelevant - it's "paid vs free". There are complete books written about that subject. It's easy to give stuff away and fairly easy to make money whilst doing it. It's harder to sell stuff, especially cheap stuff.

Also though, Reddit isn't a startup. It's part of a massive multinational. Perhaps the people who cashed out on the sale should contribute some back to keep reddit running ;)

It's $4/mo.

That's about half of what I pay per month for netflix. Think about the infrastructure that goes into netflix. I get DVDs at my door (as many as I want) and they maintain a server farm full of streaming content for me to enjoy.

This is all done without ads of any kind.

...I'd say I'm getting quite a bit more utility out of netflix than I am reddit.

That's fine, but that might not be true for everyone. I think reddit is the best thing to happen since, well sliced bread. I've gotten 100x more utility from reddit than I will ever get from Netflix.

Two hours later: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/croqe/i_gladly_d...

It's interesting seeing which opinions of outrage become popular on reddit. Before this it was Saydrah and that outrage was on and off before it turned into a virtual mobbing. I'm curious if a large population of reddit has this opinion, or if it originally cared for this opinion before the above post. Was this opinion bubbling within the threads when the donation request was announced? Of course cultural trends are difficult to measure, so I doubt I'll ever know.

Personally, raldi announced this subscriber service when he announced the donation, so I'm those reddit users whose not going against their subscription model at all (however, I am waiting on them to add Amazon payments). Still, when I compare their model to Ars Technica's, this comes to mind: Ars has paid writers while reddit has user contributions, their only service is the forum they have set up and maintained (duh). Good luck with them and I hope they have a subscription model that fairly monetizes their user's contributions without smoking them out.

EDIT: May I also add that there's the extra challenge of being under a larger company. It played a factor with Saydrah and its currently playing a factor with above.

It's funny Anandtech forums went through this many years ago facing the same problems that Reddit is. It was pretty much the same thing, I think $30 made you a subscriber and you got some benefits that non subscribers didn't. THen after only a couple years they removed it. Wonder if reddit will do the same?

Always hard to predict the future - but the counter-example is Fark/Totalfark, which have stood for quite some time now.

I wish they would give us features that people like me, who don't submit and comment much, would want and pay for as a reddit gold subscriber. So far I just click on ads occasionally, and would love to become a subscriber, but there's just nothing that they offer that would entice someone like me.

Well, what would entice you?

Here is a feature I would pay for: give me a checkbox to hide all the "funny" comments. Sometimes I just want to read comments from people who are actually trying to contribute something meaningful to the discussion, not just people trying to be funny. I don't care what they do to categorize the comments, but I would definitely pay for something like that. I'm not saying I don't like the funny comments on reddit, some of them are very funny. It's just that everybody is trying to be funny now and very few people can actually pull it off.

You took words out of my brain. The more popular reddit has become the more difficult it has become to find comments that say something other than being funny.

The funny thing is that Slashdot had this problem and solved it a decade ago with their moderation system.

Wow. All of these features are auctually pretty neat. Now let me "save" comments and block/hide certain users. Good work, can't wait to see how this works out.

You forgot user page sorting. :)

And that they announced prices too :)

I made a comment in that thread that seems to have disappeared where I said the same thing, but I think there is more that you guys could do to entice subscribers.

Things like image hosting would be huge. Let me save images that I use frequently, show me some relevant ads, I don't care.

Email alerts would also be big. Email me (include an ad in the email) when somebody responds to a message of mine (but please, not for if they reply to a self post).

Let me have the option of displaying images in the thread. yeah, yeah, I know there is javascript that I can use to do this, but do it on the server side for me. That would be great.

One thing that we do on my website (which isn't big enough for it to really be a huge feature) is the ability for users to write blog posts, these carry a lot more weight than self posts.

Here is a blog I wrote using it:

http://newslily.com/blog/permalink.cgi?blog_id=96

can you imagine this as a self post?

What's cool about this is that users can link to it as if it were an article of their own.

I think you'd get a lot of really amazing articles out of the reddit community if you opened up something like this. Let the gold members do something like it; they'd love it.

Here is another thing we do that I would love to see reddit do:

http://newslily.com/hn/hnlily.cgi (wrapped up in the HN clone layout that I did a while ago)

It's a feed of what your friends are doing. I saw that you guys added a "friends" link that shows me links my friends have submitted? That's cool, but I would love to see their comments as well. I'm sure that this would be more server-intensive, but it would also be a great way of finding more stuff to talk about. I think gold members would think this was really cool (I would).

I'm not trying to say that the things we're doing are oh-so-cool and that the things you're doing aren't, I'm just saying that you guys have got an amazing opportunity with a community that completely loves you, is very loyal, and is FREAKING HUGE. (Okay, there is a bit of jealousy there...I wish I could try ideas out on the scale that you guys can).

Howabout custom colors? HN does this after you hit a certain karma threshold. Sell this to the gold members for $4/mo.

I hope this reddit gold is a huge success for you guys. Just please invite me on the yacht someday :-P.

You know, maybe I'm a casual Reddit users, but the whole sorting thing never bothered me. Really, none of these features are compelling. Oh, I'm a subscriber, and will be for more than long enough to know if I'll remain a subscriber and pay up again.

What I'd find interesting is knowing if 9000+ 'subscribers' did for the morale of the people behind reddit. Is it lower then expected? More? Around what you though? What are the feelings going forward? I don't know why, I just love reading insider stories.

Ahem. Hint hint. Ahem.

We were overwhelmed by the response. We are excited that we are able to do things with that money already (more on that later).

But to be honest, the best part has been the postcards. Every day a big stack arrives, and it is awesome. I can't tell you how good it feels to get a stack of postcards all telling you how awesome you are and how you're changed people's lives.

There are quite a few people suggesting that the people who donated should be granted lifetime reddit-gold status...

Any thoughts on this? I mean...to be honest, when I donated, that's kindof what I thought it was. The whole "reddit gold" thing was kindof like the stickers they give out on election day that say "I voted".

It sounds like my reddit gold is now going to get taken away :(. That kindof sucks.

Gird your loins, boys, for the influx of disillusioned redditors!

(a good chunk of whom were disillusioned meme-spouting 4channers before they were disillusioned redditors)

> Gird your loins, boys, for the influx of disillusioned redditors!

Perhaps this is being downvoted because people don't know what "gird your loins" means. I didn't know before googling.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061211104553AA...

"What does gird your loins mean?"

"If you say that somebody is GIRDING their LOINS or GIRDING UP their LOINS, you mean that they are preparing to do something difficult or dangerous. Example : Both sides in the argument were girding their loins."

Indeed, we should gird up our loins.

It's quite possible that the downvoting is for the actual content of the comment too, you know.

You mean for truth? I lol'd. I'm living proof.

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