Reddit Gold Account Reviewed – And an inside look at the secret gold community.
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Few weeks back Reddit had called for help and asked for donations. Reddit is(was) a free site and it needed resources to keep going. All they had offered was a virtual trophy as a token for helping them out. Me along with 9000 others donated some money we could offer out of goodwill just for the sake of keeping a really good spirited community alive. Little did we expect or even know we even would get anything in return. I even filtered Reddit from the ad block as little help, I’m sure many might have done that too. Reddit was grateful and recieved much need cash infusion.
Today Reddit Gold would costs 4USD/month. For gold members for a limited time it is 2.50/month for a few additional features and which are expected to follow.
If you’re one of the 9000+ people who have already signed up, we’re going to prorate whatever you paid at the discount rate of $2.49 a month, and then give you an extra two months free on top of that. It’s our way of saying thanks for believing in us. So if you gave us fifteen bucks, you’ll get all current and future reddit gold benefits until sometime next March. (If you gave a penny, well, we’ll see you in September.)
As soon as possible, we’re going to start giving our gold supporters something more than just a trophy. Now that the pilot has succeeded so well, we’re going to grow reddit gold into a bona fide subscription service a la TotalFark or Ars Technica. In other words, there are some cool things coming that would be impossible for us to do for eight million active users, but totally feasible to bring to the 6000 or so who have taken a leap of faith with us so far.
Reddit Gold anncounded 3 more features. In all features being:
- A trophy on userpage
- Options to sort userpage by hot, new, top, controversial, or filter down to just the past hour, week, etc
- The ability to turn off sidebar ads, sponsored links, both, or neither
Can be done by adblock as well
Helping to identify reddit friends
- Access to a super-secret members-only community that may or may not exist
- A thank-you note
- A trophy on your userpageOptions to sort your userpage by hot, new, top, controversial, or filter down to just the past hour, week, etcThe ability to turn off sidebar ads, sponsored links, both, or neitherFriends with Benefits™ — you can add notes to your friends to help you keep track of them allAccess to a super-secret members-only community that may or may not existA thank-you note
The super secret community is a r/lounge subreddit which looks something like this
Reddit Gold Lounge
Gold members also have an option to chat directly with the Reddit engineers via IRC
IRC
Many users at the moment are not happy because they cannot find value in the provided and even many gold users are not supporting the idea of subscription payments. Here are some good user replies to reddit.
The donation felt like helping a friend out in a time of need
The subscription feels like being taken advantage of
Was upvoted more than 1000 times by popular choice.
The problem here is about social norms versus market norms…
Socially you were happy to contribute (as was I), but in a market norm, the price doesn’t seem like a good value (at least to me).
I donated to reddit, because I really like reddit. I have donated to support other specific media that I like as well. I donate to support This American Life and The Sound of Young America. I also support organizations that support media creation, I donate to Pro Publica and The Sundance Foundation.
I feel good about giving to all of these people, and I can give more than the “value” of what I “get”, because I know I am giving. Once you are charging me, we move from a social norm to a market norm.
I think Dan Ariely explains it best…
An excerpt from Dan Ariely’s Book Predictably Irrational
My good friends Uri Gneezy (a professor at the University of California at San Diego) and Aldo Rustichini (a professor at the University of Minnesota) provided a very clever test of the long-term effects of a switch from social to market norms. A few years ago, they studied a day care center in Israel to determine whether imposing a fine on parents who arrived late to pick up their children was a useful deterrent. Uri and Aldo concluded that the fine didn’t work well, and in fact it had long-term negative effects. Why? Before the fine was introduced, the teachers and parents had a social contract, with social norms about being late. Thus, if parents were late — as they occasionally were — they felt guilty about it — and their guilt compelled them to be more prompt in picking up their kids in the future. (In Israel, guilt seems to be an effective way to get compliance.) But once the fine was imposed, the day care center had inadvertently replaced the social norms with market norms. Now that the parents were paying for their tardiness, they interpreted the situation in terms of market norms. In other words, since they were being fined, they could decide for themselves whether to be late or not, and they frequently chose to be late. Needless to say, this was not what the day care center intended.
But the real story only started here. The most interesting part occurred a few weeks later, when the day care center removed the fine. Now the center was back to the social norm. Would the parents also return to the social norm? Would their guilt return as well? Not at all. Once the fine was removed, the behavior of the parents didn’t change. They continued to pick up their kids late. In fact, when the fine was removed, there was a slight increase in the number of tardy pickups (after all, both the social norms and the fine had been removed).
This experiment illustrates an unfortunate fact: when a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time. In other words, social relationships are not easy to reestablish. Once the bloom is off the rose — once a social norm is trumped by a market norm — it will rarely return.
The fact that we live in both the social world and the market world has many implications for our personal lives. From time to time, we all need someone to help us move something, or to watch our kids for a few hours, or to take in our mail when we’re out of town. What’s the best way to motivate our friends and neighbors to help us? Would cash do it — a gift, perhaps? How much? Or nothing at all? This social dance, as I’m sure you know, isn’t easy to figure out — especially when there’s a risk of pushing a relationship into the realm of a market exchange.
was upvoted more than 600 times. Very thoughtful comment indeed.
My opinion: I do feel that the pricing is steep and monthly subscription is not the way for people who contribute to the value of the website by sharing links. There are other free competitors and Reddit should find innovative to generate regular revenue. I’m curious to see what’s going to happen next.
