We're all on Reddit here, right? How "serious" are you into Reddit? Do you pay for coins?

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I’ve had my Reddit account since July of 2015. I’m not a pro-user. I did install the Reddit Suite for customization, but I set up what I wanted and forgot about it. I have styled my avatar a little… it’s kitschy and a bit fun, but nah… not going to pay for super styling.

Anyway, I don’t follow anyone on Reddit. I just browse subs of interest, participate, and sometimes chat. But that’s it. Occasionally I’ll get a notification that I’ve been followed. I don’t really pay much attention to that, until I started getting a few “nsfw” type users that end up being 1 post accounts showing sexy women with “Only Fans” links. Yeah… block that stuff. :smile:

I don’t know how long ago it was, when Reddit introduced the award function. It’s pretty cool and imaginative, the range of awards. But yikes… you have to be pretty serious about it, because you’ve got to pay for them to use them. For a time Reddit would periodically offer free coins and I’d collect them and use them on posts I liked. But then Reddit stopped giving them for free.

Does anyone here spend any money on Reddit? And if so, how do you use it? I’m just curious.

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I only use Reddit for the mechanical pencils sub. I get pretty burnt out on it from time to time. At least we have this platform to scratch my itch.

Yea, I buy coins to keep on hand. I like to award some posts just to keep the stoke going.

I’m not on any other social media like Facebook, Instagram, TT, etc. I could do without Reddit as well but every once in a while it’s nice to see some interesting things in the pencil space that I wouldn’t normally know about. But man, the sub sure provides a lot of facepalms.

Edit: just for clarity. When I was doing the Knockologist venture I had an IG account created for it. Not my cup of tea.

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Reddit pulled an unbelievable marketing campaign with the awards. IIRC at the beginning there was only gold and platinum (maybe one more), and they all granted “premium” tier on reddit to the person receiving them. Seeing an award somewhere was massive. Then, reddit silver was coined (eheh) as a joke for when someone had posted something mildly interesting but not worth enough of paying him anything.

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It was literally just this image. Then, reddit noticed that they could monetize this and they introduced more awards that granted nothing, silver among them. And people absolutely despised them, because the uniqueness and value of receiving an award was kinda lost. They started giving them away for free, and that’s why most people started calling them the “free awards”… until when that stopped being true, and now everything costs money. Thanks reddit.

Speaking of internet monetization schemes. I remember when you could search something in google for purchase advice and get results from knowledgeable people. Not anymore. Now it’s just pages with hellish SEO and a trillion of amazon affiliate links with absolutely no useful content whatsoever. And with AI it’s only going to get worse. Keep in mind that with affiliate links, they get money if you buy anything after clicking the link, it doesn’t even have to be the same product. The problem with this system is that, sometimes, the things that are sold in amazon are good, but sometimes they aren’t, and now it’s incredibly hard to find a place that tells you “no, what’s on amazon is all crap, go to this other website or to this physical store”.

And that is why I feel like reddit is (was?) the last bastion of good internet advice. Since people in communities are not usually interested in monetizing their hobbies, the advice given in reddit is usually way better than the one given by content farms. However, I’m not sure why, reddit’s advice just keeps getting worse and worse, and the questions just keep getting more and more retarded. “Capped pencil that is not the dive?” “I want a pencil for architecture, and I like the Kuru Toga, is it a good choice?” “I death grip my pencil to a degree that my doctors are worried about me, will a Zebra Delguard let my tendons survive past age 25?”.

Nice, comprehensive forum thread made by an uninterested expert, updated by the community over time. Pinned to the top, appears 1st on Google results. No affiliate links. I really want internet to go back to that, but it won’t.

So, I’m not sure what’s my point. I think that reddit is nowadays one of the only decent social networks left, together with discord. But it keeps degrading, and I feel like at some point I’ll just quit.

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I think the r/mechanicalpencils sub is a bit fractured, but that’s OK. You have your newbies and folks mostly focused on sub $20 pencils. Probably most posts are from them. But there’s enough posts from the vintage and higher end folks to keep it interesting.

Reddit is a curious place. It definitely serves a niche kind of social media. I can’t stand the juveniles, though, who just get their jollies from trolling. There are some kids who hang out on the ‘new post’ feed, no matter the sub, and just downvote anything they spot. Reddit doesn’t have any kind of gatekeeper on devious activity like this.

A dedicated forum is superior. It really helps make things a bit more lasting. Reddit is a massive scroll fest… and great posts will roll off, requiring the use of search (which isn’t always useful, especially because you can’t control the date sorting).

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Reddit suspended permanently my account for "vote manipulation":grimacing:

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Vote manipulation? How… did you “manipulate” voting? One account, one vote. You can’t upvote more than once.

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I had two accounts, both were suspended. I didn’t even vote for my own comments, I did it with other users who received down votes that seemed unfair to me, so I went and gave them a vote with the first_sail_1386 account and another with the UseYourEraser account. They still warned me several times to stop doing it before suspending both accounts.

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How did they know you were doing that?

Do we know who any of the moderators are? They don’t seem connected.

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Was it a certain particular sub? Because one vote from each of the two accounts is still really not much. I can’t even imagine any kind of algorithm detecting something that small as worthy of attention.

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Yeah, you’d think it would have to be excessive and they would key off of IP address.

He did say that they asked him to stop several times.

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I only used Reddit for r/mechanicalpencils, nothing else. The suspension did not come from the sub’s moderators, but from Reddit itself. I think they knew by looking at the IP or something.

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Yeah, same IP… and if doing it one right after the other? That’s probably one of the “alarm bells” for Reddit algorithms. Must be fun to QC that.

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Not what I’d call fun.

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I can still log in with the account. But I can’t vote or comment, or see my private chats or anything, just watch.

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I got banned from IG. I don’t know why (I did nothing except following a few people), but my account got locked, twice. I could unlock with my phone #, but I don’t want to give it out.

reddit I just read the mech pencil sub from time to time. Since this forum is more interesting, I visit reddit less often now.

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I think that except for the excess of topics of R600, GG1K and KT, r/mechanicalpencils is very interesting.

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You never know what topic will arise. Sometimes people ask very good questions, or request help on something that’s a bit tricky. Or, a showcase of vintage wonder. I’m not as active as I used to be (mainly because of Knockology :smile:), but I do browse through it a couple times a week.

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r/mechanicalpencils is a great forum.

Once, u/Pencils_Absorber posted a Mitsubishi M5-50 (by the way, is that guy Russian? Because that same picture - which is an M5 on a red cloth - is posted on an English forum where OP claims to be Russian, idk) and seeing it I thought it was such an attractive pencil that I looked it up on eBay and it was like $150 or something. Well years later I saw a very nice pencil for sale for $10 on eBay. Some Demi-.5 Deluxe. The post said NOS. I bought it and when I had it at home I sent a photo of the pencil to Pearson via PM, on Reddid. Chris respond - It looks like the first Mitsubishi M5-50. I had completely forgotten the existence of that pencil. When I searched for information on Reddit and saw u/Pencils_Absorber’s post I said - What!! It’s this pencil, how did I forget it? (We already know the Mitsubishi model designation is a joke, please don’t say that again Pearson).

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IIRC, u/Pencils_Absorber wrote to be Russian.

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Speaking of Reddit I made the mistake of visiting today on my work laptop. Apparently some subreddits are (very) NSFW now. :flushed:

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