Users who use alternative clients are banned the moment Discord finds out about them, not a great example.
Discord Nitro's perks seem just as valueless as Reddit Gold to me. The top listed features are ephemeral stuff like custom emojis and stickers and super reactions. You could argue stuff like 50+ MB uploads and HD streaming is more valuable but few users would really use those features often.
Like Discord, Reddit is a community, there's limitations to what you can charge for because you don't want to raise the barrier to entry. I suspect Reddit Gold and custom emojis actually earns Reddit and Discord quite a fair bit, I think a key difference is that Discord has 750 employees to feed while Reddit has 2000.
It seems like discord tolerates alternative clients, so long as they are not used for abuse, but this is indeed not a good situation. Discord is very far from a paragon of user choice and privacy, but it'll take a fair few screwups from them to disrupt the network effect now.
And I agree on the company size: it is hard for me to understand what those employees are doing to make reddit run, considering the nature of the platform.
I recall reading that their engineers tolerate alternative clients, but they said that when they ban bad actors the alternative clients have a chance of getting scooped up due to detection heuristics.
3rs party clients users are banned the moment they find out about them because for them to find out, they must be doing API abuse. Otherwise, they could just go in the betterDiscord server and ban everyone there.
I think discords model is fundamentally better because however useless the paid features are,2 there actually are features to speak of. HD streaming, higher upload limits and global emojis are fundamentally not that important, but you do get something out of paying. You also feel like you're sponsoring several free users, while paying for reddit gold just puts a shiny badge on a post, gives you access to a useless private club that has no direction (which is by design) and removes ads for a month.
If Reddit was a business I wanted to give money to, then Reddit Gold would be a perfectly fine way to do so. Ephemeral is just fine when all you want to say is: hey, poster, I liked your words. Hey, website, I liked how you enabled me to read those words.
> If Reddit was a business I wanted to give money to, then Reddit Gold would be a perfectly fine way to do so
I think people underestimate this. I'm always much happier for my cash to go to a business that I like. Where "like" includes both quality of product and their ethics/attitude.
There's zero value in Reddit Gold. It's such a meme. Access to a private subreddit.
Give posts badges? Who cares. They're ephemeral. Up today gone tomorrow.
They need to rethink this bullshit instead of just selling more ads.