We continue to be humbled at the astonishing success of reddit gold. As of this morning, we have over 9000 subscribers.It's time for reddit gold to make the shift from a one-week experiment to a true service with a clear pricing structure and at least a few whistles and bells.
Starting today, subscribers will see the following new features throughout the site (look for the gleaming gold borders):
Choose-your-own Ad Venture
We had thought that subscribers were going to demand the complete removal of all ads from the site, but we were surprised to find that many asked to not have their ads taken away. We're proud that we've done a good job of requiring the advertising we carry to be mostly non-intrusive and relevant. (And, at our best, we can even make you chuckle.)
However, there are definitely some who have asked to turn off at least some of our ads, and so we're bringing two new checkboxes to the preferences panel: You can turn off the sidebar ad, the sponsored links at the top of the page, both, or neither.
It's your choice when you're a reddit goldmember.™
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. Sit tight!
Userpage sorting
Back in the olden days, reddit userpages were totally sortable. You could, for instance, look up what your most controversial submissions of the last month was, or reread your highest-rated comments of all time.
Sometime back in 2007 or so, this got to be too difficult to compute for all our users, so we "temporarily" shut off the feature. Of course, we only continued to grow, so it became a permanent change.
However, there are many things in life that are hard to do for eight million active visitors, but totally doable for a few thousand paying subscribers, and this is one of them. So starting today, the userpage of any goldmember will be sortable in all the ways that the front page is: hot, new, top, controversial, this hour, this month, etc.
Eventually, we hope to bring this feature to all users, but for now, you gotta pay to play. Err, pay to sort. (That doesn't rhyme.) Moving on...
[Note: when you subscribe, we trickle in the updates to your profile page over about 24 hours. The shorter-period time sorts like "hour" and "day" will appear almost immediately, but all-time "top" and "controversial" will take up to a day to compute.]
Friends with Benefits™
We've noticed that the kind of people who subscribe to reddit often turn out to be heavily involved in the community. In particular, subscribers tend to have a lot of reddit friends.
When you mark a lot of people as your friend, you sometimes see one of them commenting and wonder, "Who is this guy? Why did I mark him as a friend?" And now, we have a solution. We call it "Friends with Benefits."
You can now add notes to your reddit friends. On any new friends you add from this day forward, the note will be pre-set to the URL of whatever page you came from. So if you love a submission so much that you click on the submitter's username and hit the "+ friend" button, the link to that submission will be set as the friend note.
There's now a column indicating how long this person has been your friend. Thanks to the way the reddit master database is organized, we're able to show this for all your friends, going back to the beginning of time.
Oh, and you don't need to go to your friends list to see all the notes. Just hover over anyone's username and you'll get a mouseover with the details:
And stay tuned...We're not going to rest on our laurels, of course. We have a lot of new ideas for reddit gold, and will be introducing them just as fast as our little hands can type them.
One More Thing
We mentioned last week that we were working on "One More Thing." The programming is 100% complete (including all the bugs we don't yet know about) but there are still a few bits of red tape tangling us up. Fortunately, we've assigned our top bureaucrats to take care of business and dispatched KeyserSosa to visit the mothership in NYC this very morning. Stay tuned...
Pricing
So, back to reddit gold. How much are we going to charge? How many cups of coffee is your reddit gold subscription going to cost? We wanted to keep it under a dollar a week, so we're setting the price at $3.99 / month. And for the next week, we're offering a discount bulk rate of $29.99 / year, which works out to $2.49 a month.
(C'mon.. you waste a lot more more than $2.49 of your employer's time in just one hour browsing reddit.)
Charter Members
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.)
Also, both charter members and anyone who signs up this week get a final bonus: You will forever retain a reddit gold award in your trophy case, and a lifetime pass to any secret members-only clubhouse that may or may not exist.
Act now,
Click here to subscribe.
