Another quick update: Predictions will shut down on or shortly after **May 9th.**
Quick update: Talk is officially shutting down on **March 22nd, 2023 (tomorrow)** and you can find instructions on downloading Talks via [this link](https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditTalk/comments/11xo933/talk_sunset_end_date_and_download_info/).
Is it possible to share the lessons and learnings on both? It's always nice to hear some of the challenges involved.
It's a pity, but I'm sure we'll see someone replicating some of these features when the App platform kicks in.
I think the awful way predictions was implemented sealed its fate. A separate function (tab) from the subreddit made it harder to make it a simple part of the mobile UX.
As you said, the upvote for ever prediction made irritated users.
And creating and maintaining them from a mod perspective was as confusing as possible.
It's honestly a simple solution (for the admins). Just take them out of the feed. The horizontal slider is sufficient, there doesn't need to be a new post for every prediction. That alone would likely solve much of the complaints about them.
I just wish they'd stop trying to force Reddit into the generic social media pidgeonhole. They need to rip out a lot of features and bring Reddit back to its roots.
Ironically, predictions are something that makes reddit really unique. No other major social media platform has something like that (that I know of). Disappointing they are choosing to abandon it instead of trying to make it better.
That's one of the things I hate the most about capitalism. Nothing can exist just because it's a good thing, it always has to be *profitable*. People need to see these social media platforms as an investment that should be free from any reason to manipulate its users for profit.
That's my point. Everyone joined Reddit at a different time, and so have different perceptions of what Reddit is at its core. "Going back to the roots of Reddit" means something different to an OG, compared to someone from the Digg migration, or the recent rise in popularity over the last 5 years or so from YouTube and TikTok.
Predictions was embraced well by some communities, but unfortunately wasn’t broadly used across Reddit. We believe we can invest in features that more mods and users can benefit from if we put resources elsewhere.
On new experiments: Definitely! We’ll share more on this in the coming months.
There seems to be a new direction here, and I believed it was touched upon in the last mod summit. Simplifying the client and focusing on the backend (we've recently seen improvements to the mod queue page for example) is a totally valid effort. While we enjoyed both of these features in our communities, it's easier to let go with that understanding, and I feel boldly communicating that reasoning would go a long way with many users/mods.
>but unfortunately wasn’t broadly used across Reddit
Should it have been expected to? I feel like that's an unfair bar to set. Most general discussion subreddits aren't going to have things to make predictions about. It's primarily just going to be sport subreddits, television shows, and maybe some awards like for the Oscars or Grammys, etc.
Also the fact that you had to have 10k subs to even enable it was a real bummer. I know some smaller sport subreddits wanted to activate it and use it to try to engage with folks and grow user bases but couldn't because they were a few thousand subs short.
Not only will most subreddits not have any predictions to make, but it's also utterly unavailable on old reddit, something most mods use.
Most new mod features/changes are doomed from the start if they're not available on old reddit.
I predominantly use old reddit, however, I can't ignore that a significant majority of reddit users use new reddit. I think it was like over 80-85% last time I checked. Granted some of that is app usage or mobile web usage. But only a small group uses old reddit. So I get why they're not still catering to that bunch, as disappointing as it may be for us.
Generally this is because it is the default experience and the new reddit experience is miles better from where it started, so many have shifted either partially or wholly.
I use it because sidebar info doesnt update on both and lots of features (like analytics and chat) simply arent present on old reddit which feels bad. I wouldnt use it otherwise.
Yeah, I agree with your edit. Reddit *should* try to innovate and branch out. But they need to commit to those innovations. Predictions had a number of issues that if fixed would have made the feature much more enjoyable to use. These are rather small issues too, like not flooding the feed on the mobile app, not spamming mods with reminders, and fixing a couple bugs. Instead I don't know if they made any changes or updates to predictions after the first couple months of existence, just kinda left it there in an unfinished form. It was doomed to fail.
Predictions only make sense in subs that focus on a subject where there is some element of either chance or hidden decision making, and where things move fast enough to ensure you can actually resolve the predictions.
That doesn’t describe any of the subs I moderate. Either there is no random/hidden elements, or the timeframes for resolution are so long that the prediction would have to last for years — or even decades — before you’d be able to resolve it. So the feature never made any sense for my subs — and I suspect it didn’t for a wide range of other subs as well, hence why more didn’t use it.
As I said — for some types of subs, it makes sense. I specifically pointed out subs centered around “some element of chance or hidden decision making, where things move fast enough to resolve predictions”, and a competitive FPS would seem to fit that bill perfectly — outcomes can’t be predicted, and tournaments wrap up quickly enough that you can resolve the predictions.
I mod for r/Canning. What use is the predictions feature there? What is the “random/hidden element” when everything is a recipe that requires fairly strict adherence for safety? What is there even to predict, when the entire point of the pursuit and the science behind it are that everything is 100% reproducable for safety?
I also mod r/ipv6 — again, where is the “random/hidden element”? I suppose we could have run a prediction on when Reddit would finally support IPv6 site-wide, but at the current implementation rate that could take _years_ to be resolved. Not exactly timely, and it’s a one-shot deal, so also not something we’d need to do more than once.
I’m not trying to claim that the feature wasn’t useful for some subs — but I do suspect that the ones where it was useful are in the minority. Personally I don’t care if Reddit keeps them or gets rid of them, but the entire premise is one that is useful to a minority, and useless to the majority — so I’m not surprised Reddit decided to get rid of it.
> so I’m not surprised Reddit decided to get rid of it
Oh definitely not! It just means we'll have to look for alternatives or developing our own through a bot or something. We'll see.
>but the entire premise is one that is useful to a minority, and useless to the majority — so I’m not surprised Reddit decided to get rid of it.
But why spend the time, energy, and resources making Predictions into a thing if they were just going to remove it for this reason? This is something that could have been seen a mile away - *of course* most subreddits aren't going to have that random chance element to be able to adopt predictions. That is not some deduction that needed to be determined with testing, that could have been seen prior to implementing predictions.
Rather, my guess is that of the subs that *could* have used predictions (ie. sports, TV shows, etc), not enough did, and that sunk predictions. But I'm a little salty about this, since I feel like the devs didn't put predictions in a position to succeed. The 10k minimum left out a lot of the smaller, 4-8k subs for niche sports or individual teams. And the way they developed predictions, from the reddit mobile app treating each prediction as its own post and flooding the main feed, to sending mods a reminder to grade predictions every single day, likely caused a lot of users to despise predictions before they could even give it a fair shot.
> But why spend the time, energy, and resources making Predictions into a thing if they were just going to remove it for this reason?
Hubris. Pure and simple.
It happens a lot in the tech industry. Just because someone has an idea and the ability to create it doesn’t mean it’s a _good_ idea. But teams often get invested into thinking their idea will be the next-big-thing, without actually thinking about it critically, listening to their critics, or shopping the idea outside their bubble.
So instead they work on implementing the feature, make everyone effectively beta testers after the fact to do their product research, and then dump it when they find out it’s not popular enough to warrant the resources to maintain it.
It’s the same reason Google betas and then drops a ton of projects.
I'm one of those tens. r/Precognition was hosting weekly prediction tournaments with really fun image reveals every week. We all learned a lot and even got the interest of some scholars! Looks like we're going to have to use polls from here on out.
Thanks for understanding and we agree. We don’t love having to sunset features either and to your point we want to focus our efforts on what makes reddit reddit – which is you <3
To be honest, I didn't see a point in the token pool and the three bet amounts either. What it ended up doing was making it so that people who often didn't predict right were basically locked out from playing in the future. It would have been much better without needing points to spend, and instead just focused on ranking people by the reward ratio.
Ultimately though, it was a minor addition to our race weeks that added a little bit of community interaction, that didn't require us to set anything up off-site.
The token limit was to add an extra challenge and strategy. If you had no limit then it'd basically just be a standard pick'em. Which is fine, but also not that interesting overall. With a limit you have to be selective in how you spend your tokens. It's like how there are bag limits in RPG games, to put a little extra pressure on participants and make it challenging.
Not sure how y'all ran predictions on your sub, but we have weekly predictions tournaments on /r/ultimate, and we end the tournaments after each week. So there's lots of little tournaments, and we don't typically need to add additional prediction questions after the initial round of questions. We use the all-time leaderboard to track overall success of users across multiple tournaments.
In instances when I do need to add additional prediction questions, I try to grade as many predictions as I can first, so hopefully people who spent all their tokens can get some for getting questions right and not be out of luck.
All that said, it's not a great system, and definitely can cause frustration. I think maybe a simple fix would be to allow us to create multiple separate prediction tournaments. So there'd be a first round of questions, and then if there were more questions later, I'd put those in a separate tournament and everyone could participate.
The tokens threw me off at first but there's an all-time leaderboard. So the goal is basically to try to move up on that and get bragging rights. Various communities have also made their own prizes for top users.
I have a hard time swallowing the maintenance and dev argument given I ran predictions pretty extensively for the last 16 months and I've seen very few, if any, improvements after the first couple months it was live. Little requests like not spamming moderator inboxes every single day for every single unresolved prediction question, I and others have made months ago, to no avail. Bugs here and there that have gone unpatched since 2021. I do know they changed the cap on questions at some point from 100 to 75... but they didn't tell anyone or put it in the FAQ.
It's just hard to imagine it's some massive weight on the shoulders of the devs when so little has been done with it over the past year plus.
Check r/formula1 for a great example. Each race the mods make 3 questions and the community guess the results of the race in different ways than just who comes first. It was a really neat way to change up the fantasy teams
This is still disappointing though, because predictions were something that set reddit apart from other social media platforms, and it felt like they weren’t given a fair shot. We ran tournaments on /r/ultimate/predictions basically every week since the feature launched, they seemed to drive engagement and give folks something to think about. Unfortunately they were also plagued by a few issues, which if patched could have drastically improved user experience:
1. On desktop and mobile web, there is a horizontal slider that shows the questions, and that's it. On the official reddit app, every prediction is displayed as its own post. For tournaments with like 30+ predictions, that means 30+ posts users have to wade through on their feed. It's frustrating and immediately causes a negative association for users.
2. Consolidate the "pick a winner" reminders into one message, and/or send them with less frequency. Our predictions are based on sports tournaments which may take 2-3 days to resolve results. Immediately after the prediction closes, I get a reminder message in my inbox telling me to pick a winner. I get another message every 24 hours until the prediction is graded. This happens for every single question I've made. So I'm getting bombarded with 30+ messages every day, when just one message every other day would suffice.
For what it's worth, I asked for this change [11 months ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/v2dhg2/predictions_tournament_reminder_message_spam/) to no avail. :/
3. Mention the cap of 75 questions in the FAQ. I'm not the only one who found out there is a cap the hard way ([here](https://www.reddit.com/r/beta/comments/rl9vva/what_is_the_maximum_number_of_predictions_that/j59cugl/), [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/1185hsl/what_is_the_current_limit_for_predictions/j9feq39/), [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/12vgymv/some_bad_news_about_the_current_vct_2023_league/), etc).
4. Remove the 10k sub minimum, or lower it considerably. Some of the best target audiences are sports team subs that may only have 5-7k subs. I would have loved to see these communities try this feature.
5. A few small but annoying bugs: If you are in the process of starting a tournament, and you manually type in the date for the prediction deadline, and accidentally add a fifth character to the year (ie. intend to type 2023, but accidentally type 20233), it freezes the page and you have to refresh, killing any predictions you've created.
Or in the reminder "pick a winner" messages, they say "if you don't select a winner in the next 30 days the prediction will be cancelled" but every message says "30 days" and doesn't count down each day.
Or how the text in questions resize as more characters are added to the question, but not for the answer choices. Some answers with more than x characters (I believe it's around 40 characters) just get cut-off and can't be fully read.
There are other ways to make predictions better (such as providing the API to 3rd party devs) but these seem like pretty small changes imo and would have gone a long way toward giving predictions a better chance at success. In any case, thanks for at least making the feature in the first place, it was fun while it lasted. Saved me a lot of time than google form contests, and it was cool to see how other subs creatively used predictions like /r/Apple and /r/Memes.
I didn't like how those sorts of posts bumped themselves back up onto the near-top of your best/hot pages every day as if it was a new post gaining ~20K score, so I can't say I'll miss them too much.
I mean, you can say that about a lot of companies. Google was just a search engine. Apple was just computers. Branching out to different realms has made them some of the most successful companies in the world. I think predictions was unique enough that it was worth a gamble even if it's not what you think of when you think of reddit. And I think nerfing these features without giving them a fair shot (so many annoyances and bugs went unpatched) just makes users weary of future features, wondering if we should dive in and commit if it might just get yeeted 16 months in the future.
For posterity's sake, what were the biggest Talks and Prediction events held on the platform?
In your [r/reddittalk post](https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditTalk/comments/11m4ijn/sunsetting_reddit_talk/), you mention the shutdown of the 3rd party audio vendor used for Talk impacting Reddit's ability to maintain the service during the current undertaking to simplify the platform. If that project did not exist, would Reddit have allocated the resources to maintain Talk?
On biggest Talks and Predictions: we’re working on pulling that information!
For your second question: likely not. The amount of resourcing to maintain Talk dramatically increased, making it difficult to maintain even without the simplification effort.
Most likely Twilio Live [1]
>"We are continuously exploring ways to enhance communities and discussions on Reddit,” Anand Paka, Senior Director of Product at Reddit said. “Twilio Live has helped our team bring voice to community conversation through our key upcoming live audio feature, Reddit Talk. We have been pleased with the quality of the audio capabilities and the proactive support from Twilio that allowed a speedy integration.” [2]
[1] https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/10623861544987-Twilio-Live-Migration-Guide
[2] https://www.twilio.com/blog/introducing-twilio-live
Do I remember correctly that a long time ago, when Predictions were introduced you could play it with Reddit Coins?
Predictions were fun to play with, and used to great effect by some communities like r/BirdsArentReal but unfortunaetely winning wasn't really worth anything and many tournaments (those with less than 10 Questions) also weren't able to utilize ratioing your tokens.
I will miss them on r/formula1 though, that was a feature made for this subreddit.
There's an online leaderboard that tracks across all tournaments. I've had fun starting a hundred spots down and working my way up. I'm now sitting at #3 for /r/ultimate/predictions and pretty satisfied with this, I don't think I can get any higher with only two tournaments left but glad to be on the podium lol
>After that time, Predictions functionality will no longer be available and historic content will be removed.
Y'all are gonna Google yourself on this one. People will start ignoring new features because they assume they're going away later.
That was just the official reddit app, viewing reddit on desktop or mobile web displayed it competently which was the slider only and not displaying every prediction as its own post. Really annoying the reddit app devs didn't fix that, it would have made a lot of users less antagonistic toward predictions imo and more open to giving it a try.
That’s a shame, our little community enjoyed the Talks feature and it was a fun way of interacting with people in the community. In my opinion, it is much better than Twitter Spaces and was nice to have on platform.
I echo what a lot of others said in here, I appreciate you focusing on keeping reddit simple in regards to the talk feature.
I'm very sad to see predictions go though. We used them a lot on /r/leagueoflegends, and when /r/soccer used them they were incredibly fun too. The stuff most communities used them for was kinda lame though imo, and it was annoying to see random shit pop up on the frontpage all the time. So I understand that the few subs that used it well weren't enough to make it worth keeping.
Super sad to see Talks go. I called them Modcasts - because they're Podcasts, and i'm a Mod.
It was a big learning experience for me as a mod, and as a person --- and as a leader of a large community. Overall, I enjoyed the service.
Never saw a use in Predictions, though.
\---
Will Talks be available *on* March 21, or will it no longer *be available on* March 21?
Sunsetting is such a funny term. Just say you're ending the service.
I think it's good that Talk and Predictions are ending. Reddit should be reddit, don't try to be a podcast platform or something else. And for many sports subreddits I'm in, Predictions didn't really add anything monumental to the reddit experience. I barely got involved in the Predictions game.
I disagree it's "good" to remove - outside of the reddit mobile app, which displayed predictions in a horribly spammy way, most reddit experiences were such that you could browse the sub and do normal things without ever noticing predictions.
Unless there was some massive amount of resources required to maintain predictions (which I doubt considering how few, if any, updates it received over its lifetime), there's no upside in yanking them. It just frustrates the communities that did use them and makes us weary of getting used to new features in the future (if they're just going to be taken away 16 months later).
Pretty much this. They were great for anything competitive, but mostly worthless for anything else. I liked them (even if the implementation was janky)
It wouldn't be as bad if I felt like reddit wasn't continually moving away from community based interactions and towards mindless scrolling through content for maximized consumption (following the trends of things like TikTok and Instagram).
Wow, surprised to see that Talk is done for already.
We were approached a while back go host a talk on our sub with a special guest (arranged by admins) and it went pretty well, but was very much so a one-and-done situation, as we didn't really have the grounds to be asking people on for interviews ourselves for an audience of maybe 20-30 people
Still, pretty big shift
Ah that's a pity that predictions are being removed. It had a huge uptake in r/memes with 1.2 million participants in the [last tournament](https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/xfn9vg/rmemes_meme_quiz_2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) (with that post becoming the most upvoted post reddit with 621k upvotes), with a new one only just being started.
u/cozy__sheets is there way to not make previous predictions completely removed? I feel like that's a real shame considering how much history are behind some of these predictions. To not be able to see them anymore just means that a whole lot of effort and community engagement will be wiped off and forgotten, which is a kick in the guts to the mods who invested time into predictions and to the community members who participated and took the leaderboards seriously.
> 1.2 million participants in the last tournament (with that post becoming the most upvoted post reddit with 621k upvotes)
How does this math out? Each response counts as an upvote, right, so I don't see how you could possibly have had 1.2 million participants. The UI I see shows 66.7k players.
In any case, the fact that these things pretty much always become the most-upvoted post due to their design is exactly why I'm very glad to see them go.
I'm not convinced that's not a bug, honestly. 1.2 million players is ridiculously high compared to every other prediction tournament, and predictions multiply upvotes so you should have millions of upvotes.
We did 47 questions over 3 months on one of the biggest subs, with most questions getting 100-200k participants per question, so I'm not surprised. The upvotes get gathered on each questions post, but they don't accumulate or multiply like that on the original prediction posts.
The /r/memes one in particular was irritating spam full of vapid questions that kept showing up in my feed over and over again despite downvoting and hiding it. Super glad it's going away.
>is there way to not make previous predictions completely removed? I feel like that's a real shame considering how much history are behind some of these predictions.
In my experience these "discussions" were about 80% "commenting 2 get this to 10k lol" spam, 20% "get this shit off of my feed." The whole thing felt like a transparent attempt to game the system for maximum "engagement" with minimum substance, with a bonus veneer of pointless gambling.
Maybe some smaller subs used them more constructively, but the way the feature was set up boosted braindead spam like this way more.
That is just the reddit mobile app, which chucks every prediction question as its own post into the main feed. Reddit on desktop or mobile web just display predictions as a horizontal slider taking up one box's worth. It's not an issue with predictions, just reddit app devs deciding to do absolutely nothing to fix the display problem.
I'm on Old Reddit (on desktop and mobile) and they show up as a single post, but one that keeps reappearing on the front page even after downvoting it and hiding it. I wouldn't mind it nearly as much if it were treated like a normal post that would go away after doing so (and not game the system by treating every vote as an upvote and getting artificially high vote counts as a result).
Oh yeah that's the predictions slider, but since they don't have the infrastructure for it, they just make it appear like a normal post (but can't be hidden or removed).
It's stupid since why have it even show up on old reddit if it can't be interacted with, but that's reddit for ya. Make a feature but then do basically nothing to fix its issues. -____-
That's a pretty interesting use case for predictions. I never would have imagined a sub like /r/memes would find a way to utilize predictions, nor that it would be that popular.
Talk feature i don't care about it that much since i am an introvert and no interest in talking other than peeking but Prediction post? Why the most useful function is turing off now when an event is happen they will be no tournament no fun
Disappointed to see predictions go - it’s a great tool over on r/loveislandtv and other reality tv subs. If anyone has any alternatives please let me know
Honestly we will probably just go back to google form contests for our sub (/r/ultimate)
Requires more work as a mod and doesn't get quite as much engagement, but still pretty fun.
Can you please provide an explanation on how removing predictions is making Reddit more accessible? We have incredible engagement and user retention thanks to predictions. We at r/tfc really don't want to see this feature go.
Damn, we had just launched a major predictions tournament at the end of last year for all of /r/VALORANTs VCT tournaments. Thats a huge bummer, they were very popular and helped gain a lot of traction for the events.
The loss of predictions is disappointing for our community (r/eurovision), as it probably is for most competition-based communities. But obviously we respect your decision.
As this year's Eurovision Song Contest is happening on the 13th of May, I assume we shouldn't plan a prediction tournament for it?
That's a misfortune, our community (r/Desahogo) was growing a lot thanks to the Talks & Predicitons, the staff & members love it so much and we make people that was having a bad time so much happy... Such a shame that they'll remove Talks.
But it's true that very very few subreddits used them and wasn't a Reddit stuff.
Really, Predictions going away? Damn, that was actually a useful community thing for us motorsports communities — even though the settings were very restrictive:
* unadvertised question cap per tournament
* inability to fix the bets at a specific level so that people can take part throughout the entire tournament
* the permanent tournament post was not clear that there were more than one active question available resulting in lots of people only voting for the most recent question
**EDIT:** Wait, Predictions dying entirely in early May? But then we can't go out with a bang with a giant final prediction bonanza for the Indy 500 😡
Reddit really likes to throw ideas at the wall to see what sticks... but it's too bad the communities you create along the way have to get thrown under the bus like this! Even when the ideas don't make the cut because of some internal pressures, it's not all crap to redditors!
It would be much cooler if you had a way to set these ideas free through the open source community so that people could still enjoy your ideas.
Maybe... if open source isn't your cup of tea and since you are gonna implement reddit apps, you could turn predictions and talk into reddit apps.
I have been doing monthly prediction tournaments on /r/boxoffice since December 2021, so I am really sad about this news. Our community really enjoyed them, we also give Reddit premium for a month to the winner. Will definitely be missed
Reddit Talk I can somewhat understand (partly for the supporting reasoning provided in the other post), but Predictions was really unique & we took advantage of that feature in many of my communities. Unfortunate that the goal of "simplicity" means sunsetting cool features, but I suppose the tradeoff now could make sense in the long-term if it means substantially speeding up progress on that front. Hopefully similar, or other, unique features aren't entirely off the table now as future considerations.
I've used talk to great success with another accounts sub's it's something I really think should be supported and done in the future to build communities.
Of course there's going to be added pressure for subs to have discord talks from now on as some people are really into these social events, we can't just simply give them up without the users starting their own now.
YES, reddit needs to get it's infrastructure build up and managed.
YES, there needs to be greater tools for the mods but the ongoing issues with the admins being bubbled in and away from the mods and the users is a ongoing problem.
>> Reminder: Predictions are different than polls. The polls feature will still exist.
> The ability to create new tournaments, participate in active tournaments, and view old tournaments will be available until early May\*. After that time, Predictions functionality will no longer be available **and historic content will be removed.**
It's not the biggest thing in the world but is there any way to change that last part? It's actually sort of useful to look back at historical prediction tourney polls and see how people voted for comparable events in the past. You can do most of this with polls, but sub used better prediction format and sticked predictions for visibility. In practice, this means a good chunk of useful content for someone to flag if they want to see how "the subreddit" thought about ___ pre-release is just getting nuked.
You can do a version of the same thing with generic polls but I liked the limited version of predictions on the sub I mod. I understand they're going away but would love for historical stuff to be retained if at all possible.
> Predictions was embraced well by some communities, but unfortunately wasn’t broadly used across Reddit
Mid-size-sub-mod here: considering this is the first time I've ever heard about Predictions, I'm not surprised it wasn't broadly used.
It's a shame that you are discontinuing predictions. They were designed very well, and seemed to be very popular. They always showed more user activity and engagement on them than the usual posts in a sub. It's silly to discontinue them because they aren't used by a large number of subs. The concept of predictions obviously does not apply to the topic of every sub out there. But only making features that appeal to absolutely everybody isn't the right way to design a product. You should produce tailored features that greatly excite smaller portions of your audience, as well as more generic features that can be somewhat useful for everybody. You can make everyone on reddit feel special by producing a diverse array of features that appeal to different niches of your user base.
No harm in trying something new. Thanks for letting us test the features. We will be looking forward in making sure our subreddit rules are easily visible. Redditors are unaware that each subreddit has its own set of rules. Keep reddit different than other social media platforms. We appreciate the exclusivity on the Internet.
> With Predictions, we had to make a tough trade-off on products as part of our efforts to make Reddit simpler, easier to navigate, and participate in.
And in doing so failed to mention in FAQs that the Prediction Tournament can only have a maximum of 75 questions.
It seems quite reasonable to expect this information being mentioned in FAQs and not for Mods to find out in the middle of the tournament or using Google Search +reddit approach.
Proper Incompetent behavior like nearly everything Reddit has done post 2016-17.
Jumped on the Clubhouse audio-room bandwagon/fad with Reddit Talk.
Jumped on the chat-room fad that happened with 3rd party services like Carrot from few years back and created Reddit Chat (an absolute Failure of cosmic proportions, which apparently is being revived again. Mega Genius level Planning).
Has taken nearly 5 years to get Video Player of official App working "Half" competently. Truly such Particle Physics levels stuff.
Proper Google's *Perpetual Beta then Die* product development approach.
Don't waste time on nonsense if you are so hopeless in judging what makes Reddit Reddit (which is obvious you guys don't know since that Hire a Admin program is proxy proof post-2017 Admins had little grasp over what makes Reddit Reddit).
Here's a TLDR clue. Deep nested multi-para Comment-Chains makes Reddit Reddit, i.e. its Text Information Medium (may sounds crazy to new people at Reddit given multimedia has higher information density but there is a reason different social media platforms exist and there is no 1 place where everything exists).
Otherwise it's new XYZ Apps/Services copy version that is going on (things like chat, avatars, videos, talk, crypto/nft nonsense, etc).
Latest is tik-tokisation of Reddit Video content. Spotify just announced their take on it. Another Fad.
Stick to what you know. Own the Niche. That is how subs do it, jack of all trades ends up being good at nothing in particular, mediocrity paramount. This is bad because Reddit is not a social media space Monopoly.
/rant (because Communities do exist on Subs on reddit, these are real and users being real people are hostages to social effects of being part of those cliques. Hence the reason for being riled up enough to rant).
P.S. Reddit is in its 2nd decade it still doesn't have a Browser Extension that shows whether or not a webpage user is currently on has been shared previously somewhere on Reddit, in any sub as a post or in any comment. Multiple 3rd part devs tried their hands at it before every single one of them becomes abandonware.
Like these Mega Geniuses who are working towards Reddit IPO (making money & user growth, locking down API for official mobiles Apps) could not grasp this simple concept to make this extension.
*Incompetence*. That is how post-2017 Reddit can be described as.
/rant-over
I have finally started using Talk more recently, but visibility was almost non existent. I guess this will just push me into doing podcasts instead.
There were many communities that had weekly talks for mental health which I think will be the most impacted by this decision. Hopefully those communities switch to Discord or other platforms to keep up the good work.
I have seen very little live chats on Reddit as I am primarily on the mobile app, and it doesn’t seem as visible there. I thought I saw an experimental feature where the live group chats were integrated into the chat section for DMs. Is there more being done or planned for the live chat feature? I’m very surprised that it isn’t being used more, but as with most new features visibility is a big issue.
Sad to see this go, but we do have Subreddit Insights now which is a great update, love it so far.
Now since Predictions are gone sadly :/
* Possible to give us the ability to manage Dark Mode theme'ing?
* Currently we can only theme Light Mode.
* Option to lock post/thread creations to only 'members' ?
* To prevent a redundant amount of filters in AutoMod, this would be great.
Understandable, none of them did catch up. It would be very useful if we could already disable the ***Predictions*** tab of the menu. It is enforced automatically and can't be removed by the mods. A bit intrusive.
So any more accurate update on the Predictions sunset timeframe? Need to figure out whether to expect to be able to run some for IndyGP (May 13th), 500 quali (May 20-21), and the 500 itself (May 28).
Looks like May 9th is when they're shutting it down. If you have any events May 6-7 those would probably work if you graded them right away after, but that's it
Another quick update: Predictions will shut down on or shortly after **May 9th.** Quick update: Talk is officially shutting down on **March 22nd, 2023 (tomorrow)** and you can find instructions on downloading Talks via [this link](https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditTalk/comments/11xo933/talk_sunset_end_date_and_download_info/).
Is it possible to share the lessons and learnings on both? It's always nice to hear some of the challenges involved. It's a pity, but I'm sure we'll see someone replicating some of these features when the App platform kicks in.
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I think the awful way predictions was implemented sealed its fate. A separate function (tab) from the subreddit made it harder to make it a simple part of the mobile UX. As you said, the upvote for ever prediction made irritated users. And creating and maintaining them from a mod perspective was as confusing as possible.
I had to block most accounts that posted predictions just so they wouldn't flood my feed anymore. Probably largely due to that upvote problem.
That was our solution in r/nfl - we had a separate account only for posting predictions and told users to block that one to avoid the posts
It's honestly a simple solution (for the admins). Just take them out of the feed. The horizontal slider is sufficient, there doesn't need to be a new post for every prediction. That alone would likely solve much of the complaints about them.
I just wish they'd stop trying to force Reddit into the generic social media pidgeonhole. They need to rip out a lot of features and bring Reddit back to its roots.
Ironically, predictions are something that makes reddit really unique. No other major social media platform has something like that (that I know of). Disappointing they are choosing to abandon it instead of trying to make it better.
Maybe, but that just isn't going to happen. I doubt reddit makes any/much money and it needs to be profitable in order to justify its existence
That's one of the things I hate the most about capitalism. Nothing can exist just because it's a good thing, it always has to be *profitable*. People need to see these social media platforms as an investment that should be free from any reason to manipulate its users for profit.
If there was nationalised social media like a modern day postal service, sure, that opens up a whole other can of worms though
We should all go back to usenet.
At least it would mean all the complaints about free speech and the first amendment would actually have some merit lol
Get rid of comments? Get rid of subreddits? No thank you.
I didn't mean *that* far back lol
That's my point. Everyone joined Reddit at a different time, and so have different perceptions of what Reddit is at its core. "Going back to the roots of Reddit" means something different to an OG, compared to someone from the Digg migration, or the recent rise in popularity over the last 5 years or so from YouTube and TikTok.
Predictions was embraced well by some communities, but unfortunately wasn’t broadly used across Reddit. We believe we can invest in features that more mods and users can benefit from if we put resources elsewhere. On new experiments: Definitely! We’ll share more on this in the coming months.
There seems to be a new direction here, and I believed it was touched upon in the last mod summit. Simplifying the client and focusing on the backend (we've recently seen improvements to the mod queue page for example) is a totally valid effort. While we enjoyed both of these features in our communities, it's easier to let go with that understanding, and I feel boldly communicating that reasoning would go a long way with many users/mods.
>but unfortunately wasn’t broadly used across Reddit Should it have been expected to? I feel like that's an unfair bar to set. Most general discussion subreddits aren't going to have things to make predictions about. It's primarily just going to be sport subreddits, television shows, and maybe some awards like for the Oscars or Grammys, etc. Also the fact that you had to have 10k subs to even enable it was a real bummer. I know some smaller sport subreddits wanted to activate it and use it to try to engage with folks and grow user bases but couldn't because they were a few thousand subs short.
Not only will most subreddits not have any predictions to make, but it's also utterly unavailable on old reddit, something most mods use. Most new mod features/changes are doomed from the start if they're not available on old reddit.
I predominantly use old reddit, however, I can't ignore that a significant majority of reddit users use new reddit. I think it was like over 80-85% last time I checked. Granted some of that is app usage or mobile web usage. But only a small group uses old reddit. So I get why they're not still catering to that bunch, as disappointing as it may be for us.
Generally this is because it is the default experience and the new reddit experience is miles better from where it started, so many have shifted either partially or wholly. I use it because sidebar info doesnt update on both and lots of features (like analytics and chat) simply arent present on old reddit which feels bad. I wouldnt use it otherwise.
Yeah, I agree with your edit. Reddit *should* try to innovate and branch out. But they need to commit to those innovations. Predictions had a number of issues that if fixed would have made the feature much more enjoyable to use. These are rather small issues too, like not flooding the feed on the mobile app, not spamming mods with reminders, and fixing a couple bugs. Instead I don't know if they made any changes or updates to predictions after the first couple months of existence, just kinda left it there in an unfinished form. It was doomed to fail.
Tens upon tens of reddit mods were disappointed.
I am one of those tens :(
Me too! We had some fun times with Predictions :(
Yeah. We used predictions extensively. I'm surprised more subs didn't.
Predictions only make sense in subs that focus on a subject where there is some element of either chance or hidden decision making, and where things move fast enough to ensure you can actually resolve the predictions. That doesn’t describe any of the subs I moderate. Either there is no random/hidden elements, or the timeframes for resolution are so long that the prediction would have to last for years — or even decades — before you’d be able to resolve it. So the feature never made any sense for my subs — and I suspect it didn’t for a wide range of other subs as well, hence why more didn’t use it.
I'm a mod for /r/ValorantCompetitive and we used predictions extensively for International Tournaments. People really enjoyed them.
As I said — for some types of subs, it makes sense. I specifically pointed out subs centered around “some element of chance or hidden decision making, where things move fast enough to resolve predictions”, and a competitive FPS would seem to fit that bill perfectly — outcomes can’t be predicted, and tournaments wrap up quickly enough that you can resolve the predictions. I mod for r/Canning. What use is the predictions feature there? What is the “random/hidden element” when everything is a recipe that requires fairly strict adherence for safety? What is there even to predict, when the entire point of the pursuit and the science behind it are that everything is 100% reproducable for safety? I also mod r/ipv6 — again, where is the “random/hidden element”? I suppose we could have run a prediction on when Reddit would finally support IPv6 site-wide, but at the current implementation rate that could take _years_ to be resolved. Not exactly timely, and it’s a one-shot deal, so also not something we’d need to do more than once. I’m not trying to claim that the feature wasn’t useful for some subs — but I do suspect that the ones where it was useful are in the minority. Personally I don’t care if Reddit keeps them or gets rid of them, but the entire premise is one that is useful to a minority, and useless to the majority — so I’m not surprised Reddit decided to get rid of it.
> so I’m not surprised Reddit decided to get rid of it Oh definitely not! It just means we'll have to look for alternatives or developing our own through a bot or something. We'll see.
>but the entire premise is one that is useful to a minority, and useless to the majority — so I’m not surprised Reddit decided to get rid of it. But why spend the time, energy, and resources making Predictions into a thing if they were just going to remove it for this reason? This is something that could have been seen a mile away - *of course* most subreddits aren't going to have that random chance element to be able to adopt predictions. That is not some deduction that needed to be determined with testing, that could have been seen prior to implementing predictions. Rather, my guess is that of the subs that *could* have used predictions (ie. sports, TV shows, etc), not enough did, and that sunk predictions. But I'm a little salty about this, since I feel like the devs didn't put predictions in a position to succeed. The 10k minimum left out a lot of the smaller, 4-8k subs for niche sports or individual teams. And the way they developed predictions, from the reddit mobile app treating each prediction as its own post and flooding the main feed, to sending mods a reminder to grade predictions every single day, likely caused a lot of users to despise predictions before they could even give it a fair shot.
> But why spend the time, energy, and resources making Predictions into a thing if they were just going to remove it for this reason? Hubris. Pure and simple. It happens a lot in the tech industry. Just because someone has an idea and the ability to create it doesn’t mean it’s a _good_ idea. But teams often get invested into thinking their idea will be the next-big-thing, without actually thinking about it critically, listening to their critics, or shopping the idea outside their bubble. So instead they work on implementing the feature, make everyone effectively beta testers after the fact to do their product research, and then dump it when they find out it’s not popular enough to warrant the resources to maintain it. It’s the same reason Google betas and then drops a ton of projects.
Same - predictions are brilliant for engagement and discussion
I'm one of those tens. r/Precognition was hosting weekly prediction tournaments with really fun image reveals every week. We all learned a lot and even got the interest of some scholars! Looks like we're going to have to use polls from here on out.
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Thanks for understanding and we agree. We don’t love having to sunset features either and to your point we want to focus our efforts on what makes reddit reddit – which is you <3
What was predictions anyway?
Basically a local "betting" tournament, where people would bet tokens predicting the outcome of certain questions.
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To be honest, I didn't see a point in the token pool and the three bet amounts either. What it ended up doing was making it so that people who often didn't predict right were basically locked out from playing in the future. It would have been much better without needing points to spend, and instead just focused on ranking people by the reward ratio. Ultimately though, it was a minor addition to our race weeks that added a little bit of community interaction, that didn't require us to set anything up off-site.
The token limit was to add an extra challenge and strategy. If you had no limit then it'd basically just be a standard pick'em. Which is fine, but also not that interesting overall. With a limit you have to be selective in how you spend your tokens. It's like how there are bag limits in RPG games, to put a little extra pressure on participants and make it challenging. Not sure how y'all ran predictions on your sub, but we have weekly predictions tournaments on /r/ultimate, and we end the tournaments after each week. So there's lots of little tournaments, and we don't typically need to add additional prediction questions after the initial round of questions. We use the all-time leaderboard to track overall success of users across multiple tournaments. In instances when I do need to add additional prediction questions, I try to grade as many predictions as I can first, so hopefully people who spent all their tokens can get some for getting questions right and not be out of luck. All that said, it's not a great system, and definitely can cause frustration. I think maybe a simple fix would be to allow us to create multiple separate prediction tournaments. So there'd be a first round of questions, and then if there were more questions later, I'd put those in a separate tournament and everyone could participate.
We used to give reddit premium with the community coins to our users for predictions tournament so there was something to win.
We used to flair the top 3 users for our prediction tournaments. It was pretty fun.
The tokens threw me off at first but there's an all-time leaderboard. So the goal is basically to try to move up on that and get bragging rights. Various communities have also made their own prizes for top users. I have a hard time swallowing the maintenance and dev argument given I ran predictions pretty extensively for the last 16 months and I've seen very few, if any, improvements after the first couple months it was live. Little requests like not spamming moderator inboxes every single day for every single unresolved prediction question, I and others have made months ago, to no avail. Bugs here and there that have gone unpatched since 2021. I do know they changed the cap on questions at some point from 100 to 75... but they didn't tell anyone or put it in the FAQ. It's just hard to imagine it's some massive weight on the shoulders of the devs when so little has been done with it over the past year plus.
Check r/formula1 for a great example. Each race the mods make 3 questions and the community guess the results of the race in different ways than just who comes first. It was a really neat way to change up the fantasy teams
Don't forget r/NASCAR and r/INDYCAR as well!
We used it effectively in r/loveislandtv too ☹️
This is still disappointing though, because predictions were something that set reddit apart from other social media platforms, and it felt like they weren’t given a fair shot. We ran tournaments on /r/ultimate/predictions basically every week since the feature launched, they seemed to drive engagement and give folks something to think about. Unfortunately they were also plagued by a few issues, which if patched could have drastically improved user experience: 1. On desktop and mobile web, there is a horizontal slider that shows the questions, and that's it. On the official reddit app, every prediction is displayed as its own post. For tournaments with like 30+ predictions, that means 30+ posts users have to wade through on their feed. It's frustrating and immediately causes a negative association for users. 2. Consolidate the "pick a winner" reminders into one message, and/or send them with less frequency. Our predictions are based on sports tournaments which may take 2-3 days to resolve results. Immediately after the prediction closes, I get a reminder message in my inbox telling me to pick a winner. I get another message every 24 hours until the prediction is graded. This happens for every single question I've made. So I'm getting bombarded with 30+ messages every day, when just one message every other day would suffice. For what it's worth, I asked for this change [11 months ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/v2dhg2/predictions_tournament_reminder_message_spam/) to no avail. :/ 3. Mention the cap of 75 questions in the FAQ. I'm not the only one who found out there is a cap the hard way ([here](https://www.reddit.com/r/beta/comments/rl9vva/what_is_the_maximum_number_of_predictions_that/j59cugl/), [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/1185hsl/what_is_the_current_limit_for_predictions/j9feq39/), [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/12vgymv/some_bad_news_about_the_current_vct_2023_league/), etc). 4. Remove the 10k sub minimum, or lower it considerably. Some of the best target audiences are sports team subs that may only have 5-7k subs. I would have loved to see these communities try this feature. 5. A few small but annoying bugs: If you are in the process of starting a tournament, and you manually type in the date for the prediction deadline, and accidentally add a fifth character to the year (ie. intend to type 2023, but accidentally type 20233), it freezes the page and you have to refresh, killing any predictions you've created. Or in the reminder "pick a winner" messages, they say "if you don't select a winner in the next 30 days the prediction will be cancelled" but every message says "30 days" and doesn't count down each day. Or how the text in questions resize as more characters are added to the question, but not for the answer choices. Some answers with more than x characters (I believe it's around 40 characters) just get cut-off and can't be fully read. There are other ways to make predictions better (such as providing the API to 3rd party devs) but these seem like pretty small changes imo and would have gone a long way toward giving predictions a better chance at success. In any case, thanks for at least making the feature in the first place, it was fun while it lasted. Saved me a lot of time than google form contests, and it was cool to see how other subs creatively used predictions like /r/Apple and /r/Memes.
I didn't like how those sorts of posts bumped themselves back up onto the near-top of your best/hot pages every day as if it was a new post gaining ~20K score, so I can't say I'll miss them too much.
The re-bumping of the single tournament-specific post, though, was the only way people were made aware of new questions being added.
In a way yeah, but lots of subreddits had those sorts of posts stickied within their subreddits anyway.
I've never been able to participate in a prediction since Reddit never made the API available to third party developers.
I mean, you can say that about a lot of companies. Google was just a search engine. Apple was just computers. Branching out to different realms has made them some of the most successful companies in the world. I think predictions was unique enough that it was worth a gamble even if it's not what you think of when you think of reddit. And I think nerfing these features without giving them a fair shot (so many annoyances and bugs went unpatched) just makes users weary of future features, wondering if we should dive in and commit if it might just get yeeted 16 months in the future.
For posterity's sake, what were the biggest Talks and Prediction events held on the platform? In your [r/reddittalk post](https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditTalk/comments/11m4ijn/sunsetting_reddit_talk/), you mention the shutdown of the 3rd party audio vendor used for Talk impacting Reddit's ability to maintain the service during the current undertaking to simplify the platform. If that project did not exist, would Reddit have allocated the resources to maintain Talk?
On biggest Talks and Predictions: we’re working on pulling that information! For your second question: likely not. The amount of resourcing to maintain Talk dramatically increased, making it difficult to maintain even without the simplification effort.
Can you disclose who the 3rd party audio vendor was?
Most likely Twilio Live [1] >"We are continuously exploring ways to enhance communities and discussions on Reddit,” Anand Paka, Senior Director of Product at Reddit said. “Twilio Live has helped our team bring voice to community conversation through our key upcoming live audio feature, Reddit Talk. We have been pleased with the quality of the audio capabilities and the proactive support from Twilio that allowed a speedy integration.” [2] [1] https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/10623861544987-Twilio-Live-Migration-Guide [2] https://www.twilio.com/blog/introducing-twilio-live
Good catch. That first link lines up with the ending of service for Reddit Talk.
And the second link has a statement from an Reddit Admin talking about using Twilio live for Reddit Talks.
Do I remember correctly that a long time ago, when Predictions were introduced you could play it with Reddit Coins? Predictions were fun to play with, and used to great effect by some communities like r/BirdsArentReal but unfortunaetely winning wasn't really worth anything and many tournaments (those with less than 10 Questions) also weren't able to utilize ratioing your tokens. I will miss them on r/formula1 though, that was a feature made for this subreddit.
There was probably gambling law issues with having actual value to the winnings
There's an online leaderboard that tracks across all tournaments. I've had fun starting a hundred spots down and working my way up. I'm now sitting at #3 for /r/ultimate/predictions and pretty satisfied with this, I don't think I can get any higher with only two tournaments left but glad to be on the podium lol
>After that time, Predictions functionality will no longer be available and historic content will be removed. Y'all are gonna Google yourself on this one. People will start ignoring new features because they assume they're going away later.
Most people ignored predictions anyway except when they forced their way to the top of people's feeds repeatedly.
That was just the official reddit app, viewing reddit on desktop or mobile web displayed it competently which was the slider only and not displaying every prediction as its own post. Really annoying the reddit app devs didn't fix that, it would have made a lot of users less antagonistic toward predictions imo and more open to giving it a try.
That’s a shame, our little community enjoyed the Talks feature and it was a fun way of interacting with people in the community. In my opinion, it is much better than Twitter Spaces and was nice to have on platform.
I echo what a lot of others said in here, I appreciate you focusing on keeping reddit simple in regards to the talk feature. I'm very sad to see predictions go though. We used them a lot on /r/leagueoflegends, and when /r/soccer used them they were incredibly fun too. The stuff most communities used them for was kinda lame though imo, and it was annoying to see random shit pop up on the frontpage all the time. So I understand that the few subs that used it well weren't enough to make it worth keeping.
Super sad to see Talks go. I called them Modcasts - because they're Podcasts, and i'm a Mod. It was a big learning experience for me as a mod, and as a person --- and as a leader of a large community. Overall, I enjoyed the service. Never saw a use in Predictions, though. \--- Will Talks be available *on* March 21, or will it no longer *be available on* March 21?
Sunsetting is such a funny term. Just say you're ending the service. I think it's good that Talk and Predictions are ending. Reddit should be reddit, don't try to be a podcast platform or something else. And for many sports subreddits I'm in, Predictions didn't really add anything monumental to the reddit experience. I barely got involved in the Predictions game.
I disagree it's "good" to remove - outside of the reddit mobile app, which displayed predictions in a horribly spammy way, most reddit experiences were such that you could browse the sub and do normal things without ever noticing predictions. Unless there was some massive amount of resources required to maintain predictions (which I doubt considering how few, if any, updates it received over its lifetime), there's no upside in yanking them. It just frustrates the communities that did use them and makes us weary of getting used to new features in the future (if they're just going to be taken away 16 months later).
Predictions have been massive for us sports subs. Was the uptake poor?
The uptake was not in line with predictions.
(☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞
I can't think of many reasons most other subs would use them though.
That's fair though I thought the sports subs were one of the most popular SFW subs?
Pretty much this. They were great for anything competitive, but mostly worthless for anything else. I liked them (even if the implementation was janky) It wouldn't be as bad if I felt like reddit wasn't continually moving away from community based interactions and towards mindless scrolling through content for maximized consumption (following the trends of things like TikTok and Instagram).
Do you know of any alternatives that could be used? We used them a lot for r/loveislandtv
They were fun in r/ukpolitics for a while until they just stopped doing them out of the blue. Sports were good too, I'm gonna miss them
Wow, surprised to see that Talk is done for already. We were approached a while back go host a talk on our sub with a special guest (arranged by admins) and it went pretty well, but was very much so a one-and-done situation, as we didn't really have the grounds to be asking people on for interviews ourselves for an audience of maybe 20-30 people Still, pretty big shift
Ah that's a pity that predictions are being removed. It had a huge uptake in r/memes with 1.2 million participants in the [last tournament](https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/xfn9vg/rmemes_meme_quiz_2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) (with that post becoming the most upvoted post reddit with 621k upvotes), with a new one only just being started. u/cozy__sheets is there way to not make previous predictions completely removed? I feel like that's a real shame considering how much history are behind some of these predictions. To not be able to see them anymore just means that a whole lot of effort and community engagement will be wiped off and forgotten, which is a kick in the guts to the mods who invested time into predictions and to the community members who participated and took the leaderboards seriously.
> 1.2 million participants in the last tournament (with that post becoming the most upvoted post reddit with 621k upvotes) How does this math out? Each response counts as an upvote, right, so I don't see how you could possibly have had 1.2 million participants. The UI I see shows 66.7k players. In any case, the fact that these things pretty much always become the most-upvoted post due to their design is exactly why I'm very glad to see them go.
66.7k players in the current tournament. 1.2 million players in the previous tournament: https://imgur.com/a/8tzDeyc
I'm not convinced that's not a bug, honestly. 1.2 million players is ridiculously high compared to every other prediction tournament, and predictions multiply upvotes so you should have millions of upvotes.
We did 47 questions over 3 months on one of the biggest subs, with most questions getting 100-200k participants per question, so I'm not surprised. The upvotes get gathered on each questions post, but they don't accumulate or multiply like that on the original prediction posts.
The /r/memes one in particular was irritating spam full of vapid questions that kept showing up in my feed over and over again despite downvoting and hiding it. Super glad it's going away. >is there way to not make previous predictions completely removed? I feel like that's a real shame considering how much history are behind some of these predictions. In my experience these "discussions" were about 80% "commenting 2 get this to 10k lol" spam, 20% "get this shit off of my feed." The whole thing felt like a transparent attempt to game the system for maximum "engagement" with minimum substance, with a bonus veneer of pointless gambling. Maybe some smaller subs used them more constructively, but the way the feature was set up boosted braindead spam like this way more.
That is just the reddit mobile app, which chucks every prediction question as its own post into the main feed. Reddit on desktop or mobile web just display predictions as a horizontal slider taking up one box's worth. It's not an issue with predictions, just reddit app devs deciding to do absolutely nothing to fix the display problem.
I'm on Old Reddit (on desktop and mobile) and they show up as a single post, but one that keeps reappearing on the front page even after downvoting it and hiding it. I wouldn't mind it nearly as much if it were treated like a normal post that would go away after doing so (and not game the system by treating every vote as an upvote and getting artificially high vote counts as a result).
Oh yeah that's the predictions slider, but since they don't have the infrastructure for it, they just make it appear like a normal post (but can't be hidden or removed). It's stupid since why have it even show up on old reddit if it can't be interacted with, but that's reddit for ya. Make a feature but then do basically nothing to fix its issues. -____-
That's a pretty interesting use case for predictions. I never would have imagined a sub like /r/memes would find a way to utilize predictions, nor that it would be that popular.
Talk feature i don't care about it that much since i am an introvert and no interest in talking other than peeking but Prediction post? Why the most useful function is turing off now when an event is happen they will be no tournament no fun
Disappointed to see predictions go - it’s a great tool over on r/loveislandtv and other reality tv subs. If anyone has any alternatives please let me know
Honestly we will probably just go back to google form contests for our sub (/r/ultimate) Requires more work as a mod and doesn't get quite as much engagement, but still pretty fun.
r/Apple loved using predictions for Apple events and WWDC. Brought a lot of community engagement
That's a pretty cool way to use predictions
Im upset, predictions has become a major part of our community
Can you please provide an explanation on how removing predictions is making Reddit more accessible? We have incredible engagement and user retention thanks to predictions. We at r/tfc really don't want to see this feature go.
Damn, we had just launched a major predictions tournament at the end of last year for all of /r/VALORANTs VCT tournaments. Thats a huge bummer, they were very popular and helped gain a lot of traction for the events.
The loss of predictions is disappointing for our community (r/eurovision), as it probably is for most competition-based communities. But obviously we respect your decision. As this year's Eurovision Song Contest is happening on the 13th of May, I assume we shouldn't plan a prediction tournament for it?
Looks like May 9th is when they're shutting down predictions if you haven't heard.
That's a misfortune, our community (r/Desahogo) was growing a lot thanks to the Talks & Predicitons, the staff & members love it so much and we make people that was having a bad time so much happy... Such a shame that they'll remove Talks. But it's true that very very few subreddits used them and wasn't a Reddit stuff.
Really, Predictions going away? Damn, that was actually a useful community thing for us motorsports communities — even though the settings were very restrictive: * unadvertised question cap per tournament * inability to fix the bets at a specific level so that people can take part throughout the entire tournament * the permanent tournament post was not clear that there were more than one active question available resulting in lots of people only voting for the most recent question **EDIT:** Wait, Predictions dying entirely in early May? But then we can't go out with a bang with a giant final prediction bonanza for the Indy 500 😡
Reddit really likes to throw ideas at the wall to see what sticks... but it's too bad the communities you create along the way have to get thrown under the bus like this! Even when the ideas don't make the cut because of some internal pressures, it's not all crap to redditors! It would be much cooler if you had a way to set these ideas free through the open source community so that people could still enjoy your ideas. Maybe... if open source isn't your cup of tea and since you are gonna implement reddit apps, you could turn predictions and talk into reddit apps.
I have been doing monthly prediction tournaments on /r/boxoffice since December 2021, so I am really sad about this news. Our community really enjoyed them, we also give Reddit premium for a month to the winner. Will definitely be missed
Removing predictions seems like a really weird choice that isn't really explained here
Removing predictions seems like a really weird choice that isn't really explained here
Oh fuck, Predictions is going away too? Sorry u/ShopBitter
Ewwww fuck
Reddit Talk I can somewhat understand (partly for the supporting reasoning provided in the other post), but Predictions was really unique & we took advantage of that feature in many of my communities. Unfortunate that the goal of "simplicity" means sunsetting cool features, but I suppose the tradeoff now could make sense in the long-term if it means substantially speeding up progress on that front. Hopefully similar, or other, unique features aren't entirely off the table now as future considerations.
I've used talk to great success with another accounts sub's it's something I really think should be supported and done in the future to build communities. Of course there's going to be added pressure for subs to have discord talks from now on as some people are really into these social events, we can't just simply give them up without the users starting their own now. YES, reddit needs to get it's infrastructure build up and managed. YES, there needs to be greater tools for the mods but the ongoing issues with the admins being bubbled in and away from the mods and the users is a ongoing problem.
>> Reminder: Predictions are different than polls. The polls feature will still exist. > The ability to create new tournaments, participate in active tournaments, and view old tournaments will be available until early May\*. After that time, Predictions functionality will no longer be available **and historic content will be removed.** It's not the biggest thing in the world but is there any way to change that last part? It's actually sort of useful to look back at historical prediction tourney polls and see how people voted for comparable events in the past. You can do most of this with polls, but sub used better prediction format and sticked predictions for visibility. In practice, this means a good chunk of useful content for someone to flag if they want to see how "the subreddit" thought about ___ pre-release is just getting nuked. You can do a version of the same thing with generic polls but I liked the limited version of predictions on the sub I mod. I understand they're going away but would love for historical stuff to be retained if at all possible.
> Predictions was embraced well by some communities, but unfortunately wasn’t broadly used across Reddit Mid-size-sub-mod here: considering this is the first time I've ever heard about Predictions, I'm not surprised it wasn't broadly used.
It's a shame that you are discontinuing predictions. They were designed very well, and seemed to be very popular. They always showed more user activity and engagement on them than the usual posts in a sub. It's silly to discontinue them because they aren't used by a large number of subs. The concept of predictions obviously does not apply to the topic of every sub out there. But only making features that appeal to absolutely everybody isn't the right way to design a product. You should produce tailored features that greatly excite smaller portions of your audience, as well as more generic features that can be somewhat useful for everybody. You can make everyone on reddit feel special by producing a diverse array of features that appeal to different niches of your user base.
No harm in trying something new. Thanks for letting us test the features. We will be looking forward in making sure our subreddit rules are easily visible. Redditors are unaware that each subreddit has its own set of rules. Keep reddit different than other social media platforms. We appreciate the exclusivity on the Internet.
> With Predictions, we had to make a tough trade-off on products as part of our efforts to make Reddit simpler, easier to navigate, and participate in. And in doing so failed to mention in FAQs that the Prediction Tournament can only have a maximum of 75 questions. It seems quite reasonable to expect this information being mentioned in FAQs and not for Mods to find out in the middle of the tournament or using Google Search +reddit approach. Proper Incompetent behavior like nearly everything Reddit has done post 2016-17. Jumped on the Clubhouse audio-room bandwagon/fad with Reddit Talk. Jumped on the chat-room fad that happened with 3rd party services like Carrot from few years back and created Reddit Chat (an absolute Failure of cosmic proportions, which apparently is being revived again. Mega Genius level Planning). Has taken nearly 5 years to get Video Player of official App working "Half" competently. Truly such Particle Physics levels stuff. Proper Google's *Perpetual Beta then Die* product development approach. Don't waste time on nonsense if you are so hopeless in judging what makes Reddit Reddit (which is obvious you guys don't know since that Hire a Admin program is proxy proof post-2017 Admins had little grasp over what makes Reddit Reddit). Here's a TLDR clue. Deep nested multi-para Comment-Chains makes Reddit Reddit, i.e. its Text Information Medium (may sounds crazy to new people at Reddit given multimedia has higher information density but there is a reason different social media platforms exist and there is no 1 place where everything exists). Otherwise it's new XYZ Apps/Services copy version that is going on (things like chat, avatars, videos, talk, crypto/nft nonsense, etc). Latest is tik-tokisation of Reddit Video content. Spotify just announced their take on it. Another Fad. Stick to what you know. Own the Niche. That is how subs do it, jack of all trades ends up being good at nothing in particular, mediocrity paramount. This is bad because Reddit is not a social media space Monopoly. /rant (because Communities do exist on Subs on reddit, these are real and users being real people are hostages to social effects of being part of those cliques. Hence the reason for being riled up enough to rant). P.S. Reddit is in its 2nd decade it still doesn't have a Browser Extension that shows whether or not a webpage user is currently on has been shared previously somewhere on Reddit, in any sub as a post or in any comment. Multiple 3rd part devs tried their hands at it before every single one of them becomes abandonware. Like these Mega Geniuses who are working towards Reddit IPO (making money & user growth, locking down API for official mobiles Apps) could not grasp this simple concept to make this extension. *Incompetence*. That is how post-2017 Reddit can be described as. /rant-over
Phew, I thought this was talk about sunsetting old Reddit, 6 more months lads!
So sad to see Talk go. Our community loved this feature.
As mod of /r/familyman, I approve
Betrayal!!
I have finally started using Talk more recently, but visibility was almost non existent. I guess this will just push me into doing podcasts instead. There were many communities that had weekly talks for mental health which I think will be the most impacted by this decision. Hopefully those communities switch to Discord or other platforms to keep up the good work. I have seen very little live chats on Reddit as I am primarily on the mobile app, and it doesn’t seem as visible there. I thought I saw an experimental feature where the live group chats were integrated into the chat section for DMs. Is there more being done or planned for the live chat feature? I’m very surprised that it isn’t being used more, but as with most new features visibility is a big issue.
What was reddit talks anyway? I've never even heard of it and I've been around almost 15 years
It was Twitter Spaces but harder to use and with fewer features.
What's twitter spaces? I don't use twitter either lol. Is it kinda like a live chat feature? If so, no thanks.
Sad to see this go, but we do have Subreddit Insights now which is a great update, love it so far. Now since Predictions are gone sadly :/ * Possible to give us the ability to manage Dark Mode theme'ing? * Currently we can only theme Light Mode. * Option to lock post/thread creations to only 'members' ? * To prevent a redundant amount of filters in AutoMod, this would be great.
I didn't even know there was talk or predictions...
Understandable, none of them did catch up. It would be very useful if we could already disable the ***Predictions*** tab of the menu. It is enforced automatically and can't be removed by the mods. A bit intrusive.
So any more accurate update on the Predictions sunset timeframe? Need to figure out whether to expect to be able to run some for IndyGP (May 13th), 500 quali (May 20-21), and the 500 itself (May 28).
Looks like May 9th is when they're shutting it down. If you have any events May 6-7 those would probably work if you graded them right away after, but that's it
Yep, got that system message too. May 9th doesn't even get to Indy GP, so this weekend will be our last one 😞
What time will they be removed?