Cute idea, Reddit Inc., but ultimately flawed. You're simply showing that you don't understand your own users and how they use your platform.

Comments and text posts do play a huge role in Reddit, and those will probably get translated. However the topic is more often than not introduced by an image or a link. Text in the images will not get translated, and for the link you'd need to rely on a second machine translator.

Furthermore a lot of the comments require further context, that won't become "magically" available just because you translated it. I'll give you guys some examples:

• "Is it him or is it not? Of course it's him! The showgirls!"
• "I'll give you an gold award that is worth more than money! A-hai, hi-hi!"

If you read those and thought "what the fuck? I don't... I don't even..." - exactly. You might get them if you speak Italian (first one) or Portuguese (second one), but then you don't need the translation at all.

And you'll likely not need the translations from English to another language, given that ~half of the Reddit userbase are native English speakers, and the other half is heavily biased towards people who know English as L2+.

So? The rest of the site sucks shit through a straw.

We don't talk about Reddit here.

Automated translations are inherently flawed. It would have been better to open up community translation submissions

Who?

I guess I'm the one who subscribed to this community. But not for good news! ಠ_ಠ

This is the best summary I could come up with:

To start, posts can be translated into English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish.

Full translation of posts and comments seems to be Reddit’s plan, though, as the admin writes that “soon, your entire conversation experience on Reddit can be multilingual!”

The admin’s post also reminds users that Reddit is about to deprecate its previous coins system, meaning you soon won’t be able to thank a stranger for giving you gold.

The last day coins will work is Tuesday, September 12th, and according to the admin, Reddit has already deprecated the ability to give awards on the Old Reddit design and on the “mobile desktop experience” (which I am guessing means mobile web).

Reddit has promised that there will be some kind of awards system down the line but hasn’t yet shared details.

Android Authority found evidence in Reddit’s Android app that the new system may let users turn gold or Reddit karma into real money, which doesn’t sound like a great replacement.

The original article contains 327 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 50%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!