Reddit Introduces Gold Service to Keep Site Running Smoothly

If you love Reddit as much as Reddit users love Reddit, the thought of the popular social bookmarking site shutting down makes you scream “Oh Noes!” inwardly. Reddit is hoping to translate this same love into cash to keep the site humming along smoothly rather than crashing every time a new meme rears its awesome head.

In a blog post that went up on blog.reddit.com, the four engineers who run the service explain that they are working full time around the clock to keep the site going, and that they need more resources.

While many of the subscriber only features they describe are great ideas, we’re going to run with “a button you could press to smack someone in the face over the Internet” as being the best. Because, srsly, who doesn’t want to do that every single day. Right now, they are concretely offering:

-A trophy on your userpage
-access to a super-secret Reddit community
-the ability to turn off ads
-new options to sort your userpage

Right now the Reddit Gold service costs $29.99 per year, for a limited time, or $3.99 per month. We’re guessing they’ll start upping the fee within a month or so, so if you are a dedicated Reddit user, you may want to get it while its hot. When the blog post first went live on July 9, they were asking for suggestions as to what to charge, and it seems that the community responded with these numbers.