Reddit's crappy app has code for a "get money for your karma" program
Reddit's crappy app has code for a "get money for your karma" program
Reddit could be working on a Contributor program, letting top contributors earn real-world money from the gold and karma they receive.
Excerpts from the link:
Fake internet points are finally worth something!
Now redditors can earn real money for their contributions to the Reddit community, based on the karma and gold they've been given.
How it works:
- Redditors give gold to posts, comments, or other contributions they think are really worth something.
- Eligible contributors that earn enough karma and gold can cash out their earnings for real money.
- Contributors apply to the program to see if they're eligible.
- Top contributors make top dollar. The more karma and gold contributors earn, the more money they can receive.
Not just anyone can be a contributor. To join and stay in the program, contributors need to meet a few requirements:\
- Be over 18 and live in the U.S.
- Only Safe for Work contributions qualify
- Earn xx gold and karma each month
- Provide verification information. You must have at least 10 gold and 100 karma to begin verification.
- NSFW accounts aren't eligible for the Contributors Program
Here's my take on this. Since this is from the latest version of Reddit's broken browser for a single site "official app", it's likely a recent development, triggered by recent changes in the platform. Reddit Inc. is likely worried about contributors leaving due to the app-pocalypse, and is trying to counter it by throwing them some spare cash.
And I'm going to be honest: holy fuck this sounds like a Bad Idea®. For three reasons.
The first one is demographics; since 47% of the users are Americans, and 21% of them are 10-19yo, it's safe to say that ~60% of the users are ineligible, and thus will only contribute for free.
Will they? People often don't mind contributing for free, as long as the others are in the same page. The picture changes once you get at least someone making money out of it - odds are that those 60% will disengage further.
The second reason is that Reddit Inc. is disregarding the fluff principle. If the money threshold is the number of upvotes and awards that someone gets per period of time, why would the person bother with high quality content? Or even quality content at all - it's easy to make up for lack of quality with quantity. For example, setting up a simple bot to scrape the top posts and repost them. (Is Reddit expecting the mods to delete those reposts? OH WAIT)
The third and final reason is who you expect to give awards to those people, before they feel pissed and discouraged and leave the program, breaking even further their trust in the platform. Who would even buy Reddit gold on first place? The Reddit community has been outright mocking Reddit gold for years, and the suckers actually buying it were the ones who were the most engaged and emotionally attached to the platform, to the point that they're willing to "help" it. (As if corporations need help, but whatever.) It would be a shame if Reddit happened to piss off exactly that demographic... like it did.
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Copying my comment from the other threads:
reddit started trialing a "Community Points" program in 2019 in /r/ethtrader, /r/cryptocurrency and /r/fortnite , where posters and commenters could earn "Community Points" that were supposedly backed up with crypto that you could eventually cash out. They announced an expansion of the program in December 2021 but, afaik, they never actually did so. Which might have something to do with the fact that one of the /r/cryptocurrency mods made $10,000 by selling community points. I don't know if the program has actively continued since then; maybe someone who was in the three trial communities can say.
My point is that reddit has been working on something similar to this program for at least five years now. And this article isn't based on any announcement by reddit, but by someone examining their source code. It's possible that this code has been present for a while and reddit has leaked it's existence to try to attract back some of their lost contributors. Or even that it hasn't been present but they included the old code in the newest app release and then pointed it out for the same reason.
In any case, this article isn't based on any official announcement, and reddit has been "trialing" a similar program for over four years. I wouldn't hold out any hope that this actually sees daylight anytime soon, or that it'll work well if it's actually released.
Good catch - community points is one of those things that I think that most people forgot completely about.
I feel like the current program is something else from the CPs. The CPs were likely the result of the "crypto boom" around 2017~8; by the way that this one is phrased and the restrictions it seems to me that they want to do it straight with dollars (otherwise the "US only" restriction wouldn't make sense). It's possible that they took some experience from the CP to run the new program, though.
And, regardless of older plans to do so, the timing is clearly connected to the API changes. Perhaps it was something that they've been planning, but decided to implement it now as damage control? Even the fact that they're pushing a bit further the idea now seems to be signs that they're concerned with the current state of the platform.
The CPs were likely the result of the “crypto boom” around 2017~8;
Oh this is definitely related to that. They started trialing the program in 2019, and it would've taken them time to program it. So late 2017-18 they decided crypto was something to incorporate, they had to figure out how, then program it, etc.
Honestly, my suspicion is that they had the bits of legacy code hanging around and decided to through them into the latest app release, then it gets "found" and a bunch of contributors who've left come back.
I'm also going to point out that stuff like this is one of the reasons reddit's never been profitable: Huffman keeps chasing shiny things. April Fool's things that cost them money to program, spiffy snoovatars that they expected to make money off of by selling the NFTs, reddit crypto, etc. The things he keeps focusing on show that he really doesn't understand the core value of reddit lies in it's communities and it's commentary. And that's why I'm convinced reddit is doomed: you're never going to make money selling something if you have no idea what you're selling or how valuable it is.
"Reddit has given away CP" is a statement that is appalling, and yet incredibly apropos given Steve Huffman, or the context of the conversation.
Sorry, I have nothing to add to this conversation, I couldn't resist the temptation. My apologies.