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.
Ny guess is they imagine it becoming like YouTube, where some popular tubers can monetize their channels and sometimes make a living. But that is also how Medium and Substack would, and both lose money and suck at the same time.
They want to turn redditors into instagram whores haha.
Have they seen redditors??
and is trying to counter it by throwing them some spare cash.
Reddit has no spare cash, Steve has pissed away better than three quarters of a billion dollars in venture capital. It’ll probably be RedditBux or an NFT or something.
I’d bet good money it’s the latter. Huffman strikes me as the type that thinks NFTs are worth something. Fucking idiot.
They already did NFT avatars, but they came out after the big backlash against NFTs so they called them by another name and left the NFT part out of the description.
Steve thinks everyone else is dumb and he’s the only smart one. Thus proving ignorance is bliss.
This was to be expected when Reddit’s board, u/spez, and his lackeys insulted & chased away users & mods.
fuck Reddit’s board. fuck u/spez, and his lackeys.
It’ll probably be RedditBux or an NFT or something.
The “US only” restriction makes me think that they’re actually planning to pay those people in dollars.
He’s dumb enough to think the SEC can regulate crypto worldwide though.
This is just going to encourage even more spammy, low quality, easily consumable clickbait content.
Good luck, Steve.I wonder if after this Silicon Valley realizes that there’s no infinite growth/money/potential and stops trying to position shit as such. Just make a product that holds up and doesn’t fold like a house of cards when it finally is being monetized.
Edit: And as a totally separate point, think about the mods! Loads of more work and zero pay while spammers “get rich”.
They can wait you out. They also make others usefull idiots that install their computers that do things for their true masters. They get others to violate your rights.
“Smart things” rant: Ads can be thoght of as propaganda, psycological war tactics. “Smart” things are pushed on (at least) amaricans really intensely. Building these really sexy displays as close to the front as possable (pushing unsposored otems to the unsexy isles) showing this omnipotent caring girlfriend in a small box some come with a monitor. Saying “Hi, im alexa. This is a small but high quality speaker I can talk to you from… (im verry buisness casual but will show my compassion)” Thats the carrots, what about the sticks? Its Burrying the inventory or the idea of the non “Smart” products. “People are too stupid or lazy to look for whats not right in front of them” - some psycologists… I think . The idea that your security cameras need to be “Smart” or it will be bulky and the footage is going to “the cloud” because where else would you put it? A cheep flash drive?
No. There’s too much money attached to it to stop.
The reality is, the Valley is capitalism on speed, but it’s still capitalism. All the underlying mechanisms are the same as in the “conventional” economy, just turned up to 11.
Because people don’t live that long, stay in the same place long enough to suffer their own short term consequences.
Edit: And as a totally separate point, think about the mods! Loads of more work and zero pay while spammers “get rich”.
“Those are landed gentry. We the King of Reddit, Steve “Jailbait Mod” Huffman, are free to decide whom We shall benefit”.
On the Silicon
HoleValley: they’re probably aware of that, so the strategy is to cash out before you hit the cap.
Same thing happened with Quora, iirc. They started offering incentive for people to post a lot of questions, so now the app is flooded by complete junk.
I think there were 0 instances of Quora being useful when I search for things. At this point I just ignore Quora results completely, just because chances are whatever is on there are just shills and word salad people.
Honestly the most I’ve seen Quora used was by an immigrant at work as basically his preferred social media.
If I said this on Reddit, the demographic probably wouldn’t have got it, but maybe most folks here will:
Quora is just the new Yahoo Answers.
A friend (asshat bully) used to talk on quarra/yh-answers back in the 2010s, he used it like urban dictionary, that kind of toxic (fun?)
“How to make barnie’s head explode?” And other fun goodies
Feeling old yet? 😗
Yep. Believe it or not, there was a time when Quora was pretty decent. This is what happens when you try to boost engagement by offering cash incentives. It becomes quantity over quality.
Oh, kinda sounds like what happened to journalism too, eh?
Quora became king of useless answers after Yahoo Answers died. They were Quoronated, if you will.
my school bully on the school computers
Types out question while snickering:
vulgar
“How to eat your own hand and feed your poop to barney”
Searches and finds
vulgar
“Dora sits on a live garnade and it goes up her butt”
Followed by uncontrolled laughter and mabe a response.
Yeah, he’s likely a really horrific 4channer
Now they need to be quorantined
There was a time, maybe 8-10 years or so ago, when you would actually find good and well-reasoned answers from qualified people on there. But now it got so bad that I added Quora to my search results blocklist addon.
what addon is that ? I still remember when Google removed the option to ignore sites from their SERPs!
I’m using this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
cheers
1 bot reposts something.
1000 more bots upvote and give it awards to get it on front page.
Take cash
Repeat
This was already happening without the “direct from reddit” incentive. I can’t imagine how bad it’s going to get
People will put a lot of effort into maximizing their returns with repost bots now. Yuck.
Whew, I instantly feel validated in my decision to leave Reddit. If this gets applied it will encourage a bot apocalypse in Reddit, which is already something they’re struggling with.
I didn’t expect the validation to be this immediate, but here we are.
Hehe, here we thought it could take months, even years. Meanwhile, it’s still July, which makes me curious to hear which fresh batch of hell will come in the second half of this month, and especially August! :-P
It makes me curious on what the traffic and ad revenue numbers they’re seeing are.
They are here if you want to look… but I’ll save you a trip: they actually went UP since the blackouts!!! :-(
The boom will come before the bust.
I think you meant to say “Yay, there will be ‘content’ there once again”?
“Here’s money for having and sharing the correct thoughts” Is a scary notion
Oh I think it’s far worse than that. Because you have to ask yourself: what is the fastest way to gain karma on reddit? And the answer is not by sharing an opinion.
The top up voted posts each month are likely going to be media of animals, some nsfw content, and news articles. All of which are posted by bots nonstop.
Because the truth is that karma already is money. People pay money for accounts with high karma. And then turn them into bot accounts or advertising accounts. So now those people will just be able to double dip.
In short: it’s likely that reddit will just become a larger bot network if they do this. Karma systems don’t lead to better posts. In fact, I’d almost prefer to keep the karma system on lemmy/kbin and just have it private.
They did say it wouldn’t apply to NSFW content; not trying to contradict what you’re saying at all, just adding clarity! To me this seems like a further slap in the face to the NSFW posters who drive a lot of traffic, just like it is to mods. Having to moderate more low-quality content for free sounds like an absolute chore.
Reddit’s choice to throw NSFW communities under the bus in favor of ad revenue is certainly a choice when a ton of NSFW content almost built that site. It used to be on the front page with everything else for goodness sake.
Whether corporations like it or not, availability of NSFW content can make or break a site like reddit/Tumblr. People are gonna go where the porn is.
“Shit, the people who actually cared about the platform and contributed good content are leaving. Quick, throw money at the problem instead of fixing the issues we created!”
“How to worsen self-inflicted wounds” by the brain trust of Reddit’s board + u/spez.
Can’t trust the judgement of a guy who modded for r/jailbait.
It’s possible that someone else made him the moderator of that sub, but this shit still makes me laugh every time that I see it. Steve Huffman, someone so deeply interested in jailbait that he’d even mod a comm about it!
Didn’t he invite violentacres to a staff party and give him a special award?
The caveat there is that at the time there wasn’t a invite system. You’d just add mods. So him getting modded there isn’t as big a deal as one would think.
The fact that it wasn’t banned until after he was long gone and only then after a CNN piece on it, that should raise an eyebrow.
Considering how easy it is to bot a post to the front page, this is going to come down to that being more expensive than he cash you get for your post, and having seen how YouTube pays out… How does reddit plan to compete there?
1 bot reposts something.
1000 more bots upvote and give it awards to get it on front page.
Take cash
Repeat
Bots spend $200 on gold awards.
Reddit pays out $2.95 in rewards.
Winning?
Really, the fact that it requires a critical mass of gold is what really kills me about this. They’re saying “If people pay us money to tell you your posts are good, we’ll pay you a fraction of that.”
This just reeks of desperation and doesnt sound thought out in the slightest.
Reddit’s’board and u/spez think things out? When they can utterly ruin reddit’s ruins?
Get outta here with that nonsense.
antique meme appraiser suddenly becomes an actual job at c/AntiqueMemesRoadshow
This is a dumb idea
This is the same thing Twitter tried (is?) doing. Spez is really going full Musk.
Reddit The Company would only be doing this if engagement and submissions had fallen off significantly, and they’re scrambling for a way to prop that up.
And it’s like they’re doing a Digg speed run, essentially handing over priority to power users.
They already had a massive bot reposting issue, and now they’ll bay paid to that? Absolutely will get worse. Unbelievable
