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.
“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.
I might give them a bit of a break on that point because I don’t know that it’s a good idea to directly push for more nsfw content or pay those creators. Providing the platform with ads on it is one thing, but paying the people that post that content? Whole can of worms.
Especially since most of those subreddits don’t verify that the poster is in the photo. So now we’d be paying people for a lot of reposts from adult studios and cam people. Reddit would rather not interact that way so I understand. I mean adult content is hard, I expect instances here to run into that if they get too big.
I think several of your points also apply to sfw posts. I mean who’s to say that a picture I’ve hypothetically posted of a cute cat is actually my cat? I may have just ripped it from a friend’s social media account and posted it as mine–but I’m still getting paid. I was just trying to illustrate that this is a shitty decision all around
I think the difference between posting people’s nude bodies for profit vs posting someone else’s cat is very different. But yeah no you’re right, it’s a bad idea all around. I’m just seeing it from reddits position and I’ll be surprised if they don’t ban porn eventually. So not monetizing it is obvious at this point. Still a slap in the face. But I think that just indicates how dead in the water reddit is. They aren’t profitable, a large part of the user’s are there for porn, and they just pissed everyone off, and they can’t incentivize anyone to post.