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.
You must log in or register to comment.
“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.
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.
You’re not wrong: https://nft.reddit.com
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.
In other words: “Please bot our site to artificially push your karma points”
As if Reddit didn’t already have issues with karma bots…
Yes, but now there is a monetary reason for doing so.
No, account selling has always existed.
People will put a lot of effort into maximizing their returns with repost bots now. Yuck.
I see a huge issue with this.
I have seen in communities where mods will remove a user’s post and then repost it themselves or with an alt and hit the front page.
So you’re telling me now the mods have a financial incentive to do this? And what if as a money generating post gets removed simply because a mod doesn’t like it, even though it doesn’t break any rules?
I also feel like the quality of posts is about to implode even further from this. You’re not asking artists or musicians or even meme creators to post, you’re asking reposters to repost content that already did good.
So you’re telling me now the mods have a financial incentive to do this?
Yes. And it gets worse: who would mod that post-appocalyptic shithole? A: people who don’t give a fuck about the other users. If Reddit moderation was already obnoxious and user-hostile, it only got worse afterwards.
Will it turn into YouTube now of people inserting in product placements and begging for likes, comments, and follows? Is there going to be reddit influencers now as opposed to for so long most people just posting without intention of trying to get famous so led to more discussions for the sake of discusion? New YouTube is so different from old YouTube where people just shared moments or clips they thought was cool as opposed to the wave of people trying to use it to sell themselves and sponsors leading to very unnatural commercialized videos.
The old reddit is dead and gone. They (corporate) know what they’re doing. They’ve pivot to the commercialized internet. The crowd that pays “influencers”, “creators”, or what have you. The crowd that gives money to people who are famous for being famous. The crowd that pays for entries in a database shown as icon badges on their profile.
This is a significant part of the internet and the people on this planet. More importantly they are monetizeable. That’s what reddit is now. The existence of this isn’t what you like but it will continue to exist regardless. There are people on this planet who are into that. That’s what reddit is today. The old reddit is no more.
Old Reddit died whenever Aaron Swartz died.
He left Reddit in 2007, but the site really took a fall after 2013.
Reddit also went closed source, which was more writing on the wall for enshittification. Nobody takes something that’s open source and makes it closed source unless they have something they want to hide.
The worst part are the people willing to pay for this shit. We had it for free and you ignorants ruined it. Same with game mods that more and more get paywalled.
They already had a massive bot reposting issue, and now they’ll bay paid to that? Absolutely will get worse. Unbelievable
Ask these websites are suddenly trying to figure out how to actually make money 😂 it’s just not gonna happen. It never was.
I think I may have some insight here. This isn’t something that was reactionary imo, maybe the timing is, but the idea has been around for a while. They have been toying with this idea on /r/cryptocurrency for a while with “moons” and the admins have discussed bringing that same thing to the larger ecosystem. Though, the admins probably are worried about the SEC with moon tokens, so they are turning to regular dollars.
In /r/cryptocurrency this required much more serious moderation (look at the size of the mod team), they have some pretty advanced moderation tools compared to most other subs.
I don’t think reddit knows what they are asking for, but they are gonna get it, a whole ton of repost / chatgpt garbage. This is sadly probably the downfall of reddit, if it wasn’t the API pricing, this surely will turn it into a bot/karma removed garbage dump.
the karma accumulated could be used to improve the rate of exchange for Reddit gold into real-world money (possibly USD)
Oh, so all those people with 10+ year accounts, with tons of karma accumulated over the years, and who deleted their accounts in protest for the API changes… are actually a “good thing” so Reddit doesn’t have to pay top rates for their comments?
Nice move, very nice… /s
I posted this elsewhere, but they were already paying people to post content before the protest.
Have a look at this user’s posts prior to the blackouts: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/ Lots and lots of low-effort posts in various UK subreddits.
And read this (which was posted after he got accused of being a karma farming bot), note the admin comment confirming it: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/comments/130zbw6/i_am_a_community_builder_for_reddit/
This link confirms that Community Builders are “vetted and paid by Reddit for their time”: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418715794324-What-is-the-Community-Builders-Program-
Despite claiming they work with mods, the mods of those subreddits don’t seem to be aware of this, as evidenced by this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Leeds/comments/138gi40/reddit_community_builders_please_read_details/
It’s not just Reddit paying people to post, social media marketing teams and governments are also doing it. Facebook used to release reports done by an actual academic institution detailing how widespread it is there too. There’s tons to gain and little to lose in manipulating social media discussion points and the hivemind online these days, it’s the next best thing to plugging us into the matrix.
This is a dumb idea
Yesterday I requested that Reddit deletes any and all data associated with my Reddit account under the GDPR. It was so hard, because my account was 9 years old and I really had so much fun in my subreddits. I tried to create high quality content, just to do my part and help Reddit grow as a diverse community.
Now that I read this I have no doubts anymore that it was a good decision to go and destroy all my content there. I’m making popcorn and watch this shithole burn. Lemmy makes it easier, because I know many good people have found a new home for sharing great content and just having a good time. Sry for the rant 0.o
This is the same thing Twitter tried (is?) doing. Spez is really going full Musk.
That’s a bold strategy Cotton, let’s see how it works out for them.