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.
This is just going to encourage even more spammy, low quality, easily consumable clickbait content.
Good luck, Steve.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.
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?
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/
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.
Feeling old yet? 😗
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
Quora became king of useless answers after Yahoo Answers died. They were Quoronated, if you will.
Now they need to be quorantined
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.
If anything scares me, its him
Honestly the most I’ve seen Quora used was by an immigrant at work as basically his preferred social media.
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”.
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.
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.Because people don’t live that long, stay in the same place long enough to suffer their own short term consequences.
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?
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
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.
The boom will come before the bust.
They are here if you want to look… but I’ll save you a trip: they actually went UP since the blackouts!!! :-(
I think you meant to say “Yay, there will be ‘content’ there once again”?
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.
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 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.
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.
Huh, I didn’t know about this (though it doesn’t surprise me). Thanks for the links.
Looks like that community builder person changed accounts. The account they outed hasn’t made any posts since.
“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.
Congrats to the themed/novelty accounts like the person who posts the watercolors, Shittymorph, Snoodle, and the others who regularly post highly upvoted content. I’d add PoppinKream, but they’re here now.
Shittymorph is here too
Really? I haven’t seen that, that’s awesome!
None of those novelty accounts were really great content though, so I don’t see how paying them helps at all.
I don’t see how they can avoid an algorithm that doesn’t pay them is the point. Apparently the key factors are gold and upvotes on a regular basis, which they all get.
I don’t think Reddit gives a crap about the quality, they just want stuff that makes people stay engaged. It’s a terrible approach though. One thing I’ve learned as a manager is that if your make a specific reward system, smart people will optimize how to get the most reward for the least effort. With this one, I can envision all sorts of things that will ultimately result in shitty content, like more repost bots, communities that make pacts to upvotes each other’s stuff, gobs of alt accounts, people trying even harder to make the funny zinger comment that adds nothing, etc.
“Becareful of what you measure”
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.
Ah, youtube… I remember when triangle head didnt grate my ears and give me the creeps. Then she had a miniture reddit. And i just checked, I must have drempt the subscriber loss.
its a joy to see her mad because otherwise she puts the mask back on. Her content has absolutely no edge despite her topics, she fails to use any grit at all to connect (respectfully or oterwise) with the topic reaulting in a clinical feeling.
Also, repitition is a useful tool for advertisers, dont know thy I said that
To be fair as much as everyone hates the product placements on YouTube, as a whole the platform has become quite phenomenal. Yeah I also miss the old days of underground videos, but these days you can literally teach yourself anything through YouTube (up to a point).
People will put a lot of effort into maximizing their returns with repost bots now. Yuck.
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.
Just want to point out that there are a ton of Telegram communities focused on bypassing these types of limitations, because $0.10 USD for 1000 upvotes goes a lot farther in rural India than it does in Indiana.
By offering an incentive program, they’ve just opened up the door for a whole new third world economy. They should have stuck to fighting 3rd party API access tbh.
I could picture people here in Brazil doing the same, too. Fuck, myself was thinking about a way to exploit this while ruining the place further.
But my point is that, once you know that someone gets money for doing something, you stop doing it for free, so the action is likely to backfire really bad. It won’t drive engagement up, but down.
I used to rail about people all about monetizing everything online, but I kind of realized I was wrong and have given up. All of our data is getting sucked up, we should get something out of it… It gets frustrating using/building up a platform with your friends only for some company to just remove everything good about it.
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
Is there an easy way to request deletion under GDPR?
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.
So all those people who rip videos from youtube (not linking to them but download and reupload, usually with intro/outro and watermarks edited out) are now going to get paid for it?
How is that not theft, again?
B/c it lines spez’s pockets with money.
Yeah, it does not make sense to me either. :-| I wonder what happens when these situations are reported -> who even gets blamed, and what consequences should they face? And importantly, will that change in the future, as the number of such violations trends upwards and become more extreme? Will we see entire TV shows, movies & such posted to Reddit now? Anyone could create a community, like “{showname}_123” and start posting links to ~~pirated~~ streamed content, and what would Reddit admins do - forcibly remove the NSFW label from it!? :-P
It’s not going to be unpaid mods anymore haha they’re fucked
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.”
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.
Absolutely, for a long time it’s obvious the good things about Reddit existed because of users but not only didn’t Reddit management like those users or listen to them but they actively worked against them. I don’t really know what they thought Reddit was but they clearly had a very odd view of it.
“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.
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.
