Make content, get paid.
The concept behind the program is straightforward. Redditors who receive substantial gold and karma from other community members can potentially convert these virtual rewards into real-world money that can be cashed out.
sigh, that’s desperation. This means that the discussion on Reddit will not be natural or organic, it will cease to be human. Redditors will be like dogs, where they shitpost and post comments that everyone agrees with so they can make money, basically doing what the master tells them in order to get their treat. Reddit as we know it will cease to exist.
I agree, though I also believe that Reddit is like that already.
It is like that already, but try, if you can, to imagine how bad it will get if the incentive isn’t fake internet points, but actual money.
Bot farms.
You mean bigger bot farms. The VAST MAJORITY of reddit posters are bots and serial reposters.
Maybe if you’re on the main subs. I’d say to get rid of those, but it’s best to get rid of all of reddit at this point lol.
Cheers to that!
No no, let Reddit stay and let it remain popular and profitable enough that people who want to run bots for easy money all stay there.
I mean I dunno if you consider /r/swimming and /r/climbing and /r/triathlon are major subs but they have massive repost bot problems. Those are juts some of the smaller subs I miss the most from reddit.
Soon on YouTube “how to make money on reddit”, “top 10 comments that will get you 9999 upvotes”
This!
Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!
We did it, Reddit!
“Easy trick for TOP GOLD Reddit admins don’t want YOU to now!”
Looks great for engagement when everyone is greedily making posts for the most likes though. Just another step towards a golden facade for IPO.
Basically Quora.
Quora started to pay people to ask questions, rather than reward the people who put efforts into answering.
I skipped that stupid thing instantly.
That explains why content quality over there is so damn bad, I didn’t know about that before since I skipped the Quora train.
Yeah, I never saw any good reason to use Quora.
“I caught my 12 year old son playing Minecraft so I smashed all his things and beat him. Was I wrong?”
That was roughly one of the so-called questions I saw on Quora recently. Absolute garbage.
Well they get paid to ask absolute garbage so you’ll see oodles of these shitty “questions”
Worse, I don’t think it’s desperation. I think the senior leadership genuinely sees this as a good idea. That implies they view reddit no longer as a series of communities that organically develop and more as a social network that should pursue reach and “quality” content.
To me, that’s way worse than desperation. That’s like the exact opposite of what reddit was stated to be when I first joined.
That’s like the exact opposite of what reddit was stated to be when I first joined.
It is exactly the opposite of what Aaron Swartz created.
We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive.
-Steve Huffman-
It is a good idea from the point of view that a lot of platforms are compensating their content creators for their work to keep them on the platform.
It is a bad idea because most power users used third party apps to help provide their content, and Reddit just pissed a lot of them off.
Yeah this will make discussion 100x worse now that there’s a strong financial reason to be ungenuine and follow the hive mind. Not to mention this decision has terrible timing with the rise of ChatGPT bots, as if bots weren’t already an issue. Did they think these bots were actually going to use the API? I’m sure communities will love Reddit offering users money to ruin their communities.
Yeah. Who is going to risk a downvote with real money on the line. Actually I can see brigading wars to “ruin someone financially” being a thing.
Sounds like the exploitation of children that happens on Roblox. They may earn money if they make enough after cuts to withdraw. Just more user exploitation with the carrot-on-stick of getting paid.
Or…maybe some will use bots to make comments/post/earn money. Possible no humans needed for conversation at some point. Just bots chatting with bots making the “human dogs” money!!
Makes me wonder what the actual bot convo would look like!!!
I’m sure if you go into a political sub right now you can see GPT4 vs GPT3.5 in full swing
r/cryptocurrency became exactly like under a similar system.
This is also observable with all social media, where you can see that the communities shifted greatly once people started making money or getting a following, content just became mostly derivative of “what works”.
I act natural around my friends and they pay me, so I dont know what the big issue is 🤷🏼♂️
I think, “Yea!, that’s desperation”…
And we thought bots and karma farming were bad before.
Yeah, this new thing will be botted to hell lol.
Get gets us… Reddit gold?
Reddit must be super nervous and losing a lot of traffic. Burn baby, burn!
I feel like I got out just at the right time!
It’s such a shame that everything has to be commodifed. Being on lemmy, free of ads and financial incentives is such a breath of fresh air. Community and sharing ideas shouldn’t be driven by money.
I agree, but unfortunately it does cost money (way more than you think) to host something online, even a small Lemmy instance. The more traffic you have, the more it costs. The same goes for time spent on admin, which shouldn’t be free unless it’s a passion project.
which is exactly why the fediverse is so good! you can host it yourself and shoulder the cost, join a free instance, donate something small… the cost is shared among many, which makes it far more acceptable for a lot of small passion projects
You can say the same for lots of things though. I think if we want to take back control of discourse then we have to accept the cost.
An example from a world I understand - putting on and taking part in free parties (in the UK and the rest of Europe) has a financial and time cost. But people put on these incredible festivals not for financial gain, and not to even break even as there’s no charge to get in, but because they love music and community. Some things are more important than profit.
Aren’t Reddit moderators already volunteer admins? Still, Lemmy has the same issue as Reddit when considering server costs, if not worse. On Reddit, if a post brings in high volume of traffic, their server (farm?) needs to be strong to handle the influx. On Lemmy, the server instance can go down… theoretically. Not sure how much load a post can cause. But, compared to Reddit, Lemmy federated design means high load situations are suboptimal.
They are, and yet they have limited control over the discourse as we’ve seen over the last month.
I get your points - I’m interested and excited to see how the Feddiverse grows and I hope it remains sustainable. I feel uncharacteristically positive about it.
Reddit has a harsher delineation between mods and admins compared to Lemmy. It seems common for Lemmy admins to mod some of their communities, while that is really rare on Reddit.
Sure, but the decentralized nature of the fediverse means that a single failure point is no longer enough to take the entire thing down.
True but donations help, it’s the best way to support this kind of projects IMO, doesn’t cover admins time and the soul they pour into it but at least the server costs.
All it would take is one left-leaning billionaire to fund server costs for Lemmy instances with no strings attached, and we’d never have to worry about it being commodified. C’mon George Soros, where are you at? It would be pocket change for you.
So many far right billionaires putting so much money into their hateful, bigoted causes, while progressive causes seem to die on the vine due to lack of funding.
Problem is, you don’t become a billionaire without massive amounts of exploiting people for profit, and someone like that isn’t going to support Lemmy since there’s no profit to be had. There are no left-leaning billionaires, only neo-liberal billionaires.
I hope he wasn’t serious lol, he even has three arrows on his profile pic. It’s such a corporate thing to say.
More incentive to post low quality content
Comments asking for upvotes and gold gonna be out of hand
“…and remember guys, if you liked this comment please UPVOTE and GILD!!!”
This post is sponsored by NordVPN. Make sure to check out my Patreon after reading my comment.
“thanks for the gold, kind stranger”
All these typing makes my hand sore. Did I mention this supplement that is good for muscle cramps? You can buy it now at mychannelstore dot com!
Remember all those posts that sometimes will come up in r/relationship advice or subs like that portraying really vulnerable people that are really down on their luck (“Im a single mom/dad and have to do horrible things so that my children can eat” “Im an abused teen and can’t escape my home” “Im trying to escape a borderline cult” etc etc)?
Now, Im sure at least some of those were fake to begin with (I don’t have anything against those subs or those stories, but you can’t guarantee every single one of them is true). Now imagine if they could put a little edit in the end “thank you all, you are so kind, I managed to sign up into reddit’s content program, so if you want to help make sure to upvote and leave some gold, it means so much”.
In those subs, people were already helping out how they could (I would often see people offering to send food or stuff to OPs home, things like that)… so that’s not gonna backfire at all if its implemented.
Great post, 4 day old account /u/BroughtListless! Here’s $20!
It is a race to the bottom. There is no way this turns out well.
Literal karma whore (although they say must be sfw)
Can you imagine the abuse of that?
Corruption usually comes from the top down. The real trickle down economics.
I’m not an expert by any means but can’t this be used to launder money?
No, I don’t think so. How you would get the dirty money in the system? I’m assuming the content creators don’t have to give Reddit any money to get money back for their content.
Just spitballimg here, could be totally wrong as we’re not 100% sure how this is going to work:
Get 2 accounts
Link a prepaid card with dirty money to account 1.
Comment/post on account 2 (whichever pays more)
Gild account 2s activity repeatedly with account 1, use bots to upvote spam account 2.
Deposit payments from reddit into personal account. Now your money is washed
Omg that’s good! I wonder what the limit is on how much a single post or comment could earn. Like, say, you have $100,000 to wash - could that go to one post, or 100,000 posts? Does Reddit take any percentage of the earnings (not.sure if that was mentioned in the article)?
I don’t think money laundering would be worth it. I would expect Reddit to end up with the majority due to the pay out rate.
I was thinking a mix of theft and fraud. Use stolen credit cards to buy gold for bot/puppet accounts then post on your main account. If a post starts to take off, throw the bots at it to gild and add extra upvotes.
If someone was doing this, I would expect it to be a side hustle. Use the stolen credit cards early like this to test if they’re valid. Then use them for the main crime of buying goods to resell.
If you’re going to pay anyone maybe pay the mods? You’re just going to be creating even more work for them as they fend off karma farming bot swarms with no moderator tools.
So all those perma bans of high karma long time members for no reason was a money driven directive?
By suspending the accounts reddit just wiped a bunch of karma they wont pay for but still can use the content.
Pretty sure it’s just for karma you earn after after you apply.
I was going to say…with what money is Reddit going to pay these posters? Because they couldn’t turn a profit while relying on unpaid moderators.
It’s completely ass-backwards to pay posters while telling mods to suck it and donate their time.
Steve Huffman: “Reddit doesn’t make any money”
Also Steve Huffman: “Please stay on our platform, we’ll pay you?”
From what I understood from the article, the money only comes from gold and awards users bought and then awarded to the content. so its more like, “we won’t pay for your labor but we will ask the other, previously free users to pay for it”
I guess what he meant is that, at the moment, Reddit Gold revenue goes 100% into Reddit’s pockets. But if they start funneling part of this money into contributor’s pockets, it means Reddit is effectively paying them from a money pool that was previously exclusively theirs. Thus, Reddit is “paying them”.
As soon as users are paid for sharing someone else’s copyrighted content, wouldn’t companies like media outlets start pursuing it as theft for profit?
Sounds like Reddit is headed down the road of YouTube where UMG is going to start slamming users everywhere with strikes for their revenue, and DMCA will be abused a lot more heavily.
Just gonna hijack your comment for visibility. 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.
Yeah this is going to make a fucking mess with attribution. Expect to see even less OC on Reddit if posting it means you lose your rights AND someone else gets to profit off reposts.
So no more song lyric waterfalls?
They should stick to the karma lakes they are used to.
So…we can actively harm Reddit by going on reporting sprees? Yes?
Maybe, if you have sufficient accounts to do so and not get caught. It’s probably not worth the time and effort. Living well (elsewhere) is the best revenge.
Gallowboob will be a billionaire overnight and everyone else will be left in the dust.
This plan isn’t just stupid, it’s moronic.
Why do I suddenly have visions of that South Park episode about virtual internet money?
Canada wants more money! I’m not your friend, Buddy!
Gallowboob left a whole ago.
Left or just changed to various other accounts?
My understanding is left, based on what I’ve heard.
From looking at his profile, he is not on reddit often now but still posts periodically.
What ever happened to that dude? I blocked him long ago, but he also wasn’t a frequent poster on the small communities I was subbed to.
“This is gonna make the karmawhoring and bot problem so much better guys I swear”
-spez, probably
So wait, not only has their monetization effort so far been a flop, now they’re going to start paying people to post? Woooow. Spez trying to edge out Elon for the Most Incompetent Management award this year?
He wants to be recognized by his “Elon-senpai” to take part in the “dick measuring” contest too.
spez would be the first to die in a cage match. Whatever…
Musk ain’t getting in a cage with a two-comma commoner.
He needs another comma if he wants to whip it out with Elon.
Good Lord. This whole influencer/social media celebrity thing needs to die
Ok but first like and share my comment. Of course gold will also be appreciated!
>demand money from third party app developers
>give money to karmawhoreswut
so what does that say about their values and vision?
Oh my God. This is awesome.
“We need to tighten the purse strings!!1” quickly became “open the coffers!” as soon as they hit a speed bump.
Seriously epic. With the amount of vote manipulation going on over there, this will be a complete and utter failure. I guarantee it will be pulled in a month or two.
So stupid. Greedy motherfuckers… I thought it was the unpaid, volunteer mods that were the “landed gentry” that were ruining the site? They fucked around and found out pretty quickly, and now they’re creating something that fits their analogy much better.
I can’t wait to see their IPO fail miserably, and watch Steve Huffman realize that he fucked himself over by being too greedy.
I have a feeling that whatever disappointment the current owners and execs of Reddit have with the IPO will be eclipsed by the disappointment of the people who buy the shares. I don’t think Reddit was worth anywhere close to the valuations two months ago and I’d be surprised if it’s still worth half of its true value two months ago.
But then again, it has close to zero value to me at the moment (it varies which side of zero it’s on based on my mood).
Sooo, Reddit will soon turn into Instagram, where a few (relatively speaking) paid influencers will push their content to the masses? Glad I left…
Or like YouTube where people will be arbitrarily demonetized for rules they aren’t actually violating while others who blatantly violate rules will be ignored because they are corporate posters and Reddit won’t want the legal nightmare they might start if they enforce rules with them.
It’s an interesting idea and a step in the right direction overall, but this reality has a way of turning every possible utopia into a distopia.
Well, at least YouTube is still a valid way to make a living for a lot of people. Who knows how long this will last, but somehow they managed to keep the whole ecosystem alive and working thus far
