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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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”.
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.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.
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
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.
It was disappointing observing the internet turn this way. People want what they want. What can you do.
Until they ban you with little to no explanation
“You’ve been permanently suspended from Reddit on account of multiple, repeated violations of the code of conduct”. There’s some appeal system, but since you don’t know what you did wrong, you can’t actually appeal the suspension; and if you say “I don’t even know why I’m being suspended”, they say that they “reviewed your suspension” and decided to keep it. It’s just like in Kafka’s The Process - they hope that you either find something to feel guilty or give up defending yourself.
And always with that implicit “it’s a user, you can’t tell it ‘don’t do this’, it won’t be able to get it and change its behaviour.”
I got suspended for “sexualization of minors”. Appealed that I did no such thing, and in response got permanently suspended for “repeated violations”.
So when “they” say you did it, you better believe it, because claiming otherwise is an additional violation 🤦
Wow. Just… wow. That borders libel. But odds are that they know that people won’t sue Reddit for libel, for such a small thing like a suspended account.
There’s even a name for that specific style of kafkatrapping that they used against you, it’s model “A” kafkatrapping: “your refusal to acknowledge that you’re guilty confirms that you’re guilty”.
Probably can’t be libel if they don’t make it public, just stuff that happens behind closed doors and they can say “no comment”. Would be different if Reddit had a public modlog like Lemmy.
My guess is, after 10 years without a problem, someone around 2 years ago might have marked me for takedown for whatever reason. I always tried to be respectful, but didn’t start self-censoring until they suspended me for “violent content” without even referencing what was the supposed content. I kind of hoped that using Power Delete Suite to blank the account history, and avoiding most polemic topics from then onwards, would keep it safe, but apparently not.
Ironically, an alt account I created to participate in more polemic topics, got zero problems… but they now banned it along the main one, so bye Reddit, so long and thanks for all the fish.
That’s a shame - this whole “we’re claiming that you did something that you didn’t do” sounds clearly illegal though.
It’s possible that they deemed you as unprofitable, and decided to kick you out based on that.
Ironically, an alt account I created to participate in more polemic topics, got zero problems… but they now banned it along the main one, so bye Reddit, so long and thanks for all the fish.
Something similar-ish happened with me, except that I did violate the rules (I told a declared Nazi to kill himself). They went out of the way to ban my old, inactive account; the newer account that I used for topics that I didn’t want to associate with the main account; but “curiously enough” they left the mod account alone. It was when I decided “nope, there’s some shady shit going on, I’m not modding for this shithole”.
I’m in the 1% for karma earners.
Gimme my fuckin’ money, Spez. $1 for every karma. So I’ll get over a million.
Aw man, I’d only get $550k :(
About 90k here, I’ll take it tbh…
then rob /u/spez karma I guess?
Not in the top anything, but over the years I collected some. 14000 is welcome money
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
Good. Spez is going to take the Elon route: doing everything absolutely the wrong way because they’re out of touch with reality. A bot apocalypse would continue to help drive people away from Reddit, which 100% needs to happen at this point.
I have a bet with a friend on reddit being significantly smaller or dead in 5 years, its looking pretty good for me.
Haha i have a similar bet, but only 2 years down the line
they’re really getting desperate huh
Ugh, I was hoping I could just cash out on the karma I already had. This is pointless. If they thought karma whoring was bad before, this is going to push it to a whole new level.
I know there has been a lot of doommongering recently about the innevitable demise of Reddit. However, I feel like this change will be the worst thing the will have ever done if it comes to fruition.
Holy shit this is pathetic, sad and incredibly dumb.
Poo poo management goes poo poo.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
They have been taking about this for ages too. Originally it was supposed to be crypto and posting would be effort/stake. Which was an interesting idea tbh. Rumor was that the lawyers nixed the idea but I never bought that. It was definitely just that reddit burns through investor cash in stupid ways.
r/crypto actually implemented it. I made about $80 off of like 2 highly upvoted comments. Some people made a few grand off of it.
give OP a fraction of a cent per gold on a post.
Isn’t that what this article is actually about? Karma seems to be a factor, but the strings they found mention that you get paid based on gold received.
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.
Yeah, I think they did this too late to have it resolve in a benign manner. LLM’s are going to turn this into an invisible mess(*).
Most social media has no process for monetizing content, which is why sponsored deals are so common. But even if I HAVE seen stealth promoted posts (by Starbucks) on reddit, that was a massive outlier. The whole platform is just not something someone can use to make money(*). Reddit is still a semi-anonymous platform, with people following content, rather than people. I Even Twitter, which is functionally about following personalities, still has it rough compared to how so much easier to monetize Instagram or TikTok.
(*) There is however ONE profitable way to operate om Reddit. Creating and selling accounts. Which is something done primarily by bots. Too bad the API changes killed off the ability to detect them, which means they’ll run rampant.
That’s so stupid that it’s funny again. Steve Huffman will milk this Reddit cow to death. Without repost filtering this incentivizes bot makers, with years of experience, to flood Reddit with garbage because the common user can’t tell. Come in, come in, my bots and
userslaves to create content for the show. Also awards give incentive to post provoking content and rage bait, you even have this shit on steam for almost useless award rewards.Milking implies the cow survives. He’s trying to jam new limbs on the cow to make it moo but is just killing it quicker.
