Reddit could be working on a Contributor program, letting top contributors earn real-world money from the gold and karma they receive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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!”
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).
Yep, the last 3 times I hit front page my posts were removed and all 3 times they really stretched their own rules to justify it but then post the same shit themselves
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If karma is worth money can I sell my 50,000 point account to someone who promises to use it for evil and make Reddit worse? Maybe Russians or scammers? Or Russian scammers?
who promises to use it for evil and make Reddit worse? Maybe Russians or scammers? Or Russian scammers?
Please do not associate people from specific countries - regardless of country - with "doing things for evil". You could easily convey the same point without this.
In most cases I would agree with you, but I think he was referencing the Russian propaganda bots on Facebook and Twitter that were implicated in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
This :clap: is :clap: why :clap: Karma :clap: isnt :clap: safe.
Karma, as an economic comodity builds perverse insentives and punishes honesty. If you got your Karma ligitimately, someones there to gunk up reddit by farming karma. Let reddit die by the hands of those who buy karma for propaganda sake!
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.
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.
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?
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
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
"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."
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.
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?
so they can't pay for their shitty api and killed off thirdparty clients because they "can't afford them".. but can pay random users for shitty karma? sounds right.
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.
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.
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.
Ny guess is they imagine it becoming like YouTube, where some popular tubers can monetize their channels and sometimes make a living. But that is also how Medium and Substack would, and both lose money and suck at the same time.
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 user slaves 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.
Eliminate 3rd party tools, try to force people on to a terrible app with a shitty interface, and then incentivize the content farms. A recipe for success if ever I've heard one.
You know what might have been a better idea? If they'd offered a profit sharing agreement to third party apps through some sort of affiliate program that allowed them to sell gold and split the revenue. They could even have kept the obscene api rates for AI scrapers by giving a massive discount to affiliated apps. This way reddit would get the revenue it was missing out on, users could support their preferred app while also giving money to reddit, and really, everybody wins.
But then spez wouldn't get to be Elon jr, so that obviously wasn't going to work.
This reminds me that overquoted start of Marx's The 18te Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." It's basically what's happening here - Musk has been nothing but a tragedy for Twitter and its users; but now you got someone to do the same stupid moves in Reddit because he's trying to follow Musk's steps, while disregarding completely how different both situations are:
Musk owns Twitter. Huffman doesn't own Reddit. Shareholders can still force the later to do their bidding, and he doesn't have enough money to throw into a problem to make it go away.
Twitter is not undergoing IPO. Public image for Reddit is considerably more important than for Twitter.
In Twitter, as long as you "anchor" certain people to the platform, you can keep it relatively exodus-free. The same does not apply in Reddit as, contrariwise to what Huffman wants to believe, it is not the same sort of social medium as Twitter or Facebook, it's far more content-centric.
Twitter does not rely structurally on the contribution of unpaid volunteers.
You know what might have been a better idea? [...]
That would work better even in the short run. Or, since the issue with 3PA is adbux, force them to get some ads alongside the API access, and then create a "premium" tier (no ads, but then you got to pay a lot for API access). And then actually work on the development of that shitty official app, to discourage usage of the 3PA the "right" way. But that would require some hindsight that Huffman simply doesn't have, as well as stop diverting manpower to stupid shit like chat and livestream and "we're the next Facebook!" tier stuff.
Aside from the valid points made by other comments, giving Reddit even more information (how else are they going to verify your age? Copy of driver's license would be my guess) is just asinine. At this point, if you're still on Reddit and you sign up for this you deserve what you get.
The last Eternal September was June of 2007. The iPhone gave an internet connection to users not because they wanted one and were interested in participating and contributing, but as an app. A way to passively consume online content for quick entertainment. Ever since then everything has been progressively forced towards app format, so that 99% of users don't ever meaningfully contribute in anyway. Upvote, downvote, "this" in the comments and then off to the next app.
Hilarious that Huffman openly admitted that Reddit “isn’t profitable” (somehow) and they have to squeeze 3PAs out to try to make up for that, but apparently they found spare funds in the budget to pay spambots to keep reposting content to keep things from going barren.
Everyone should make a concerted effort to abandon reddit. I, and many others, left digg.com back whenever that whole shitfest imploded and many other sites have been abandoned over the years when they went to shit due to bad leaders/service became shit.
Use lemmy or whatever else that isn’t reddit. Let it die. The biggest thing on reddit is the nerdy shit like network, linux, windows, android, etc. troubleshooting and help from actual people of various backgrounds, some very skilled, to normie users and everyone else.
If you absolutely “must” use reddit for some reason, and overall I don’t see a must-use use there except aforementioned troubleshooting help, then use adblocked desktop version or if you’re a normal person who doesn’t view reddit on non-mobile (lol) then use a custom api app. Apollo has one, and on android the revanced team (behind the superior YouTube app alternative to the google one) has implemented custom api patches for all the popular reddit apps like sync and such. They all block ads and generally deny Steve what he wanted. Use those instead of the official. Never use the official app!
Ironically the official app sucks so much that even using mobile safari and Google searching for reddit posts works better so you don't even really need to convince people to do this
True. There’s a safari extension called like sink it for reddit that removes that annoying “DOWNLOAD OUR APP” popup which they keep trying to make unblockable. I really probably can’t and shouldn’t type what I’m THINKING should happen to that piece of shit spez. It’s nothing good for him or his physical body.
I have the same experience. Lemmy is pretty much accepted as the replacement of reddit, there are good conversations here, and I’m typing this comment on my phone with the Memmy application which is like Apollo.
As a fellow Apollo refugee who was in denial until the very end (I’m sure it’s healthy) there’s also wefwef that’s pretty much a carbon copy of Apollo but honestly I like Memmy more. Feels much more like it’s taking heavy inspiration from Apollo while still adding a few elements to make it it’s own
Same. I just plopped the app in the position of the Apollo one on my home screen and tossed a modded Apollo in a folder somewhere with the other shit like Twitter. I’ll use it from time to time, but overall, muscle memory and the apps looking close enough and websites functioning similarly on a user level makes it like nothing happened
Is it a conspiracy that Twitter and Reddit, center-lib spaces, gone down at the same time?
I won't give too much credit to people like Musk and Hoffman, it's just too useful for right-wing actors to sink these platforms down since a lot of their accounts were banned there, and none of their projects like Parler or TruthSocial got from the ground.
nah, imo it's just reddit going the way of corporate and the timing just happens to align with twitter's downfall. reddit has been making stupid decisions for years, only the latest one started pushing people over the edge of leaving the platform.
Also, it really feels like reddit demotes older, higher karma accounts these days. I have one which is close to a million karma and 13+ years old and it's a grind to get upvotes on it. If I use the same methodology on younger accounts it's legitimately like a 10x difference in karma production.
But either way, I will never attach my real name to a reddit account anyway, so this is pointless anyway.
I was going to say “I hope they never actually implement this”, but then I remembered that I don’t have a horse in this race. Now I hope they DO implement it. It’ll be funnier.
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?
So I wasn’t crazy when I began speculating to the sub that I mod Reddit would/could implement partners program(predictions I have made (charging mods to moderate), making subs that don’t generate ad revenue hard to run. Subs being turned into subscriptions and users also putting their content behind P***yWalls in an effort to warn them at least going nsfw has been well recieves and my Spez shelters are getting traction at last