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.
I mean it is still kind of notable that there's practically a soft ban on this instance for discussing Russian atrocities in Ukraine, but a mod will pipe up to broadly defend Russia.
I get what you are saying, and generally agree with and respect the sentiment, but I hope you also will acknowledge the broader optics of this statement within that context. It would be nice to see mods here be just as upset and vocal about soft censorship of Ukrainian genocide.
I don't know mate, I'm browsing All Hot mostly, and there, it's like every 10th post about Ukraine. There was nothing about war atrocities, it's just really not good idea to associate certain nation with certain negative trait - roots of genocide, divide and conquer, and all that fun (not really) stuff.
I'm talking about specifically lemmy.ml where I think this is posted originally but perhaps I'm mistaken.
Just to be clear: for the sake of rule #1, the exact same would apply if a comment associated "Ukrainian = evil", "American = evil" or any other country or region of the world. This lumps together people who you shouldn't blame for certain events and actions with the people that you should.
(I'm glad that this happened with a fairly minor issue, most likely accidental, and the poster in question is reasonable.)
I'm aware of the broader context of lemmy.ml; I'm simply not in a good position to talk about this, because as a mod this is not a political community, and as a user I tend to get irrationally angry at some oversimplifications and bullshit used to justify shit happening in the war*.
*Speaking this as a user, not as "the mod": fucking Putin dressing power projection as it was "denazification", fucking Zelensky turning a blind eye to Nazi every fucking where in the country that he runs (including the military ranks), fucking NATO using the war to strengthen its own position (and people be damned as usual), and nobody giving a flying fuck about the population. It gets specially worse for the Russian- and surzhyk-speaking Ukrainians in the East, as some people in both sides are eager to burn them in a fire.