this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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SNOOcalypse - document, discuss, and promote the downfall of Reddit.

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Ask these websites are suddenly trying to figure out how to actually make money 😂 it's just not gonna happen. It never was.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I guess they just really don't understand why reddit was worth visiting in the first place.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (7 children)
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They want to turn redditors into instagram whores haha.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

antique meme appraiser suddenly becomes an actual job at c/AntiqueMemesRoadshow

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  • Earn xx gold and karma each month

"Thank you for all your passion driven volunteer work. Let us reward you with slavery".

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

That's a bold strategy Cotton, let's see how it works out for them.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

This is the same thing Twitter tried (is?) doing. Spez is really going full Musk.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Reddit will pay a million content farms to repost memes before they pay a single moderator for [squints at paper] running their website

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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.

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