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.
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.
“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.
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.
Soon on YouTube “how to make money on reddit”, “top 10 comments that will get you 9999 upvotes”
r/cryptocurrency became exactly like that 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”.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
