Reddit's crappy app has code for a "get money for your karma" program

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.

MerylasFalguard,
MerylasFalguard avatar

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.

ivanafterall,
ivanafterall avatar

I suspect they might be in full-on panic mode at Reddit HQ.

PenguinJuice,

Without a doubt

Hikiru,
@Hikiru@lemmy.world avatar

“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!”

xuxebiko,

"How to worsen self-inflicted wounds" by the brain trust of Reddit's board + u/spez.

FinalFallacy,
FinalFallacy avatar

Can't trust the judgement of a guy who modded for r/jailbait.

Stern,
Stern avatar

The caveat there is that at the time there wasn't a invite system. You'd just add mods. So him getting modded there isn't as big a deal as one would think.

The fact that it wasn't banned until after he was long gone and only then after a CNN piece on it, that should raise an eyebrow.

lvxferre,
@lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

It’s possible that someone else made him the moderator of that sub, but this shit still makes me laugh every time that I see it. Steve Huffman, someone so deeply interested in jailbait that he’d even mod a comm about it!

Meowoem,

Didn’t he invite violentacres to a staff party and give him a special award?

Evoke3626,

They already had a massive bot reposting issue, and now they’ll bay paid to that? Absolutely will get worse. Unbelievable

Nougat,

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.

dan,

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: old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/ Lots and lots of low-effort posts in various UK subreddits.

And read this (which was posted after he got accused of being a karma farming bot), note the admin comment confirming it: old.reddit.com/…/i_am_a_community_builder_for_red…

This link confirms that Community Builders are “vetted and paid by Reddit for their time”: …reddithelp.com/…/4418715794324-What-is-the-Commu…

Despite claiming they work with mods, the mods of those subreddits don’t seem to be aware of this, as evidenced by this post: reddit.com/…/reddit_community_builders_please_rea…

Lazylazycat,
@Lazylazycat@lemmy.world avatar

Huh, I didn’t know about this (though it doesn’t surprise me). Thanks for the links.

Kushia,
@Kushia@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

WarmSoda,

Looks like that community builder person changed accounts. The account they outed hasn’t made any posts since.

dan,

He just started again in the last day

waltuh,

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

Stinkywizzleteets,

Between this and twitters incentives this seriously feels wrong. Like, social credit score wrong.

Makeitstop,

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.

lvxferre,
@lvxferre@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

jarfil,

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?

Nice move, very nice… /s

AtHeartEngineer,

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.

DrQuint,

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.

Send_me_nude_girls,

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.

kamenoko,

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.

throbbing_banjo,
@throbbing_banjo@lemmy.world avatar

Marty Byrd loves this idea

DrTautology,

Holy shit this is pathetic, sad and incredibly dumb.

Anticorp,

Poo poo management goes poo poo.

another_lemming,

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.

DaPorkchop_,

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.

another_lemming,

Possible, right. They’ve had a bad history since the beginning.

It’s just Spez is a poor guy among his IT friends and he could’ve followed this course for a pocket change.

forgotmylastusername,

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.

Send_me_nude_girls,

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.

forgotmylastusername,

It was disappointing observing the internet turn this way. People want what they want. What can you do.

refurbishedrefurbisher,

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.

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