Who cares?
We mentioned early this year that we want to both make Reddit simpler and a place where the community empowers the community more directly.
The community isn’t empowered at all. u/spez is a dictator who doesn’t care about the community.
Yep the leaked coming moves will be the death of Reddit. Screwing your users doesn’t really matter because the vast majority will obviously contribute to tolerate it.
This will just make Reddit a shitty place to be. They just need to admit that there’s no viable business model.
I think “there’s no viable business model “ is where they are, yeah. I think if they had taken a different path… I don’t know, several years ago… they might have found one, but they just keep throwing away their assets.
Soon: “Buy NFTs of your favourite comments and posts! The creators get crypto worth $0.50 for every purchase!”
This is half-confirmation for what Android Authority discovered in the app as the incoming “Reddit pays you for your content”.
For that to work, they have to remove coins and awards.
Wow, how they gonna get rid of all the karma farming bots after this outstanding move?
What? Could you elaborate this is very intriguing
If that ends up being true it very well may pull me back to Reddit, but only to write comments that I think people will upvote. When Reddit gave out auto-generated avatars in the past, it gave me one that said it was for writing funny comments that get lots of upvotes, so they must have some logic assessing how the community responds to individual commenters.
I’d still be pissed off about how they rolled out their recent changes, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they actually had a halfway decent plan here but bungled it all by rolling it out too slowly without making it clear how one dot (keeping users in an ecosystem to make sure they see ads) connects to another (creating a community that can support a model to pay contributors).
YouTube pays contributors who attract audiences. Why shouldn’t Reddit? That’s the best possible thing commercial social media can do for its users.
It would change the Reddit community, though. I wouldn’t be there to hang out, I’d be there to work and create content tailored to… what Reddit likes.
But I can’t deny that it would attract my interest.
Because it will be done unorganically. I can just shove ChatGPT to make articles and post them weekly around content.
You can’t, at least not now, AI your way out with a YouTube video.
Also, while it looks good for content creators, there are better places to create written content and be paid for it. Medium rings my bell, and surely there are others too.
If people start churning out upvote-worthy AI-generated content and posting it on Reddit, then Reddit will be happy with all the extra views coming from Google. They won’t mind.
The upvotes are bots too though. A decent sized server farm could churn absolute garbage out and game the upvote algorithm and bingo, a front-page full of complete gibberish. Faking YouTube views is harder since YouTube knows how long you’ve actually watched the video and toss out any errant signals. Upvotes are too basic any bot farm can do it for cheap.
Hm, but it sounds to me like this will be a problem for Reddit’s plans regardless of AI.
“Create content”? Just use a repost bot. Scrape the top 100 posts of each subreddit, check which hasn’t been posted in the last X days, repost it.
Already noticed that in one of the last three subreddits i still go into. reposts which some diligent redditors pulled out the original posts of as proof and maybe-ai-rewriten-posts that they also pulled out very similar older posts of. Now it’s down into two subs, both an ask community a niche topic i skimmed through daily.
And this is what will fundamentally kill reddit
If that ends up being true it very well may pull me back to Reddit, but only to write comments that I think people will upvote.
I feel very safe in saying that even if you’re able to generate enough positive response to be a part of this program, it will not be in any way worth your time to do this for the money. I’d be incredibly surprised if you managed to pull in even a reasonable fraction of minimum wage, and if you’re doing it for money and not because you enjoy the participation, it’ll be worse than just putting in extra time at your job in all likelihood.
That said, you do you.
Yeah, I don’t see how anyone other than repost bots, serial reposters and karma farmers will benefit in any meaningful amount.
The question for me is, how are they going to stop the grains of rice?
Not to mention the psychology study that showed kids paid to draw were less likely to draw spontaneously.
“Supplementing” an intrinsic motivation with extrinsic reward destroys the intrinsic motivation.
Of course the knobs that run reddit probably don’t understand what intrinsic motivation is or how anyone could make choices based on anything other getting paid to do something.
It’s an absolutely terrible idea for a thriving community of creators working for free, to start paying them. Like the science says “this kills the platform”.
I like writing stupid Reddit comments. If they want to pay me to do it, now matter how much or little, that’s more than I’m getting paid to shoot the shit in my downtime anywhere else.
But “residuals” are where it’s at. Old comments that never die because people keep gilding or replying. Views on that content can be (and we’re dealing with Reddit, so they very well could screw it up) turned into ad dollars. Companies are turning more of their tv ad dollars to social media.
Idk. I don’t disagree, but I think the cynicism may prove wrong here. But the cost of participating is zero if it turns out I get residuals on a comment I wrote 9 years ago.
The cost of participating is that you have to give Reddit your identity, complete with bank account and tax information.
I like writing stupid Reddit comments.
The quickest way to take something you enjoy and turn it into something you don’t is by making it a job.
Based on their early description of the feature, you can’t just rely on residuals to make money. You have to be getting a critical mass of upvotes and gold (which is an interesting inclusion given they’re pulling awards - they either didn’t think it through all the way and redesigned it already, or they have some other method for how that’ll work) each month to even qualify in the first place.
Haha good life advice nonetheless
I bet new Reddit gold is going to be their crypto platform that runs on Ethereum. Just a guess.
Not to mention, it will require attached a name and bank account to your reddit handle. This is the real trojan horse here I suspect. Reddit’s ad impressions are probably less valuable than other social media because of the pseudo anonymous nature of the platform.
Could I train a LLM off of your comments and the source posts then use a few bots to make passive income from this policy?
If they don’t do anything to prevent that (as YouTube does) then sure
I mean, I guess enjoy being monetized by white supremacist sympathizers
Well. There are no coins here. Are they really needed?
Yeah got this pm from Reddit:
* I only have premium because I was awarded Platinum. No way in hell I’d buy it.
- I only have premium because I was awarded Platinum. Now way in hell I’d buy it.
Just like reddit to include the entire, long email after assuring you the following is the TLDR.
I gave all my coins away this morning to people who didn’t need them. Thousands of coins from hundreds of awards over the years were distributed to the least deserving replies. Wewt! Bye, reddit.
It’s so on-brand for Reddit to announce killing these features without any explanation of what is to take its place. Just a vague mention of more communication “in the coming months”.
How exciting.
Reminds me of when they killed Reddit Gifts/Secret Santa.
Reddit and Twitter are racing to see who can kill themselves faster.
Nothing is coming. You’ll get nothing and you’ll like it!
is reddit trying to kill their platform on purpose?
By all indication, yes.
I suspect it might be an enemy of reddit playing Wormtongue with upper managemebt.
If I am sitting on a stash of coins that I would want to get rid of before they dissapear. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Oh yay, spez is getting ready to piss off reddit again.
King Steven the Turd is simply changing what his Realm uses as coinage.
Anyone who actually cares about what reddit does has already left or is in the process of leaving.
Highly doubt it. The world has a lot of different sorts in it, including ones of varying stubbornness. People get older, change, etc. It’ll never be “over”. Not for as long as reddit is still big and ran by spez anyway.
Well, -for me- its over. There is just no Reddit anymore.
It hurt itself in its confusion
I always disliked the crazy number of awards when they came our, it felt like they all suddenly became meaningless when there were so many. I will miss gold though, getting that shit always made you feel like a celebrity
In Apollo I turned off awards sometimes especially if it was a super popular post but that one Reddit ama was a time I was happy I had awards visible
Reddit gold was great and classy design. Reddit silver should have died the same month it should have been released, April. The rest were dumb money grabs that no one really fell for, and that’s why they’re killing them.
Might as well throw the baby out with the shitwater.
Reddit Silver was at its best when it was a jokingly copy pasted poorly drawn image rather than an actual award. It was the way to show how utterly pointless and stupid virtual “gold” is that doesn’t even go to the one you “rewarded” but rather to Reddit’s shitty admins.
Reddit admins weren’t always shitty. In fact… well, rest in peace, dude. You died trying to do a good thing for people.
I made a funny or thoughtful comment that someone with money really liked!
…you laugh, but there are people whose entire career is based on creating that scenario.
This is only good news for the lemmiverse
Ugh, they’re gonna replace awards with NFTs and crypto aren’t they?
It’s possible. But another possibility is that they gave up the idea that users would give Reddit money, and instead they want advertisers to buy upvotes with RL money.
Fake currencies like Reddit coins are useful when you’re milking users, as it’s harder for them to determine the real cost of their actions. For example: how much money would you need to spend to award your own post to become the most awarded post of a subreddit? (A: it depends on which coin package you bought, which award you’re granting, in which sub you’re posting, etc.) It’s probably more expensive than the user thinks, i.e. the “sucker tax”.
This backfires for advertisers because they will run the maths and notice your outrageous prices, and they won’t pay the “sucker tax”. And any additional loop between money and service raises their suspicion, thus the risk that they associate with your platform. When dealing with them, you’re better off streamlining everything, and getting rid of things that they might see as risk-increasing uncertainty.
And one of those risk-increasing uncertainties is the value of awards vs. votes in the visibility of a post (i.e. a potential ad). How many users sort by “top” vs. “awarded”? Are you better off buying awards or upvotes? Reddit just removed those two uncertainties, plus one loop (buy Reddit coins to buy stuff → buy stuff directly).
If my reasoning above is correct, bots running rampant in Reddit will be the least concern. Expect stuff like the top post in r/linux being Microsoft “informing” you on the “risks” of running Linux, and the moderator responsible for correctly marking as spam to be “relieved” from his “duties”. r/cooking will be full of nothing but advertisement for food chains, r/youtube with an “exclusive promotion for Snoos who buy YT Premium”, stuff like this.
What you’re calling “sucker tax” is also just having different values. Someone buying reddit coins is trading money for something else they value more than the money.
Like this cheeseburger isn’t gonna make me any money so it’s a bad investment, but I want the cheeseburger for non-monetary reasons so I’m trading my money for it.
What I’m calling “sucker tax” is only the difference between the actual price versus the “eyeballed” price of something inside one’s head, because the person didn’t bother to run the maths. This is an actual thing when fake currencies are involved.
For example. A platinum award should cost 4~7 dollars. If we told this to two different users, who just gave someone a platinum award:
- Alice: “wow, that’s too expensive. I’m not giving awards any more.”
- Bob: “I know, I’m fine with this.”
Alice is paying the sucker tax; Bob isn’t. Bob’s case is a lot more like your cheeseburger example.
This is relevant here because the sucker tax usually requires some in-game “fake” currency, like Reddit coins, to mask the real cost of the action. It’s a piece of user-hostile design that you see often in games full of microtransactions.
Ah I see the difference now. The intermediary currency is where the strangeness comes in. And conversion to the intermediary currency is always nonlinear. You get bulk pricing on bigger conversions.
