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.
Yesterday I requested that Reddit deletes any and all data associated with my Reddit account under the GDPR. It was so hard, because my account was 9 years old and I really had so much fun in my subreddits. I tried to create high quality content, just to do my part and help Reddit grow as a diverse community.
Now that I read this I have no doubts anymore that it was a good decision to go and destroy all my content there. I’m making popcorn and watch this shithole burn. Lemmy makes it easier, because I know many good people have found a new home for sharing great content and just having a good time. Sry for the rant 0.o
Is there an easy way to request deletion under GDPR?
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.
If karma is worth money can I sell my 50,000 point account to someone who promises to use it for evil and make Reddit worse? Maybe Russians or scammers? Or Russian scammers?
[Speaking as mod]
who promises to use it for evil and make Reddit worse? Maybe Russians or scammers? Or Russian scammers?
Please do not associate people from specific countries - regardless of country - with “doing things for evil”. You could easily convey the same point without this.
Very brave.
In most cases I would agree with you, but I think he was referencing the Russian propaganda bots on Facebook and Twitter that were implicated in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
[Speaking as mod]
The issue is the message that it conveys. Without that explicit reference, and without any sort of qualifier, “Russians” implies “the Russian population in general”. It would be different if saying, for example, “Russian trolls” (as it specifies a group) or “Putler & Co.” or something like this.
It’s a minor issue, as it’s an implication instead of a statement, and I’m aware of the risk of the mod being a dumbarse and reading this wrong, that’s why I opted for a simple “please don’t”. I also don’t think that the user had the intention to associate “Russian = evil”, but sadly moderators can’t act based on projected intentions.
I appreciate it, I will be more mindful about this.
Thank you for being reasonable. It’s that sort of thing that we don’t usually pay attention, so I can’t really blame you, but I think that we [people in general] should watch out for this sort of stuff.
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.
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.
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.
This awesome. Thank you!
Inb4 reddit karma farms pop-up all over the third world promising unlimited upvotes.
Lol reddit needs those guys rn
In a post somewhat similar on reddit, there was a link to calculate the worth of your reddit accounts. Didn’t need a user name, just age and karma
Amusingly an older lower karma account is worth more than a newer, higher karma account
Before redditpocalypse accounts over 10 years were selling for 50 to 100 bucks on ebay if they had over like 25k comment karma.
Not talking listed, I mean sold.
Hmm, what about 300k?
How about 550k?
That’s a lot
I know, that’s why I want it converted into cash money. There are sketchy sites out there that could give me a couple hundred, but let’s aim for a buck per karm.
Buck per karma, I like the way you think
This :clap: is :clap: why :clap: Karma :clap: isnt :clap: safe.
Karma, as an economic comodity builds perverse insentives and punishes honesty. If you got your Karma ligitimately, someones there to gunk up reddit by farming karma. Let reddit die by the hands of those who buy karma for propaganda sake!
classic image reposted
Shameless plug to my post on farming
expandable image of karma farming
Marty Byrd loves this idea
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was disappointing observing the internet turn this way. People want what they want. What can you do.
they’re really getting desperate huh
Considering how easy it is to bot a post to the front page, this is going to come down to that being more expensive than he cash you get for your post, and having seen how YouTube pays out… How does reddit plan to compete there?
1 bot reposts something.
1000 more bots upvote and give it awards to get it on front page.
Take cash
Repeat
Bots spend $200 on gold awards.
Reddit pays out $2.95 in rewards.
Winning?
Really, the fact that it requires a critical mass of gold is what really kills me about this. They’re saying “If people pay us money to tell you your posts are good, we’ll pay you a fraction of that.”
Reddit will pay a million content farms to repost memes before they pay a single moderator for [squints at paper] running their website
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.
Holy shit this is pathetic, sad and incredibly dumb.
Poo poo management goes poo poo.
That’s a bold strategy Cotton, let’s see how it works out for them.
September is coming
and it is eternal…
The last Eternal September was June of 2007. The iPhone gave an internet connection to users not because they wanted one and were interested in participating and contributing, but as an app. A way to passively consume online content for quick entertainment. Ever since then everything has been progressively forced towards app format, so that 99% of users don’t ever meaningfully contribute in anyway. Upvote, downvote, “this” in the comments and then off to the next app.
this
This in the comments
Why was the “Eternal September” a big deal? What was it like when it first happened?
I missed the first September but previous to the iPhone a large part of the web was individual forums/message boards, personally operated websites. Almost everyone online was there to talk to other people who share the same niche interests, or to share their hobbies on a dedicated website or their own personal site.
iPhones totally murdered most of that because phones encourage consumption over participation just by their nature, business caught on that there were millions of new users who did not know what they wanted and everything got turned into a revenue generation machine. Endless scrolling through formulaic content interspersed with ads.
Internet culture as a whole has been roughly like this for the last 16 years. Before that it was meme sites, flash games, webcomics, news aggregators, forums, chat rooms. Social media hadn’t taken off, the only way people communicated online was either AOL Instant Messanger or being in an ICQ chat channel. Or just communicating offline/in person, showing them the latest Homestar Runner video huddled around the computer as it loaded.
Since the mass introduction of smart phones and social media, it was no longer the insulated and dedicated using the internet, it was EVERYBODY. It’s switching from your indie rock station to the top 100. It’s going from your hole-in-the-wall bookstore to the city center. Not saying people don’t deserve access, but everything has become more diluted, passive, consumer-friendly.
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.
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.
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.
Just want to point out that there are a ton of Telegram communities focused on bypassing these types of limitations, because $0.10 USD for 1000 upvotes goes a lot farther in rural India than it does in Indiana.
By offering an incentive program, they’ve just opened up the door for a whole new third world economy. They should have stuck to fighting 3rd party API access tbh.
Venezuelan bot farms are ecstatic.
I could picture people here in Brazil doing the same, too. Fuck, myself was thinking about a way to exploit this while ruining the place further.
But my point is that, once you know that someone gets money for doing something, you stop doing it for free, so the action is likely to backfire really bad. It won’t drive engagement up, but down.
I used to rail about people all about monetizing everything online, but I kind of realized I was wrong and have given up. All of our data is getting sucked up, we should get something out of it… It gets frustrating using/building up a platform with your friends only for some company to just remove everything good about it.
You and I are here because we have hope that the federation experament will make things better. I cant promise anything, but having hope is enough to make at least a temporary home and at most a revolutionary new system.
