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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/snoocalypse@lemmy.ml

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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[-] Dirk@lemmy.ml 37 points 1 year ago

In other words: "Please bot our site to artificially push your karma points"

[-] SyJ@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 year ago

As if Reddit didn't already have issues with karma bots...

[-] Dirk@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 year ago

Yes, but now there is a monetary reason for doing so.

[-] sociablefish@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

No, account selling has always existed.

[-] Heastes@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago

This is just going to encourage even more spammy, low quality, easily consumable clickbait content.
Good luck, Steve.

[-] MontyVirus@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 year ago

Same thing happened with Quora, iirc. They started offering incentive for people to post a lot of questions, so now the app is flooded by complete junk.

[-] ddnomad@infosec.pub 9 points 1 year ago

I think there were 0 instances of Quora being useful when I search for things. At this point I just ignore Quora results completely, just because chances are whatever is on there are just shills and word salad people.

[-] MontyVirus@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 year ago

Yep. Believe it or not, there was a time when Quora was pretty decent. This is what happens when you try to boost engagement by offering cash incentives. It becomes quantity over quality.

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[-] ColonelSanders@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

If I said this on Reddit, the demographic probably wouldn't have got it, but maybe most folks here will:

Quora is just the new Yahoo Answers.

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[-] Heastes@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

There was a time, maybe 8-10 years or so ago, when you would actually find good and well-reasoned answers from qualified people on there. But now it got so bad that I added Quora to my search results blocklist addon.

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[-] forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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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[-] sturmblast@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago

Until they ban you with little to no explanation

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago

"You've been permanently suspended from Reddit on account of multiple, repeated violations of the code of conduct". There's some appeal system, but since you don't know what you did wrong, you can't actually appeal the suspension; and if you say "I don't even know why I'm being suspended", they say that they "reviewed your suspension" and decided to keep it. It's just like in Kafka's The Process - they hope that you either find something to feel guilty or give up defending yourself.

And always with that implicit "it's a user, you can't tell it 'don't do this', it won't be able to get it and change its behaviour."

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[-] 0uterzenith@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

they're really getting desperate huh

[-] jonne@infosec.pub 16 points 1 year ago

Ugh, I was hoping I could just cash out on the karma I already had. This is pointless. If they thought karma whoring was bad before, this is going to push it to a whole new level.

[-] JesusTheCarpenter@feddit.uk 15 points 1 year ago

I know there has been a lot of doommongering recently about the innevitable demise of Reddit. However, I feel like this change will be the worst thing the will have ever done if it comes to fruition.

[-] DrTautology@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

Holy shit this is pathetic, sad and incredibly dumb.

[-] Anticorp@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Poo poo management goes poo poo.

[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm in the 1% for karma earners.

Gimme my fuckin' money, Spez. $1 for every karma. So I'll get over a million.

[-] Valravn@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Not in the top anything, but over the years I collected some. 14000 is welcome money

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[-] simple@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Whew, I instantly feel validated in my decision to leave Reddit. If this gets applied it will encourage a bot apocalypse in Reddit, which is already something they're struggling with.

[-] TheSpookiestUser@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I didn't expect the validation to be this immediate, but here we are.

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[-] AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago

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@lemmy.world 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.

[-] Makeitstop@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

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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[-] reddithalation@sopuli.xyz 11 points 1 year ago

I have a bet with a friend on reddit being significantly smaller or dead in 5 years, its looking pretty good for me.

[-] hazeebabee@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

Haha i have a similar bet, but only 2 years down the line

They want to turn redditors into instagram whores haha.

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[-] Send_me_nude_girls@feddit.de 11 points 1 year ago

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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[-] another_lemming@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

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_@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago

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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[-] socsa@lemmy.ml 7 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.

[-] Hikiru@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

“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!”

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[-] dan@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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: https://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: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/comments/130zbw6/i_am_a_community_builder_for_reddit/

This link confirms that Community Builders are “vetted and paid by Reddit for their time”: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418715794324-What-is-the-Community-Builders-Program-

Despite claiming they work with mods, the mods of those subreddits don’t seem to be aware of this, as evidenced by this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Leeds/comments/138gi40/reddit_community_builders_please_read_details/

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[-] jarfil@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

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

[-] AdmiralShat@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

I see a huge issue with this.

I have seen in communities where mods will remove a user's post and then repost it themselves or with an alt and hit the front page.

So you're telling me now the mods have a financial incentive to do this? And what if as a money generating post gets removed simply because a mod doesn't like it, even though it doesn't break any rules?

I also feel like the quality of posts is about to implode even further from this. You're not asking artists or musicians or even meme creators to post, you're asking reposters to repost content that already did good.

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[-] Cyyy@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

so they can't pay for their shitty api and killed off thirdparty clients because they "can't afford them".. but can pay random users for shitty karma? sounds right.

[-] db2@lemmy.one 4 points 1 year ago

and is trying to counter it by throwing them some spare cash.

Reddit has no spare cash, Steve has pissed away better than three quarters of a billion dollars in venture capital. It'll probably be RedditBux or an NFT or something.

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[-] throbbing_banjo@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Marty Byrd loves this idea

[-] mysoulishome@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

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?

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

[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.

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[-] AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Congrats to the themed/novelty accounts like the person who posts the watercolors, Shittymorph, Snoodle, and the others who regularly post highly upvoted content. I'd add PoppinKream, but they're here now.

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[-] neveraskedforthis@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

So all those people who rip videos from youtube (not linking to them but download and reupload, usually with intro/outro and watermarks edited out) are now going to get paid for it?

How is that not theft, again?

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[-] BaconIsAVeg@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
247 points (98.1% liked)

SNOOcalypse - document, discuss, and promote the downfall of Reddit.

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SNOOcalypse is closing down. If you wish to talk about Reddit, check out !reddit@lemm.ee, !reddit@lemmy.world and !RedditMigration@kbin.social.


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