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.
This is just going to encourage even more spammy, low quality, easily consumable clickbait content.
Good luck, Steve.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.
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.
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.
Oh, kinda sounds like what happened to journalism too, eh?
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.
A friend (asshat bully) used to talk on quarra/yh-answers back in the 2010s, he used it like urban dictionary, that kind of toxic (fun?)
“How to make barnie’s head explode?” And other fun goodies
Feeling old yet? 😗
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.
Quora became king of useless answers after Yahoo Answers died. They were Quoronated, if you will.
my school bully on the school computers
Types out question while snickering:
vulgar
“How to eat your own hand and feed your poop to barney”
Searches and finds
vulgar
“Dora sits on a live garnade and it goes up her butt”
Followed by uncontrolled laughter and mabe a response.
If anything scares me, its him
I wonder if after this Silicon Valley realizes that there’s no infinite growth/money/potential and stops trying to position shit as such. Just make a product that holds up and doesn’t fold like a house of cards when it finally is being monetized.
Edit: And as a totally separate point, think about the mods! Loads of more work and zero pay while spammers “get rich”.
No. There’s too much money attached to it to stop.
The reality is, the Valley is capitalism on speed, but it’s still capitalism. All the underlying mechanisms are the same as in the “conventional” economy, just turned up to 11.
Between this and twitters incentives this seriously feels wrong. Like, social credit score wrong.
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.
In other words: “Please bot our site to artificially push your karma points”
As if Reddit didn’t already have issues with karma bots…
Yes, but now there is a monetary reason for doing so.
No, account selling has always existed.
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.
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?
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/
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.
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.
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.
So you’re telling me now the mods have a financial incentive to do this?
Yes. And it gets worse: who would mod that post-appocalyptic shithole? A: people who don’t give a fuck about the other users. If Reddit moderation was already obnoxious and user-hostile, it only got worse afterwards.
People will put a lot of effort into maximizing their returns with repost bots now. Yuck.
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.
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.
Until they ban you with little to no explanation
“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.”
I got suspended for “sexualization of minors”. Appealed that I did no such thing, and in response got permanently suspended for “repeated violations”.
So when “they” say you did it, you better believe it, because claiming otherwise is an additional violation 🤦
Wow. Just… wow. That borders libel. But odds are that they know that people won’t sue Reddit for libel, for such a small thing like a suspended account.
There’s even a name for that specific style of kafkatrapping that they used against you, it’s model “A” kafkatrapping: “your refusal to acknowledge that you’re guilty confirms that you’re guilty”.
Probably can’t be libel if they don’t make it public, just stuff that happens behind closed doors and they can say “no comment”. Would be different if Reddit had a public modlog like Lemmy.
My guess is, after 10 years without a problem, someone around 2 years ago might have marked me for takedown for whatever reason. I always tried to be respectful, but didn’t start self-censoring until they suspended me for “violent content” without even referencing what was the supposed content. I kind of hoped that using Power Delete Suite to blank the account history, and avoiding most polemic topics from then onwards, would keep it safe, but apparently not.
Ironically, an alt account I created to participate in more polemic topics, got zero problems… but they now banned it along the main one, so bye Reddit, so long and thanks for all the fish.
That’s a shame - this whole “we’re claiming that you did something that you didn’t do” sounds clearly illegal though.
It’s possible that they deemed you as unprofitable, and decided to kick you out based on that.
Ironically, an alt account I created to participate in more polemic topics, got zero problems… but they now banned it along the main one, so bye Reddit, so long and thanks for all the fish.
Something similar-ish happened with me, except that I did violate the rules (I told a declared Nazi to kill himself). They went out of the way to ban my old, inactive account; the newer account that I used for topics that I didn’t want to associate with the main account; but “curiously enough” they left the mod account alone. It was when I decided “nope, there’s some shady shit going on, I’m not modding for this shithole”.
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.
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 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.
Very brave.
Inb4 reddit karma farms pop-up all over the third world promising unlimited upvotes.
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.
