Community Points allow members of Reddit communities to own a piece of their community, earn rewards for quality contributions, and unlock special features.
Read all about it at the above link. There's way too much to process here. This is going to be wild.
Today's online communities are not like this. They are trapped inside apps and platforms, where they do not have independence or control anything of value.
That's hilarious, when they literally just trapped users in their app and killed 3rd party apps.
In case anyone's confused about what this is all about:
$5/month per community
It's easy to miss, but they snuck in that Special Memberships (subreddit subscriptions, which unlock badges and emojis and stuff) cost $5 a month per subreddit, outside of Reddit Premium. You can also spend 1000 Community Points, but if you don't have the balance and want the benefits, you'll be giving reddit money.
It feels like reddit has come to understand how much closer redditors feel to their communities than reddit as a whole - reddit is hated, but users still cling to their communities. A sitewide Reddit Premium badge is irrelevant, even repugnant and a badge of shame, but special flairs and features in close knit communities are still desirable.
This is reddit exploiting their users' relationships with their communities with a stackable 5 buck alternative to Reddit Premium.
Probably the only smart thing Reddit has done all year. All you have to do is invent some sort of perk for a community and put it behind a monthly paywall. Make it a pooled system with a goal and peer pressure will get you more subs. Discord has been making bank on this concept for a while now.
If they can leverage subreddit tribalism, it might have even have more potential than Discord, which isn't nearly as interconnected. Or it would have, if they hadn't hitched this to the blockchain.