Reddit is killing blockchain based Community Points

Man, how much institutional failure is one man's ego actually worth?

It's more evidence that the platform is being run by investors that don't really know what they're doing. Reddit was a great platform, but instead of spending energy to "fix search" or "build better admin tools" they put their focus into buzzwords and ads. The NFT profile snoos, the crypto approach - is just pandering to the idea of an IPO so that they can all dump their stock and make a buck. Likely used engagement numbers from before the layout changes to pitch advertising without updating them as to how engagement has changed.

If they had any intention of running the platform long term, they would balance the experience that Redditors are used to with a sober approach to advertising. They would create meaningful community features and charge for them as a community add on (such as a community event calendar that ISN'T Facebook, community marketplaces, association management, etc.) With the audience and reach that they have, the long term profitability of the platform was almost assured. They would have adopted federation in order to aggregate even more content. They would have rolled their own AI instance into their search and community recommendations instead of freaking out about it. Instead, we got NFT avatars that literally nobody asked for, because crypto bros.

Fwiw, the site has shit the bed. There isn't nearly as many active users as people seem to think. There's... A LOT of very obvious bots. New communities that being floated now are clearly gaming the algorithm. It's very obviously different than what it was.

Spez created both reddit crypto and reddit NFTs, and spent millions doing so. At the same time, he was literally paying all the infrastructure costs for some of the world's wealthiest companies to mass-harvest reddit's data for their latest projects, and spent tens of millions in infrastructure, development costs, storage and bandwidth to self-host videos and images and create a broken media player (after having spent 15 years refusing to do so).

He literally sees a techbro trend start, watches it peak, and then tries to drag reddit along in it's wake as it starts to fail. He is a failure as a CEO, and he knows it. He also knows this is his last chance to make bank, which is why he's so stubbornly insisting on following the current path: he wants "his" bag.

You mean NFTs?

There's a ton of potential real-world purposes for blockchain, but none are going to come to fruition for decades. There's one project I am still involved in, distributed cloud storage, nodes get paid for participation in tokens. It is not profitable, but I like keeping a toe in the water for a "real thing."

That was their excuse. The real reason was they couldn't monetize data when people used third party apps, or shove useless features from their shitty app into peoples faces.

They didn’t ban third party apps. They increased the pricing for using the api to a rate higher than most third party apps could afford with their business models.

Like if someone wanting to train some ai on reddit would pay those insane prices for the API instead of just scraping for free.

Openai pirated millions of books via books2/zlibrary to train their model, they don't care about copyright