Desperate or just business as normal?
The Reddit app is potentially introducing a Contributor program, allowing users to earn real money for their contributions, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem within the community.
Make content, get paid.
The concept behind the program is straightforward. Redditors who receive substantial gold and karma from other community members can potentially convert these virtual rewards into real-world money that can be cashed out.
sigh, that's desperation. This means that the discussion on Reddit will not be natural or organic, it will cease to be human. Redditors will be like dogs, where they shitpost and post comments that everyone agrees with so they can make money, basically doing what the master tells them in order to get their treat. Reddit as we know it will cease to exist.
Basically Quora.
Quora started to pay people to ask questions, rather than reward the people who put efforts into answering.
I skipped that stupid thing instantly.
Looks great for engagement when everyone is greedily making posts for the most likes though. Just another step towards a golden facade for IPO.
Worse, I don't think it's desperation. I think the senior leadership genuinely sees this as a good idea. That implies they view reddit no longer as a series of communities that organically develop and more as a social network that should pursue reach and "quality" content.
To me, that's way worse than desperation. That's like the exact opposite of what reddit was stated to be when I first joined.
That’s like the exact opposite of what reddit was stated to be when I first joined.
It is exactly the opposite of what Aaron Swartz created.
We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive.
-Steve Huffman-
It is a good idea from the point of view that a lot of platforms are compensating their content creators for their work to keep them on the platform.
It is a bad idea because most power users used third party apps to help provide their content, and Reddit just pissed a lot of them off.
Yeah this will make discussion 100x worse now that there's a strong financial reason to be ungenuine and follow the hive mind. Not to mention this decision has terrible timing with the rise of ChatGPT bots, as if bots weren't already an issue. Did they think these bots were actually going to use the API? I'm sure communities will love Reddit offering users money to ruin their communities.
Yeah. Who is going to risk a downvote with real money on the line. Actually I can see brigading wars to "ruin someone financially" being a thing.
Sounds like the exploitation of children that happens on Roblox. They may earn money if they make enough after cuts to withdraw. Just more user exploitation with the carrot-on-stick of getting paid.
Or.....maybe some will use bots to make comments/post/earn money. Possible no humans needed for conversation at some point. Just bots chatting with bots making the "human dogs" money!!
Makes me wonder what the actual bot convo would look like!!!!
I’m sure if you go into a political sub right now you can see GPT4 vs GPT3.5 in full swing
I act natural around my friends and they pay me, so I dont know what the big issue is 🤷🏼♂️
r/cryptocurrency became exactly like that under a similar system.
This is also observable with all social media, where you can see that the communities shifted greatly once people started making money or getting a following, content just became mostly derivative of "what works".
Look at gonewild. Onlyfans as far as the eye can see.
I think, "Yea!, that's desperation"...
It's Quora.
And we thought bots and karma farming were bad before.
Yeah, this new thing will be botted to hell lol.
Get gets us... Reddit gold?
Reddit must be super nervous and losing a lot of traffic. Burn baby, burn!
I feel like I got out just at the right time!
It's such a shame that everything has to be commodifed. Being on lemmy, free of ads and financial incentives is such a breath of fresh air. Community and sharing ideas shouldn't be driven by money.
More incentive to post low quality content
Comments asking for upvotes and gold gonna be out of hand
Remember all those posts that sometimes will come up in r/relationship advice or subs like that portraying really vulnerable people that are really down on their luck ("Im a single mom/dad and have to do horrible things so that my children can eat" "Im an abused teen and can't escape my home" "Im trying to escape a borderline cult" etc etc)?
Now, Im sure at least some of those were fake to begin with (I don't have anything against those subs or those stories, but you can't guarantee every single one of them is true). Now imagine if they could put a little edit in the end "thank you all, you are so kind, I managed to sign up into reddit's content program, so if you want to help make sure to upvote and leave some gold, it means so much".
In those subs, people were already helping out how they could (I would often see people offering to send food or stuff to OPs home, things like that)... so that's not gonna backfire at all if its implemented.
Great post, 4 day old account /u/BroughtListless! Here's $20!
It is a race to the bottom. There is no way this turns out well.
Literal karma whore (although they say must be sfw)
So all those perma bans of high karma long time members for no reason was a money driven directive?
By suspending the accounts reddit just wiped a bunch of karma they wont pay for but still can use the content.
Pretty sure it’s just for karma you earn after after you apply.
I was going to say…with what money is Reddit going to pay these posters? Because they couldn’t turn a profit while relying on unpaid moderators.
It’s completely ass-backwards to pay posters while telling mods to suck it and donate their time.
Can you imagine the abuse of that?
Corruption usually comes from the top down. The real trickle down economics.
I'm not an expert by any means but can't this be used to launder money?
I don't think money laundering would be worth it. I would expect Reddit to end up with the majority due to the pay out rate.
I was thinking a mix of theft and fraud. Use stolen credit cards to buy gold for bot/puppet accounts then post on your main account. If a post starts to take off, throw the bots at it to gild and add extra upvotes.
If someone was doing this, I would expect it to be a side hustle. Use the stolen credit cards early like this to test if they're valid. Then use them for the main crime of buying goods to resell.
Why would they need that when they already have their dumbass NFTs?
Steve Huffman: "Reddit doesn't make any money"
Also Steve Huffman: "Please stay on our platform, we'll pay you?"
From what I understood from the article, the money only comes from gold and awards users bought and then awarded to the content. so its more like, "we won't pay for your labor but we will ask the other, previously free users to pay for it"
I guess what he meant is that, at the moment, Reddit Gold revenue goes 100% into Reddit's pockets. But if they start funneling part of this money into contributor's pockets, it means Reddit is effectively paying them from a money pool that was previously exclusively theirs. Thus, Reddit is "paying them".
As soon as users are paid for sharing someone else’s copyrighted content, wouldn’t companies like media outlets start pursuing it as theft for profit?
Sounds like Reddit is headed down the road of YouTube where UMG is going to start slamming users everywhere with strikes for their revenue, and DMCA will be abused a lot more heavily.
Just gonna hijack your comment for visibility. reddit started trialing a "Community Points" program in 2019 in /r/ethtrader, /r/cryptocurrency and /r/fortnite , where posters and commenters could earn "Community Points" that were supposedly backed up with crypto that you could eventually cash out. They announced an expansion of the program in December 2021 but, afaik, they never actually did so. Which might have something to do with the fact that one of the /r/cryptocurrency mods made $10,000 by selling community points. I don't know if the program has actively continued since then; maybe someone who was in the three trial communities can say.
My point is that reddit has been working on something similar to this program for at least five years now. And this article isn't based on any announcement by reddit, but by someone examining their source code. It's possible that this code has been present for a while and reddit has leaked it's existence to try to attract back some of their lost contributors. Or even that it hasn't been present but they included the old code in the newest app release and then pointed it out for the same reason.
In any case, this article isn't based on any official announcement, and reddit has been "trialing" a similar program for over four years. I wouldn't hold out any hope that this actually sees daylight anytime soon, or that it'll work well if it's actually released.
Yeah this is going to make a fucking mess with attribution. Expect to see even less OC on Reddit if posting it means you lose your rights AND someone else gets to profit off reposts.
So…we can actively harm Reddit by going on reporting sprees? Yes?
Maybe, if you have sufficient accounts to do so and not get caught. It's probably not worth the time and effort. Living well (elsewhere) is the best revenge.
So no more song lyric waterfalls?
They should stick to the karma lakes they are used to.
Imagine an environment where users are getting paid for gold award content and the moderators are still unpaid for all the work they do behind the scenes.
With bot detection going away, I can see programmers making several bots to manipulate this to make money, and lots of it, through many accounts.
Meanwhile, yikes, they are totally forgetting the real users. I’m a few months, there will be at least a 50% chance that comment or post you are replying to is a bot.
I’m a few months, there will be at least a 50% chance that comment or post you are replying to is a bot.
It already feels this way. A lot of them are the most basic comments or don't make any sense at all.
Part of why I liked the Apollo app was that it could show account ages. There'd be a post from a 23-day-old account, and a heavily-upvoted thread with witty comments from a 24-day-old account, replied to by a 22-day-old account, replied to by a 27-day-old account.
It really sucks because I'm working on stuff I'd love to share with people, but sharing content on reddit would feel dirty. I haven't done anything but lurk the stable diffusion subreddit using Brave in over a month.
Or it'll end up going the same way as Quora. People just churn out answers for money, irrespective of whether they're helpful or all that relevant at all.
Contributors should be rewarded. What kind of contributions though? Video? Isn't that Youtube? Articles? Ok. I mean, if they are really good articles that really give insight into important information, great!. Art? Sure. They deserve it. This is the thing. Once it becomes "commercial". Then the forums will become safespaces. The whole thing becomes just a giant market and I can see reddit "demonetizing" depending on the content. That will turn reddit into something entirely different to Lemmy. And you know what? That's alright. The internet is big enough where reddit can coexist with the fediverse. But this is actually a good thing. Because then, lemmy and systems like this can become community oriented. A platform where people can discuss without concerns of what a corporation will or won't do. A place where the value lies on our contributions as a community in the very same way reddit was in its beginnings.
Reddit becoming a source of income for contributors shouldn't be a bad thing. It simply turns it into something entirely different to what we saw back in the early 2000s
"This is gonna make the karmawhoring and bot problem so much better guys I swear"
-spez, probably
Gallowboob will be a billionaire overnight and everyone else will be left in the dust.
This plan isn't just stupid, it's moronic.
Why do I suddenly have visions of that South Park episode about virtual internet money?
Canada wants more money! I'm not your friend, Buddy!
So wait, not only has their monetization effort so far been a flop, now they're going to start paying people to post? Woooow. Spez trying to edge out Elon for the Most Incompetent Management award this year?
demand money from third party app developers
give money to karmawhores
wut
so what does that say about their values and vision?
Lol "third party API is too expensive".....but let's give out money to users for fun
This payout has got to be fractions of a penny per 100 gold or something similar to the low rates artists are paid for Spotify plays or YouTube views.
How would this even work? How are they going to stop brigading, bots, low effort spam crap for upvotes, massive reposting, etc? How will this actually increase quality of content?
Also: this would mean giving reddit your actual information, right? How else are they going to pay you? Or are they going to try using crypto and nfts?
It sounds like a terrible idea to me, tbh. Maybe they should start with paid moderators to deal with all the extra spam, crossposting, brigading and bots that will result from this move.
To ensure the authenticity and security of the program, contributors will need to provide verification information, including their email addresses, personal details, and tax and bank account information.
Yikes²
They already have crypto and NFTs. Take a look at Reddit Moons and the NFT Avatars
I never really cared about them tacking on a bunch of useless shit on top of Reddit. As a third-party-app and old.reddit user I kind of figured that if they monitized that piece and let me hang out in the underbelly then it wasn't really a problem. Why not have the normies subsidize the denizens of the old reddit, it's not like we aren't using adblock anyway.
But now that they've killed off the API it's only a matter of time before the come for old.reddit so I'm out before they get around to it.
You'll be paid in NFT Snoos.
In all seriousness, this leaves the site wide open to exploitation in the pursuit of monetary gain.
Ultimately that will lead to a degredation of content (even more so than now).
paid in NFT Snoos
I smell an exit scam
Good Lord. This whole influencer/social media celebrity thing needs to die
Ok but first like and share my comment. Of course gold will also be appreciated!
Not sure if there are any ex Redditors old enough to remember the Sydrah debacle?
In which a Reddit user and mod of several communities advertised on LinkedIn that they were ‘a social community manager who had pull in several online communities’ (“has pull” is a direct quote the rest is paraphrased) and that they could be paid to influence the narrative in these communities.
Someone doxxed them and leaked the LinkedIn profile and a vast swathe of the community cried out in horror and revulsion. Oh how the bacon narwhaled on that day!
She’s still a mod of 2xC and at least a few dozen other subs.
Looks like Reddit just legitimised her now ancient play really. It’ll be a website full of Sydrahs after this.
Everyone loves to joke about how moderators are “jannies” and “free labor” but let’s be honest, all the power mods that have control of dozens of subs are making money off it. Political/news subs have loads of value to groups with agendas, and non-political subs still have value to corporations that want to advertise their products.
The only thing Sydrah did that was unique was getting caught.
Wholeheartedly agree.
I always apply the adage: ‘if it can be done it is being done’.
How did you find the mod list on that sub? I'm using browser now to occasionally check Reddit, but it seems like they are removing rhe ability to search for sub mods, or maybe I'm just not looking hard enough.
In old.reddit, it's on the bottom of the side bar. If it's not visible, perhaps it can be hidden by CSS, but I think the link in format https://www.reddit.com/r/[subreddit]/about/moderators will be always available. Note that this link points to new reddit; it works there as well.
Not a clue. That website is dead to me.
This looks like the way to go full Digg. With payment comes verified accounts, and probably further segmentation of accounts with higher priority than normal accounts. The idea being the paid accounts are professionals with high karma, therefore assumed to provide better content and become prioritized.
This is exactly the way of thinking that destroyed Digg. Although this is tweaked compared to what Digg did, the basic idea is the same, and the outcome will very likely look somewhat similar. The quality of content will fall off a cliff, and the userbase will quickly evaporate.
Even if they never go through with this scheme, it shows the leadership of reddit has lost their perspective, and sense of the community shaping that originally made reddit good.
it shows the leadership of reddit has lost their perspective, and sense of the community shaping that originally made reddit good.
Most importantly, they forgot their history and why Reddit succeeded when Digg failed.
Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.
They have forgotten the face of their father.
It’s transactional. Community dies when relationships become transactional.
Man, you don't never go full Digg. Everybody knows that.
Or like YouTube where people will be arbitrarily demonetized for rules they aren't actually violating while others who blatantly violate rules will be ignored because they are corporate posters and Reddit won't want the legal nightmare they might start if they enforce rules with them.
It's an interesting idea and a step in the right direction overall, but this reality has a way of turning every possible utopia into a distopia.
Well, at least YouTube is still a valid way to make a living for a lot of people. Who knows how long this will last, but somehow they managed to keep the whole ecosystem alive and working thus far
Let me get this straight.
People make content, bots up vote content that aligns with their objectives. People get paid for up votes.
So... People are working for bots now?
I think you forgot a crucial step... Bots steal actual content, then direct other bots to down vote and report said original content, and then direct said bots to upvote the stolen content.
I, for one, welcome our new bot overlords
Oh my God. This is awesome.
"We need to tighten the purse strings!!1" quickly became "open the coffers!" as soon as they hit a speed bump.
Seriously epic. With the amount of vote manipulation going on over there, this will be a complete and utter failure. I guarantee it will be pulled in a month or two.
So stupid. Greedy motherfuckers... I thought it was the unpaid, volunteer mods that were the "landed gentry" that were ruining the site? They fucked around and found out pretty quickly, and now they're creating something that fits their analogy much better.
I can't wait to see their IPO fail miserably, and watch Steve Huffman realize that he fucked himself over by being too greedy.
I have a feeling that whatever disappointment the current owners and execs of Reddit have with the IPO will be eclipsed by the disappointment of the people who buy the shares. I don't think Reddit was worth anywhere close to the valuations two months ago and I'd be surprised if it's still worth half of its true value two months ago.
But then again, it has close to zero value to me at the moment (it varies which side of zero it's on based on my mood).
desperate as fuckkkkkk
lemmy for me rn has become an almost perfect replacement. only thing i can feature request is the ability to transfer my data to other instances when needed, in case my current one blows up.
other than that, this place is solid 👍🏼
There are already some issues open on Lemmy's github about transferring data between instances, so it has good chances of being implemented (although there isn't a timeline for when it could happen). I just don't think things like comments, posts and votes can be transferred, at least for now.
got it, thank you!
There are several tools out there on GitHub already which allows you to export all your settings and import it elsewhere.
Instances being blowed up will be a huge issue if the whole thing will be getting really popular. And if not, it might die anyway
I meant blowed up in the sense of like, genuinely goes out of service (i was at work at the time, i did not explain properly). But yeah, if it gets too popular for the admin to handle that may also be an issue. So far I like lemmy a little more than reddit. I think I will always miss apollo, but this will guarantee that my third party client will not go out of service 🙏🏼
If you think karma whoring is bad now ...
Ok God damnit... Someone fucking explain the shitty ass chat filter to me please? I don't know what was removed from dudes comment, but I'd kinda like to know if anything will get me banned before I go fucking around and get settled in here...
Sorry bud, not picking on you personal or anything like that, just a FNG from baconreader trying to sort shit out ;)
Edit- not a single "removed" here? I got the word removed removed from another comment...
More edit- yeah that word lol... Can I get banned for bypassing? Like if I say b***h? Can I get a warning or some shit here please?
Not a thing, sorry dude. Check your settings, maybe your instance added some sort of explicit language filter? That's all I can think of.
If this is true, the end is nigh. What kind of content do they think this will encourage? Bots and low-quality rehashings will flood the place further.
Though I guess they'll get some juicy income from requiring this information:
email addresses, personal details, and tax and bank account information.
Good riddance!
yea, all this does is incentivize running plenty of bots. enough chatGPT content, and you will be able to cash it out.
yikes. why/how do they have access to this?
“I wouldn’t use the piece-of-shit first-party App, even if you paid me!”
“What if we pay you?”
“…”
It also sounds like a way to drive up gold subscriptions. Reddit has gone full digg.
I won't lie, I thought about it for a minute
It's going to be a Karma OnlyFans out there soon.
We're about to see the Great Flood of Reposts and Karma Farming.
All ye Redditors that got annoyed at the protests, this is what you brought upon yourself.
Shitposts, shitposts everywhere
To be honest, if I were in Spez's shoes, I wouldn't have gone after the third-party apps but instead created actual incentives to subscribe to Reddit Premium like anonymous posting, enhanced privacy settings, enhanced search functionality, the ability to post images and videos in comments, etc.
Also I would've added a partner program where approved creators can monetize their artwork, videos, nudes, etc. Rather than have such creators astroturf the shit out of your platform to push their Fansly, OnlyFans and Patreon accounts, Spez could've cut out the middle-man and profiteered directly from content creators and porn stars.
I would've even poised RPAN to become a direct competitor to apps like Periscope, Kick and Twitch.
I would have fixed the damn API to push ads out to third party apps, with ad revenue sharing. Then implemented a per user API price to enable browsing ad free.
Considering Reddit Premium removed ads, they were already set up for this. 🤦
It is a much better (and more honest) way to manipulate users using the Sunk Cost Fallacy.
Instead of blackmailing Mods to stay by saying “you have invested a lot of your time into this subreddit, it would be a shame if something would happen to it”, they could say to users “you are already paying for the ability to use Reddit, you might as well use Reddit”.
Oh hey I'm relevant! I actually got a message from Reddit back when I was selling porn 2-3 years ago. What did it say you might ask.
It was a cease and desist for using Reddit to push "obscene and questionable materials" involving "abuse of disabled individuals" because my wheelchair was visible in a few of my stuffs. Not to mention the only reason I needed the wheelchair was cause I had to get an appendix removed and that combined with my heart problem made walking difficult.
Look. Competence was never their strong suit, ok?
Here's the interesting bit for me:
To begin verification, you must have at least ten gold and 100 karma, according to the code.
and
users will have to maintain a certain level of activity and accumulate a designated amount of gold and karma each month to remain eligible for payouts
Sounds like an attempt to drive up reddit gold sales? I deleted my account and still had that one free gold award from forever ago. Feels like the easiest way to do this is have a second account that buys gold and awards it to the primary earning account to meet the minimum.
Quick maffs $20 to get 10 gold awards, which also gives the recipient 1000 coins (worth 2 gold awards for another account, so you'll probably see subs devoted to a black market for discounted gold awards for that accumulated coin) and 10 weeks of reddit premium. It honestly sounds like a very complicated subscription.
are there discounts for platinum?
I'm honestly interested in how they'll get around anti money laundering laws
That's the neat part...
All those ShowerThoughts that were blocked by bots, only to be reposted for Karma by a different person…yeah, somehow that’s going to be rigged.
My decision to move here looks better the time goes by
Crazy thought but what if they paid third party developers instead by simply not kicking them off
That's a great idea! Too bad nobody thought of it before and now here we are lol
Spez: "I paid you a small fortune."
Me: "And this gives you power over me?"
"The Barbie Rises", only in theaters July 21st.
It's not about Ken, it's about sending a message.
And the message is that you should preorder your tickets to "Barbie" today!
Oh jeez please let the writer's strike be over soon.
We both know I must upvote you now.
I basically quit Reddit cold turkey. Rather than watch the slow, sad decline of its communities by going along with Reddit management, I'd advocate them to make the transition to the Fediverse now rather than later. The /retrogaming/ community (I need to drop the /r/ for obvious reasons) did this and is doing quite well for itself on Lemmy and Mastodon.
If you could link to their lemmy so other retrogmaing lovers can sub and follow, that'd be amazing!
That will make them profitable for sure!
Faking popularity for profit. Ew.
Users must be over 18 years old and reside in the United States
Reddit: the front page of the internet intranet
This is going to be super easy to exploit
Barely an inconvenience
Each human account with tax information will run 1 million upvoting bots
First it was bitcoin mining, now it’s Reddit karma whoring…
Not really. I expect that the cost of gold will be higher than the pay.
You're over estimating the payout. I'd imagine it to be something like the creator gets 10 cents of the 3$ a gold costs.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/YAKOWcs8w54
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I love this bot. Of all the bots this one is by far the coolest.
Pay moderators and app developers that help make communities thrive? Hell no. Pay people to contribute content? Yes! That’s the way! Force the community with money. Yes!
I know who will be the top contributor!
Their name is ChatGPT.
Just give me cash for my 16 years of karma so I can fuck off to Lemmy, kthx.
Because if karma bots weren't a problem before..
I’m definitely not opposed to this from an ideological perspective — you are actively producing content for a platform that’s making money off of it, so surely revenue sharing with you is just the right thing to do.
That said unless the system has extensive human involvement I have no idea how it could possibly work. It seems rife for abuse. And I would bet on it being the first thing cut during cost-cutting (if it was ever implemented at all of which I’m pretty skeptical).
The Nerd Wars of 2023 are shaping up to be even more action packed than The Great Meme War of 2016!
Remember the Real-Money Auction House in Diablo 3? This seems very much like that...
And I bet it's going to go the way of the RMAH.
Not trying to brag, just for the sake of this discussion, I had a shit ton of karma and I would get gold awards all the time. I guess Reddit is saving money by me refusing to go back there. That sort of puts me in a bind. Do I keep away from Reddit or do I help bleed them dry?
Just kidding, fuck Reddit. I am totally done with them.
It won't be retroactive. They'll come up with a new award instead.
Did you really believe they'd honor golds of old?
I know it won't be retroactive, but I haven't changed my behavior, so I could potentially earn if this stupid idea happens.
“We have already determined what kind of person you are, now we are just establishing the price."
I had nearly 600k post karma on Reddit but I’m never going to post anything there again.
They just got done complaining about third-party apps making money while they’re not. Now they want to pay people to post and interact? Smelling very desperate.
They’ve really fucked that place.
Such a shame.
Anyway…
What could possibly go wrong!?
don't forget to stock up on popcorn.
Okay, hear me out. Someone make a gold-farming bot on reddit, and take that money and donate to some lemmy/kbin instance. I think we found a way to fund lemmy/kbin! Reddit will do it for us!
