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.
Test comment
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?
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.
what addon is that ? I still remember when Google removed the option to ignore sites from their SERPs!
I’m using this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
cheers
Quora became king of useless answers after Yahoo Answers died. They were Quoronated, if you will.
Now they need to be quorantined
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
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.
Feeling old yet? 😗
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
1 bot reposts something.
1000 more bots upvote and give it awards to get it on front page.
Take cash
Repeat
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.
I didn’t expect the validation to be this immediate, but here we are.
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.
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.
Yep, the last 3 times I hit front page my posts were removed and all 3 times they really stretched their own rules to justify it but then post the same shit themselves
“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!”
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.
Shittymorph is here too
Really? I haven’t seen that, that’s awesome!
None of those novelty accounts were really great content though, so I don’t see how paying them helps at all.
I don’t see how they can avoid an algorithm that doesn’t pay them is the point. Apparently the key factors are gold and upvotes on a regular basis, which they all get.
I don’t think Reddit gives a crap about the quality, they just want stuff that makes people stay engaged. It’s a terrible approach though. One thing I’ve learned as a manager is that if your make a specific reward system, smart people will optimize how to get the most reward for the least effort. With this one, I can envision all sorts of things that will ultimately result in shitty content, like more repost bots, communities that make pacts to upvotes each other’s stuff, gobs of alt accounts, people trying even harder to make the funny zinger comment that adds nothing, etc.
“Becareful of what you measure”
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.
Very brave.
Inb4 reddit karma farms pop-up all over the third world promising unlimited upvotes.
Lol reddit needs those guys rn
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.
Hmm, what about 300k?
How about 550k?
That’s a lot
I know, that’s why I want it converted into cash money. There are sketchy sites out there that could give me a couple hundred, but let’s aim for a buck per karm.
Buck per karma, I like the way you think
This :clap: is :clap: why :clap: Karma :clap: isnt :clap: safe.
Karma, as an economic comodity builds perverse insentives and punishes honesty. If you got your Karma ligitimately, someones there to gunk up reddit by farming karma. Let reddit die by the hands of those who buy karma for propaganda sake!
classic image reposted
Shameless plug to my post on farming
expandable image of karma farming
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.
I could picture people here in Brazil doing the same, too. Fuck, myself was thinking about a way to exploit this while ruining the place further.
But my point is that, once you know that someone gets money for doing something, you stop doing it for free, so the action is likely to backfire really bad. It won’t drive engagement up, but down.
I used to rail about people all about monetizing everything online, but I kind of realized I was wrong and have given up. All of our data is getting sucked up, we should get something out of it… It gets frustrating using/building up a platform with your friends only for some company to just remove everything good about it.
You and I are here because we have hope that the federation experament will make things better. I cant promise anything, but having hope is enough to make at least a temporary home and at most a revolutionary new system.
Venezuelan bot farms are ecstatic.
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?
People will put a lot of effort into maximizing their returns with repost bots now. Yuck.
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.
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.
Their other idea was better where they would create shitcoins tied to your Karma… but then the entire crypto industry had a rug pull lmao
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”.
Watch it be 1 cent per 100k karma.
I’ll take that nickel!
