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.
and it is eternal…
The last Eternal September was June of 2007. The iPhone gave an internet connection to users not because they wanted one and were interested in participating and contributing, but as an app. A way to passively consume online content for quick entertainment. Ever since then everything has been progressively forced towards app format, so that 99% of users don’t ever meaningfully contribute in anyway. Upvote, downvote, “this” in the comments and then off to the next app.
this
This in the comments
Why was the “Eternal September” a big deal? What was it like when it first happened?
Internet culture as a whole has been roughly like this for the last 16 years. Before that it was meme sites, flash games, webcomics, news aggregators, forums, chat rooms. Social media hadn’t taken off, the only way people communicated online was either AOL Instant Messanger or being in an ICQ chat channel. Or just communicating offline/in person, showing them the latest Homestar Runner video huddled around the computer as it loaded.
Since the mass introduction of smart phones and social media, it was no longer the insulated and dedicated using the internet, it was EVERYBODY. It’s switching from your indie rock station to the top 100. It’s going from your hole-in-the-wall bookstore to the city center. Not saying people don’t deserve access, but everything has become more diluted, passive, consumer-friendly.
I missed the first September but previous to the iPhone a large part of the web was individual forums/message boards, personally operated websites. Almost everyone online was there to talk to other people who share the same niche interests, or to share their hobbies on a dedicated website or their own personal site.
iPhones totally murdered most of that because phones encourage consumption over participation just by their nature, business caught on that there were millions of new users who did not know what they wanted and everything got turned into a revenue generation machine. Endless scrolling through formulaic content interspersed with ads.