Make content, get paid.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    3301 year ago

    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.

    • merlin
      link
      fedilink
      1021 year ago

      I agree, though I also believe that Reddit is like that already.

    • youthinkyouknowme
      link
      fedilink
      English
      651 year ago

      Soon on YouTube “how to make money on reddit”, “top 10 comments that will get you 9999 upvotes”

      • @Nobody
        link
        English
        351 year ago

        This!

        Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!

        We did it, Reddit!

        • @HiDefMusic
          link
          English
          31 year ago

          Ding ding ding! We have a winner!

      • Marxine
        link
        fedilink
        English
        101 year ago

        “Easy trick for TOP GOLD Reddit admins don’t want YOU to now!”

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      381 year ago

      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.

      • KᑌᔕᕼIᗩ
        link
        fedilink
        English
        151 year ago

        “I caught my 12 year old son playing Minecraft so I smashed all his things and beat him. Was I wrong?”

        That was roughly one of the so-called questions I saw on Quora recently. Absolute garbage.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          21 year ago

          Well they get paid to ask absolute garbage so you’ll see oodles of these shitty “questions”

      • Marxine
        link
        fedilink
        English
        141 year ago

        That explains why content quality over there is so damn bad, I didn’t know about that before since I skipped the Quora train.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          51 year ago

          I used it for some time before, since it was just people asking questions and doubts and curiosities.

          But once this paid stupidity started, it was adios time.

    • @Halosheep
      link
      English
      331 year ago

      Looks great for engagement when everyone is greedily making posts for the most likes though. Just another step towards a golden facade for IPO.

    • @SCB
      link
      English
      321 year ago

      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.

      • TomTheGeek
        link
        English
        161 year ago

        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.

      • Raging LibTarg
        link
        English
        151 year ago

        We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive.

        -Steve Huffman-

      • HobbitFoot
        link
        fedilink
        English
        21 year ago

        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.

    • 👁️👄👁️
      link
      fedilink
      English
      111 year ago

      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.

      • @veroxii
        link
        English
        41 year ago

        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.

    • Neato
      link
      fedilink
      101 year ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      91 year ago

      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!!!

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      51 year ago

      I act natural around my friends and they pay me, so I dont know what the big issue is 🤷🏼‍♂️

    • Hunter2
      link
      fedilink
      English
      5
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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”.

  • Skray
    link
    fedilink
    1991 year ago

    And we thought bots and karma farming were bad before.

  • MdRuckus
    link
    English
    1651 year ago

    Reddit must be super nervous and losing a lot of traffic. Burn baby, burn!

    • @Lazylazycat
      link
      English
      1111 year ago

      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.

      • CaptainHowdy
        link
        fedilink
        281 year ago

        I agree, but unfortunately it does cost money (way more than you think) to host something online, even a small Lemmy instance. The more traffic you have, the more it costs. The same goes for time spent on admin, which shouldn’t be free unless it’s a passion project.

        • PupBiru
          link
          fedilink
          221 year ago

          which is exactly why the fediverse is so good! you can host it yourself and shoulder the cost, join a free instance, donate something small… the cost is shared among many, which makes it far more acceptable for a lot of small passion projects

        • @Lazylazycat
          link
          English
          13
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          You can say the same for lots of things though. I think if we want to take back control of discourse then we have to accept the cost.

          An example from a world I understand - putting on and taking part in free parties (in the UK and the rest of Europe) has a financial and time cost. But people put on these incredible festivals not for financial gain, and not to even break even as there’s no charge to get in, but because they love music and community. Some things are more important than profit.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            31 year ago

            Aren’t Reddit moderators already volunteer admins? Still, Lemmy has the same issue as Reddit when considering server costs, if not worse. On Reddit, if a post brings in high volume of traffic, their server (farm?) needs to be strong to handle the influx. On Lemmy, the server instance can go down… theoretically. Not sure how much load a post can cause. But, compared to Reddit, Lemmy federated design means high load situations are suboptimal.

            • @Lazylazycat
              link
              English
              31 year ago

              They are, and yet they have limited control over the discourse as we’ve seen over the last month.

              I get your points - I’m interested and excited to see how the Feddiverse grows and I hope it remains sustainable. I feel uncharacteristically positive about it.

            • HobbitFoot
              link
              fedilink
              English
              31 year ago

              Reddit has a harsher delineation between mods and admins compared to Lemmy. It seems common for Lemmy admins to mod some of their communities, while that is really rare on Reddit.

            • prole
              link
              fedilink
              English
              21 year ago

              Sure, but the decentralized nature of the fediverse means that a single failure point is no longer enough to take the entire thing down.

        • Ulu-Mulu-no-die
          link
          English
          61 year ago

          True but donations help, it’s the best way to support this kind of projects IMO, doesn’t cover admins time and the soul they pour into it but at least the server costs.

        • prole
          link
          fedilink
          English
          11 year ago

          All it would take is one left-leaning billionaire to fund server costs for Lemmy instances with no strings attached, and we’d never have to worry about it being commodified. C’mon George Soros, where are you at? It would be pocket change for you.

          So many far right billionaires putting so much money into their hateful, bigoted causes, while progressive causes seem to die on the vine due to lack of funding.

          • @TheGreatFox
            link
            English
            51 year ago

            Problem is, you don’t become a billionaire without massive amounts of exploiting people for profit, and someone like that isn’t going to support Lemmy since there’s no profit to be had. There are no left-leaning billionaires, only neo-liberal billionaires.

            • @Historical_General
              link
              English
              -11 year ago

              I hope he wasn’t serious lol, he even has three arrows on his profile pic. It’s such a corporate thing to say.

      • 567PrimeMover
        link
        fedilink
        671 year ago

        “…and remember guys, if you liked this comment please UPVOTE and GILD!!!”

        • StarServal
          link
          fedilink
          181 year ago

          This post is sponsored by NordVPN. Make sure to check out my Patreon after reading my comment.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          81 year ago

          All these typing makes my hand sore. Did I mention this supplement that is good for muscle cramps? You can buy it now at mychannelstore dot com!

      • BuddhaBeettle
        link
        fedilink
        231 year ago

        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.

    • @mctit
      link
      English
      191 year ago

      Great post, 4 day old account /u/BroughtListless! Here’s $20!

  • @Ludo
    link
    English
    95
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    deleted by creator

    • @postmateDumbass
      link
      English
      33
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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.

      • @Syrc
        link
        English
        01 year ago

        Pretty sure it’s just for karma you earn after after you apply.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      71 year ago

      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.

  • @ShroOmeric
    link
    English
    881 year ago

    Can you imagine the abuse of that?

    • db2
      link
      fedilink
      English
      311 year ago

      Corruption usually comes from the top down. The real trickle down economics.

      • @DocMcStuffin
        link
        English
        61 year ago

        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.

      • @Wooly
        link
        English
        51 year ago

        No, I don’t think so. How you would get the dirty money in the system? I’m assuming the content creators don’t have to give Reddit any money to get money back for their content.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          91 year ago

          Just spitballimg here, could be totally wrong as we’re not 100% sure how this is going to work:

          Get 2 accounts

          Link a prepaid card with dirty money to account 1.

          Comment/post on account 2 (whichever pays more)

          Gild account 2s activity repeatedly with account 1, use bots to upvote spam account 2.

          Deposit payments from reddit into personal account. Now your money is washed

          • Very_Bad_Janet
            link
            fedilink
            3
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Omg that’s good! I wonder what the limit is on how much a single post or comment could earn. Like, say, you have $100,000 to wash - could that go to one post, or 100,000 posts? Does Reddit take any percentage of the earnings (not.sure if that was mentioned in the article)?

      • @Hackerman_uwu
        link
        English
        11 year ago

        Why would they need that when they already have their dumbass NFTs?

    • mk36109
      link
      fedilink
      311 year ago

      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”

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        81 year ago

        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”.

        • @AncientMariner
          link
          English
          21 year ago

          Reddit seems to be creating a tipping process in which they take a cut… Delightful.

          • @Hackerman_uwu
            link
            English
            11 year ago

            Actually a lot more like there is a reservoir of value from which you can sip if you do Immortan Spezs bidding. And you can ride with him through the gates of karma for eternity all shiny and chrome.

  • @Stitch
    link
    English
    751 year ago

    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.

    • athos77
      link
      fedilink
      14
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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.

    • @rustyfish
      link
      English
      51 year ago

      So…we can actively harm Reddit by going on reporting sprees? Yes?

      • @dynamojoe
        link
        English
        71 year ago

        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.

  • Tygr
    link
    English
    74
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Seraphin 🐬
      link
      fedilink
      English
      241 year ago

      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.

      • @delvach
        link
        English
        111 year ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          -11 year ago

          Could also have been old-timers that have had accounts repeatedly banned by admins for bullshit reasons. But yeah more likely just bots lol.

    • @T156
      link
      English
      101 year ago

      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.

    • ax1900kr
      link
      English
      81 year ago

      Removed by mod

    • @Caminsky
      link
      English
      8
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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

  • DumbAceDragon
    link
    fedilink
    English
    681 year ago

    “This is gonna make the karmawhoring and bot problem so much better guys I swear”

    -spez, probably

  • @S_204
    link
    English
    661 year ago

    Gallowboob will be a billionaire overnight and everyone else will be left in the dust.

    This plan isn’t just stupid, it’s moronic.

    • @IphtashuFitz
      link
      English
      91 year ago

      Why do I suddenly have visions of that South Park episode about virtual internet money?

      • @zeppo
        link
        English
        111 year ago

        Left or just changed to various other accounts?

          • @zeppo
            link
            English
            91 year ago

            From looking at his profile, he is not on reddit often now but still posts periodically.

      • Altima NEO
        link
        fedilink
        English
        31 year ago

        What ever happened to that dude? I blocked him long ago, but he also wasn’t a frequent poster on the small communities I was subbed to.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    651 year ago

    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?

  • Paradox
    link
    fedilink
    English
    641 year ago

    >demand money from third party app developers
    >give money to karmawhores

    wut

    • @aceshigh
      link
      English
      41 year ago

      so what does that say about their values and vision?

  • @Llamajockey
    link
    English
    591 year ago

    Lol “third party API is too expensive”…but let’s give out money to users for fun

    • @BoomBoomLemon
      link
      English
      141 year ago

      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.

  • Bri Guy
    link
    fedilink
    English
    571 year ago

    Good Lord. This whole influencer/social media celebrity thing needs to die

    • @OrangeCorvus
      link
      English
      91 year ago

      Ok but first like and share my comment. Of course gold will also be appreciated!