X’s program has been criticized for potentially encouraging spam-y, bait-y posts and posts that are controversial and offensive, just for the sake of generating reactions and comments that will lead to the user making money. But that hasn’t stopped Reddit from enacting a user payment scheme of its own (after all, Huffman has said Musk’s X is an example for Reddit.)

When Steam integrated “awards” to their gaming client, that you can give to profiles and posts/comments/reviews, thousands of useless controversial or nonsensical reviews/posts and comments started to pop up everywhere, because people wanted to farm rewards. The review system wasn’t perfect before by any means, but now it is useless. And these awards were not real money, just play money to make your profile page more shiny.

I don’t know why anyone can think of this as a good idea, but one started with it and now everything has to follow.