Reddit’s new Contributor Program will let you cash out gold given to your posts by other users in real money.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23887226/reddit-gold-system-contributor-programOpen linkView original on sopuli.xyz280
Comments79https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23887226/reddit-gold-system-contributor-programOpen linkView original on sopuli.xyz
Oh good. Now they're literally paying the karma-farming bots to spam recycled and stolen content. That will surely end well.
More karma farming is going to happen.
Convenient (for them) that they start this only after destroying all the coins people earned over years of using the site. I had over 80k coins and 18 years of premium from various awarded posts (all OC) that they just threw away for nothing.
If they respected my contributions, I might be excited about this, but now I plan on contributing absolutely nothing of value ever again.
Same username as here
https://old.reddit.com/user/serinus
Reddit is getting into money laundering I see.
what
Probably because they dont want to incentive people to go there and make up stories about in order to get sympathy gold.
I'm guessing they don't want non-qualified individuals benefiting monetarily from mental health services. I can only assume it's a legal can of worms.
But not relationship and advice subs?
Why shouldn’t creative writing get benefits?
Hey, at least it should keep the bots out of there, if it offers consolation. I can’t imagine they’re not doing this to cover their butt.
How will they even enforce that?
It's quite easy to make a list of existing large trauma support subs, just search "trauma" and they'll probably include the top 3 pages
Yeah fuck all of this.
Top to bottom.
This feels like crypto, NFT silicon valley bro bullshit. I just know Spez has a fucking erection every time it gets mentioned .
Let's welcome the next wave of Redditors to the Fediverse everyone .
"Men of Reddit, do you prefer doggy style, missionary, or something else?" by u/BotTiddyGothGF | +34k / 869 comments | 2 hours ago
Great, now they've turned karma whoring into a profitable enterprise. This will surely go well.
One gold upvote costs $2, the recipient might get either $0.90 or perhaps $1. But most likely they’ll get nothing.
Does it also not open the door to stolen intellectual property now? Its one thing to repost a meme or use a format for no profit, but if any post garners profit coming off someone else's creation, would that not be a legal issue?
It blows my mind that this is both spez and Elmo's best idea for what to do with their respective hellsites: what if we made a shittier Quora? Because Quora's such an enviable business, right guys? Quora's right up there with Apple and Microsoft!
The Metaverse pivot by Zuck was only marginally less stupid. This is why HBO had to cancel Silicon Valley, the show: you can't parody Sillycon Valley anymore. ByteDance and WeChat are going to devour these clowns alive, now that the money printer stopped going brrr. They never had any plan to ever be profitable. Their business model was just to continue scamming investors with fake users and keep raising more billions, like the Pied Piper bot users. These are zombie companies, propped up by negative real interest rates for a decade. Let them die already.
lol WeChat who has a defacto government granted monopoly in exchange for all customer data being given to the government is going to drive the innovation?
You had me until the WeChat/ByteDance part.
*Reality may vary
I'm suddenly reminded of when people used to give out doge coins as a meme
Doge is awesome though, I made tens of dollars from it. 😁
I really enjoyed the Doge community 7 years ago. It wasn’t serious so the community was actually welcoming. I did make like 5k cause of the musky asshat.
I probably gave out 100k Doge on Reddit back in those days.
So a user issue 2.50 to buy a gold, then the receiver can cash out 1.00. So Reddit aims to make 1.50 for every gold awarded
Absolute scam
Well to be fair, before this they got all of the money for a tiny picture. So in that light they scam a bit less now.
But of course this still is a stupid idea which will decrease whatever remaining quality Reddit has even more.
Time to set up that AI chatbot for passive income
They just saw that video on Roblox and said "yeah that sounds great, let's do that"
They're just copying Elon. To that end, the already clickbait-filled front page is gonna get worse and engagement farming is going to become as rife as ever.
It's a desperate and cynical attempt to claw back users who appear to have left en masse after the API changes. Reddit is noticeably less active in smaller subs since July. And the larger subs have more or less consolidated themselves to a few power users.
schrute-bucks would have a higher exchange rate.
What's the conversion to Stanley Nickles?
About three fiddy
God dammit, no, I said! You ain't getting no tree fitty, you good-for-nothin' Loch Ness Monster.
What about Skibidi dollars?
I wonder if they're all retarded. Like, what do they think is going to happen, there will suddenly be a bunch of totally not Chinese gold farmers posting content?
They may be the stupidest motherfuckers in existentiality.
Just look at Quora, you have your target nationality wrong. It'll be flooded by Indian gold farmers. The vast majority of Chinese people don't speak English. China has a parallel, disjoint internet to ours. India has the second-largest English speaking population in the world, due to British imperialism, and no Great Firewall.
Please do the needful.
Yes I have done it sir.
I can already imagine the YouTube grifter videos: "Make XXXX$ per day on Reddit with AI with only 10 minutes of work!".
"passive income"
More like "massive con" I'maright? badum tss
How is this supposed to actually make them money? Remember, third party apps died for their profit incentives.
I'm guessing that they'll sell Reddit Gold for money (or give subscribers a monthly stipend), then share a (small) portion of the money they made to contributors when they receive and then sell back said gold.
Third party apps cost a lot in terms of server usage but contributed nearly nothing in terms of value. Money changing hands is normally very profitable. Way more than ads.
The only way to know how much of an impact third party apps made on their profit is if we can see their revenue / profit figures. Plus, it's their own fault that their official app is so damn bad compared to apps made by solo devs.
It definitely acted as a drag. Every API request was a cost without a way to make money
The real problem is that investors piled into reddit and bloated it into an unsustainable pile of death without knowing how it could make money.
Now they're squeezing it for cash and will slowly kill it as a result. But at the end of the day you can't just have a free open API because websites do cost money.
IMO. The problem is that reddit priced to kill the apps in order to serve your shitty microtransactions and track you to death. They could have had a slimmer site and a more reasonable price for the API, and that would have been fair.
The value was the content provided for free by the people, the company ran ads against that content and are now trying to sell it to AI companies to train their models against.
Server costs money to run. Company has to make money or it'll go out of business. Either the people making the posts have to pay or the people reading do.
And apparently Reddit wants to pay people for their content now anyways.
I'm not rehashing this again, but there were many ways to tweak things, such as serving ads to the apps through the api, to charging a small reasonable fee to 3rd party app users. Instead they killed off the other apps.
I'm saying the people reading pay via ads, and outside companies pay for the content itself which breaks your false choice.
I don't think that's because they want to.
Even if not a huge threat today, it's pretty obvious that apps like Lemmy can completely replace Reddit for users. All Lemmy needs now is just enough critical mass of interactions like comments. Reddit has to come up with ways to keep people around because it's core features are way too basic and replaceable.
They contributed lots in terms of value, just not straight up cash value.
Posts on Reddit will change a lot now.
Exactly my thoughts. People will start making the most exaggerated comments, seeking some money. I expect them to become like youtube covers and titles. Also, I expect the echo chamber effect to grow stronger.
But what if I am a 73 year-old quadriplegic, autistic, nonbinary Vietnam War veteran who was recently foreclosed upon and made homeless because my wife and son died when being T-boned by a drunk semitruck driver, leaving me without any assistance to pay the mortgage?
I need your charity, I swear.
^My mom won't buy me a PlayStation unless I have all the money for it.^
New money laundering scheme?
ROI is likely lower than Steam market trading but could be an easy way to diversify your portfolio
This guy launders money.
So many limits and restrictions, including getting ten gold a year, to cash out. I don't see reddit having to give out much money here.
Hopefully more people end up in the Fediverse.
Seems to be a better representation of people's views, probably because all the rage-bait and astro-turfing is missing.
It's insane how different the community behaves on Mastodon/Lemmy vs Twitter/Reddit.
There are some instances with weird admins. But you can just jump instances. And dealing with people is better than dealing with corporations paying PR companies running bot networks.
Reddit is so desperate for users they're paying people to stay.. but they don't want to use their own money LOL
Reddit admins note: "you’ll receive a new shiny badge on your profile indicating you’re in the program and can earn cash! "
Hoping that reddit mods have the balls to auto-delete all posts from users who are approved for the monetization system. Knowing that they won't, I'm waiting for the Firefox extension and Revanced patch that auto-censor posts by those users.
Of course reddit will quickly remove that visibility.
Communities do have good contributors that make good content. Speaking to Pokemon GO, announcements are often wordy and lack key information (which pokemon can be shiny, for example). It's up to the community to post helpful infographics when events start to give a concise and accurate overview. In many instances, blocking top contributors will also block the best content.
Totally different story when talking about big, general topic subs like memes, news, etc. But why would you even browse those in the first place?
Seems to me it's likely to make reposts more contentious and lead to more gaming of the voting system.
Wow. They have become that desperate?
I'll be honest. I do miss Reddit. I often think about going back to it. Reading this though, it reinvigorates my belief, I made the right choice and I'm never going back.
Honestly makes me a tiny bit sad I deleted my account with a few post rewards, but I see it for what it is. An incentive to keep users on a platform that treats them poorly. You wouldn't stay with an abusive partner just because they keet giving you nice stuff. They're still an abusive partner at the end of the day.
Edit: spelling( I'm on a phone)
Reddit got rid of the old awards anyways
Excited Chinese sounds
Indian*
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“In the past, there were both paid and free coins that had been distributed, making it incredibly challenging,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said.
With the introduction of the Contributor Program, thanking a kind stranger for giving you gold takes on a new meaning.
Part of what makes Reddit so useful is that most great posts aren’t made with an expectation of payment, meaning that people share their expertise, a handy tip, or a funny joke just because they want to.
I’m also worried that bad actors might find ways to abuse the Contributor Program to earn a quick buck without actually making meaningful contributions.
The Contributor Program is also rolling out starting Monday, and it will be available on the web and Reddit’s mobile apps.
While the protests across the site over the API pricing have largely died down, some users expressed their unhappiness toward CEO Steve Huffman during the recent run of the r/Place interactive canvas.
The original article contains 778 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
So a platform that more heavily favours and incentivizes the information preferred and supported by those with expendable money.
Can we eat the rich yet?
Familiar with Moons? Saw this coming a long time, and it's going to be a shitshow.
Exactly my thought, crypto sub moon boy gonna have a field day
Yes, yes, and so the thirst continues...
That's desperate.
Maybe for commercial social media? But personally I prefer if people just post if they want to, and for the platform to not exploit them for profit. Money just brings in too many bad incentives from all sides. Honestly, the more I think about it the more I don't know how a for-profit social media can ever truly work, in a positive manner.