this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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It doesn't.
Crypto bros are really fond of the whole "use the blockchain to take your assets from one platform to another" grift, but it:
It's like you said: Do any other websites care about your Reddit karma? No. Why would they? It's only 2 uses are to make people addicted to Reddit through gamifying their opinions and filtering bot accounts by having a minimal karma threshold to post on subs.
This is basically the issue of almost every hypothetical use of the blockchain that advocates throw around.
"You could move all your skins from Counterstrike to Valorant?"
OK. Putting aside the unbelievably complex technical and practical issues, why would either Valve or Riot want this? In this scenario Valve is making it easier for their customers to leave, and Riot is effectively giving you a bunch of cool skins for free.
These people watched Ready Player One, totally ignored the part where the entire premise was "One single corporation controls basically all interactive media and that's really bad" and decided that this sounded like a cool idea.
Basically every software engineer laughed their ass off once they realized they were serious about that stuff.
It just shows such an intense lack of understanding of how software and business works. Thinking that blockchain is just some magic powder that can bring their wishes to reality.
It's what happens when the only use case for a tech product is its ability to interest venture capital.
We're seeing the same thing now with "AI"
Eh, no, I'm going to disagree with you there.
Yes, AI is trendy, hyped, and a buzzword at the moment, but at the core of it there really is a very useful and practical technology (and it's also much more varied than just LLMs). Take for the fact that generative AI is actually being used in practice, to do more or less what it was advertised to.
You're right to say that generative AI has at least some practical applications. That's a valid distinction as compared to crypto, and it's exactly why the venture capital world pivoted to it so hard.
However if you compare how these companies are selling their technology to what it actually does, the gulf is astonishing. Almost every story of a company actually trying to use this tech has been a disaster. And what we hear from advocates is the constant refrain of "It's early days", but that's exactly what we heard about crypto and distributed blockchain for over a decade. Meanwhile a lot of the experts are increasingly of the opinion that most of the proposed applications of AI will never reach the point where the tech actually works as advertised. Sooner or later, it's gonna recommend a food bank as a tourist destination. And human validation isn't going to solve this because inattentional blindness is a thing.
I do think that there are probably, eventually, real uses for this tech, but we're clearly no where near them yet. Right now it's still all just magic beans.
You need to be more specific than just say "AI" here. Experts do not say that AI will never reach a point of true general intelligence, but they may say that LLMs cannot do that.
AI is a big field, and it has seen massive improvements over time. Sure, don't oversell its current capabilities, but we don't really know where the current path leads. Current AI is already plenty impressive.
Yes, I'm aware. I thought that could have been easily inferred from context, given the topic of conversation. That's, y'know, how conversation works. We're not writing essays here.
I see a lot of people conflating concepts in AI, so I cannot be too sure just from context.
The more obvious flaw is not why would they want to do it but why would they want to do it with blockchain.
Exactly! And it's not like crossover content doesn't happen between publishers already without blockchain. Look at Fortnite. All it takes is a promo code.
Yeah. I got a free NFT avatar on Reddit and some crypto bro couldn't shut up about how I "owned". Like no, chuckle head, if Reddit is the only site that supports it and they decide to stop supporting it, I own nothing.
To your other points, this isn't about transfering your karma. Moons (et al) are not karma. That's why your karma remains the same even if you transfer your Moons out of your vault and into a wallet somewhere else (or just sell them off). I don't think many people want their reddit accounts linked to their other accounts or real identity anyway.
The entire point of these community coins was for them to be used for governance. CryptoCurrency is a good example: the mods are pretty hands off on the grander scheme of things. Anyone can propose a change or idea, and the community will vote on it. Can it be done without crypto? Definitely. Did Moons encourage people to stay engaged and govern once a month? YES. A resounding yes. It also incentivized engagement because you could earn rewards for commenting or posting. And the rules surrounding what is earned and how much was voted on by the community, and actively managed over time to address issues like low effort posts that are overrunning reddit elsewhere as people feverishly try to build up accounts before reddit's new "revenue sharing" model rolls out and makes things expontentially worse (but reddit has full control over, with no community input, because reddit inc is the sole governor now and people cannot transfer or convert anything without reddit's blessing and every changing rules.
Take Reddit gold as an example. Reddit controls everything including the rules. That's why all the people with tons of gold are pissed because they had its one use phased out with no recourse. But Moons have been able to be transferred to your own non-reddit wallet and converted into other things for a while now. Reddit has no control over it in the end, the community is likely to keep it alive themselves just without minting new coins, and this is likely why reddit is killing it but not NFTs.
Reddit does not want a community-controlled competitor to their new revenue sharing grift on their own site.