this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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SNOOcalypse - document, discuss, and promote the downfall of Reddit.

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SNOOcalypse is closing down. If you wish to talk about Reddit, check out [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].


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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago (6 children)

If that ends up being true it very well may pull me back to Reddit, but only to write comments that I think people will upvote. When Reddit gave out auto-generated avatars in the past, it gave me one that said it was for writing funny comments that get lots of upvotes, so they must have some logic assessing how the community responds to individual commenters.

I’d still be pissed off about how they rolled out their recent changes, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they actually had a halfway decent plan here but bungled it all by rolling it out too slowly without making it clear how one dot (keeping users in an ecosystem to make sure they see ads) connects to another (creating a community that can support a model to pay contributors).

YouTube pays contributors who attract audiences. Why shouldn’t Reddit? That’s the best possible thing commercial social media can do for its users.

It would change the Reddit community, though. I wouldn’t be there to hang out, I’d be there to work and create content tailored to… what Reddit likes.

But I can’t deny that it would attract my interest.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (4 children)

If that ends up being true it very well may pull me back to Reddit, but only to write comments that I think people will upvote.

I feel very safe in saying that even if you're able to generate enough positive response to be a part of this program, it will not be in any way worth your time to do this for the money. I'd be incredibly surprised if you managed to pull in even a reasonable fraction of minimum wage, and if you're doing it for money and not because you enjoy the participation, it'll be worse than just putting in extra time at your job in all likelihood.

That said, you do you.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Not to mention, it will require attached a name and bank account to your reddit handle. This is the real trojan horse here I suspect. Reddit's ad impressions are probably less valuable than other social media because of the pseudo anonymous nature of the platform.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I don't see how anyone other than repost bots, serial reposters and karma farmers will benefit in any meaningful amount.

The question for me is, how are they going to stop the grains of rice?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Not to mention the psychology study that showed kids paid to draw were less likely to draw spontaneously.

“Supplementing” an intrinsic motivation with extrinsic reward destroys the intrinsic motivation.

Of course the knobs that run reddit probably don’t understand what intrinsic motivation is or how anyone could make choices based on anything other getting paid to do something.

It’s an absolutely terrible idea for a thriving community of creators working for free, to start paying them. Like the science says “this kills the platform”.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I like writing stupid Reddit comments. If they want to pay me to do it, now matter how much or little, that’s more than I’m getting paid to shoot the shit in my downtime anywhere else.

But “residuals” are where it’s at. Old comments that never die because people keep gilding or replying. Views on that content can be (and we’re dealing with Reddit, so they very well could screw it up) turned into ad dollars. Companies are turning more of their tv ad dollars to social media.

Idk. I don’t disagree, but I think the cynicism may prove wrong here. But the cost of participating is zero if it turns out I get residuals on a comment I wrote 9 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like writing stupid Reddit comments.

The quickest way to take something you enjoy and turn it into something you don't is by making it a job.

Based on their early description of the feature, you can't just rely on residuals to make money. You have to be getting a critical mass of upvotes and gold (which is an interesting inclusion given they're pulling awards - they either didn't think it through all the way and redesigned it already, or they have some other method for how that'll work) each month to even qualify in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Haha good life advice nonetheless

I bet new Reddit gold is going to be their crypto platform that runs on Ethereum. Just a guess.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That's probably a very good guess, based on their recent adventure into NFTs. It's like they're living in the internet from 2019 and are slowly struggling to catch up to reality not realizing it's already moved on.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The cost of participating is that you have to give Reddit your identity, complete with bank account and tax information.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because it will be done unorganically. I can just shove ChatGPT to make articles and post them weekly around content.

You can’t, at least not now, AI your way out with a YouTube video.

Also, while it looks good for content creators, there are better places to create written content and be paid for it. Medium rings my bell, and surely there are others too.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If people start churning out upvote-worthy AI-generated content and posting it on Reddit, then Reddit will be happy with all the extra views coming from Google. They won't mind.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The upvotes are bots too though. A decent sized server farm could churn absolute garbage out and game the upvote algorithm and bingo, a front-page full of complete gibberish. Faking YouTube views is harder since YouTube knows how long you've actually watched the video and toss out any errant signals. Upvotes are too basic any bot farm can do it for cheap.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Hm, but it sounds to me like this will be a problem for Reddit's plans regardless of AI.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

And this is what will fundamentally kill reddit

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Create content"? Just use a repost bot. Scrape the top 100 posts of each subreddit, check which hasn't been posted in the last X days, repost it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Already noticed that in one of the last three subreddits i still go into. reposts which some diligent redditors pulled out the original posts of as proof and maybe-ai-rewriten-posts that they also pulled out very similar older posts of. Now it's down into two subs, both an ask community a niche topic i skimmed through daily.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Could I train a LLM off of your comments and the source posts then use a few bots to make passive income from this policy?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

If they don’t do anything to prevent that (as YouTube does) then sure

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I mean, I guess enjoy being monetized by white supremacist sympathizers