Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
Who could possibly have predicted this?!?
Oh. Yeah. Anyone with two working brain cells.
That's a high bar, I mean they are still on Reddit after all
This was obviously going to end up flat on its face, but still, seeing Reddit fail is some satisfying schadenfreude ngl.
"take your reputation anywhere you want on the Internet."
How is this supposed to work exactly? Does any other site care about your reddit karma?
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:
- Doesn't work if the other platform doesn't support it
- Could be done without a blockchain if both platforms agree to share a database
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.
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.
Anyone remember Klout, I think it was this but before blockchain.
What could possibly be the point of a decentralized currency that is utterly dependent on a centralized system?
Just another database posing as "blockchain" to sound hip.
Answer: no point.
Probably to get the normie crypto people to use Reddit.
"Normie crypto" sounds like an oxymoron
Classic investment scam- offer a valueless item at a price, get everyone hyped up about the new item which is supposed to gain value, get people to invest, let the insiders in the company know so they can sell off, then get rid of it altogether. I hope they get prosecuted for this.
Did Reddit actually accept any money for these junk tokens? It kinda sounds like they didn't, they just issued them and then decided to quit using them. If they did accept money for them, then yeah, sure sounds like securities fraud.
In general, the cryptocurrency "industry" cannot exist without crime (ransomware, fraud, money laundering, etc.) -- but this one just seems like a bad product that was cancelled. Most major cryptocurrencies should be considered to be backed by crime, in the same sense that dollars used to be backed by gold and silver: the underlying value of Bitcoin is that you can use it to pay criminal ransoms or acquire fentanyl. But this one just seems to have been backed by fake internet points.
Why the hell did people buy this crap with real money
Because they didn't accept monopoly money at the time?
I can’t believe they ever had value.
they never have
For some reason, i read that like Jon Snow from Game of Thrones with “ey’ neveh’ave”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Reddit's Community Points, a blockchain-based rewards system for quality posts, comments, and other contributions in a subset of subreddits, is going the way of many similar tokens launched during the crypto boom times: away.
As of November 8, coins like the "MOON" that r/CryptoCurrency used for tips, premium features, and even voting shares will be removed from users' Vaults.
Shortly before 3 pm, MOON had dropped just below $0.02, a loss of more than 85 percent, with fellow Reddit currencies BRICK (r/FortNiteBR) and DONUT (r/EthTrader) seeing similarly precipitous plunges.
Conspiratorial claims of Reddit having "rugged" the currencies—pulling money from the system before a sudden shutdown—floated on social media.
Its newer Contributor Program, which rewards users with actual money from the Reddit gold and karma they accrue, is one such example.
With a certain number of Community Points, moderators could offer "Special Memberships," which would allow for badges, GIF embeds, animated emojis, or other upgrades.
The original article contains 538 words, the summary contains 154 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I was on reddit for 15 years and never once heard of these until people posted articles on Lemmy.
Same I figured it was just one of their trendy marketing strategies and a way to monetize the platform.
Is it … solar powered?
Solar FREAKIN Crypto!
It's indisputable they failed to think this through, but did Reddit make any money off the attempt alone?
Is this entire switch to blockchain and then abruptly stopping it a net loss, or a minor, short-term net gain?
Serious question, because while I have a general understanding of what blockchain is, the whole who benefits/who loses and how that happens thing has become far too complex for me to really follow, so I'm hoping someone here can tell me.
Also, they didn't shut it ALL down, apparently there are still some rubes to be fleeced via blockchain:
Notably, Reddit's NFT marketplace was not targeted for closure.
So. Net loss? Net gain? Neutral? What's your best guess, and why?
Likely only Reddit can say. I don't think Reddit was ever trying to make money off Community Points directly (in contrast to their NFTs), but rather to boost engagement. Whether or not it did, and by enough to offset the costs of starting and maintaining the system, we'll likely never know.
You're probably right on all counts, but thank you for your response. Anymore when people start talking about the never ending shell game of crypto my eyes just glaze over, lol. "We’ll likely never know" seems to be the final line of every crypto story these days, when it comes right down to it.
I think it really boosted the worst kind of engagement. I found a whole spam network there modded by a single egomaniac who spent their whole life creating subreddits, maintaining different personas on the site, crossposting posts between all their alt accounts and subreddits, to external subs they didn't control, etc. People who noticed spammy behavior were silenced and many who spoke out were harassed by them through false reports or just the person calling them slurs in comment threads. Admins recently banned all their main subs and accounts, but they constantly lost individual alt accounts for this behavior. They still operate smaller subs on the site and behave the exact same way.
The belief amongst some is that reddit basically did a rug pull. People could and would buy these crypto points with real money, so reddit likely made money. Odds are it just was not successful outside of niche subreddits, hence:
Its newer Contributor Program, which rewards users with actual money from the Reddit gold and karma they accrue, is one such example. "Part of why we're moving past this product is that we've already launched, or are actively investing in, several products that accomplish what the Community Points program was trying to accomplish, while being easier to adopt and understand," Reddit’s director of consumer and product communications, Tim Rathschmidt, told TechCrunch.
Crypto also hopefully seems to be on the decline, and it's possible Reddit did not want to appear to be behind the times.
Reddit will not be forthcoming with that data regarding profitability. But they essentially gave the coins away to the communities to use as they saw fit. Reddit seemed to be angling to use it as an on-ramp for its NFT marketplace. The fact that the marketplace is sticking around, but not the community-based crypto, has me convinced that they are going to try this again but with an even more centralized token. Or maybe just with reddit gold/whatever they replace it with.
But this system did boost engagement on the subs. CryptoCurrency had to resort to heavy moderation because it boosted low effort engagement too much for people trying to make a quick buck. This is exactly what we see happening on reddit right now in the other subs as people try to get traction so they can make money off reddit's "revenue sharing" scheme they took directly from Elon.
Spez never was an original idea man. He implemented crypto and NFTs because everyone else was. He is on record saying that Elon is a great leader and he wants to emulate what he's doing with X. Hence, reddit copy/pasting X"s monetization strategy via tiered memberships with ads along with the potential to profit individually. I fully expect reddit to reverse course with an even more centralized token if that is what Elon does with X (or just use whichever token or coin that Spez happens to be heavily invested in, like Elon has floated several times with Doge).
The thing is: reddit can't really kill Moons. You can transfer them out of your Reddit vault and into your own wallet. There is an initiative on CryptoCurrency to get people to do that and just keep using Moons to fund and govern the community. Except, instead of reddit minting 1.2 million moons a month, the coins would instead become either static or deflationary. Rewards would be a fraction of what they are now but the Moons would theorhetically hold more value individually because no new Moons are being created.
I don't think Moons were ever a scam. They were a fun thing to encourage community engagement which included monthly governance votes to determine the policies and direction of the cryptocurrency subreddit. I can't think of any other community which was so self-governed right on down to which sponsors they would accept, what type of advertisements (if any) would be allowed, what types of posts, and even the rules. The mods are not the typical overbearing power trippers in general. Did Moons create that environment? I don't know. But it definitely incentivized people to stay engaged and vote. And it incentivized the mods to follow through.
Those karna whores be crying lulz xD
heh.