Technology

The concept behind the program is straightforward. Redditors who receive substantial gold and karma from other community members can potentially convert these virtual rewards into real-world money that can be cashed out.

sigh, that's desperation. This means that the discussion on Reddit will not be natural or organic, it will cease to be human. Redditors will be like dogs, where they shitpost and post comments that everyone agrees with so they can make money, basically doing what the master tells them in order to get their treat. Reddit as we know it will cease to exist.

And we thought bots and karma farming were bad before.

Reddit must be super nervous and losing a lot of traffic. Burn baby, burn!

More incentive to post low quality content

Can you imagine the abuse of that?

Steve Huffman: "Reddit doesn't make any money"

Also Steve Huffman: "Please stay on our platform, we'll pay you?"

Imagine an environment where users are getting paid for gold award content and the moderators are still unpaid for all the work they do behind the scenes.

With bot detection going away, I can see programmers making several bots to manipulate this to make money, and lots of it, through many accounts.

Meanwhile, yikes, they are totally forgetting the real users. I’m a few months, there will be at least a 50% chance that comment or post you are replying to is a bot.

As soon as users are paid for sharing someone else’s copyrighted content, wouldn’t companies like media outlets start pursuing it as theft for profit?

Sounds like Reddit is headed down the road of YouTube where UMG is going to start slamming users everywhere with strikes for their revenue, and DMCA will be abused a lot more heavily.

"This is gonna make the karmawhoring and bot problem so much better guys I swear"

-spez, probably

Gallowboob will be a billionaire overnight and everyone else will be left in the dust.

This plan isn't just stupid, it's moronic.

So wait, not only has their monetization effort so far been a flop, now they're going to start paying people to post? Woooow. Spez trying to edge out Elon for the Most Incompetent Management award this year?

>demand money from third party app developers
>give money to karmawhores

wut

Lol "third party API is too expensive".....but let's give out money to users for fun

Good Lord. This whole influencer/social media celebrity thing needs to die

How would this even work? How are they going to stop brigading, bots, low effort spam crap for upvotes, massive reposting, etc? How will this actually increase quality of content?

Also: this would mean giving reddit your actual information, right? How else are they going to pay you? Or are they going to try using crypto and nfts?

It sounds like a terrible idea to me, tbh. Maybe they should start with paid moderators to deal with all the extra spam, crossposting, brigading and bots that will result from this move.

Not sure if there are any ex Redditors old enough to remember the Sydrah debacle?

In which a Reddit user and mod of several communities advertised on LinkedIn that they were ‘a social community manager who had pull in several online communities’ (“has pull” is a direct quote the rest is paraphrased) and that they could be paid to influence the narrative in these communities.

Someone doxxed them and leaked the LinkedIn profile and a vast swathe of the community cried out in horror and revulsion. Oh how the bacon narwhaled on that day!

She’s still a mod of 2xC and at least a few dozen other subs.

Looks like Reddit just legitimised her now ancient play really. It’ll be a website full of Sydrahs after this.

This looks like the way to go full Digg. With payment comes verified accounts, and probably further segmentation of accounts with higher priority than normal accounts. The idea being the paid accounts are professionals with high karma, therefore assumed to provide better content and become prioritized.

This is exactly the way of thinking that destroyed Digg. Although this is tweaked compared to what Digg did, the basic idea is the same, and the outcome will very likely look somewhat similar. The quality of content will fall off a cliff, and the userbase will quickly evaporate.

Even if they never go through with this scheme, it shows the leadership of reddit has lost their perspective, and sense of the community shaping that originally made reddit good.

Oh my God. This is awesome.

"We need to tighten the purse strings!!1" quickly became "open the coffers!" as soon as they hit a speed bump.

Seriously epic. With the amount of vote manipulation going on over there, this will be a complete and utter failure. I guarantee it will be pulled in a month or two.

Let me get this straight.

People make content, bots up vote content that aligns with their objectives. People get paid for up votes.

So... People are working for bots now?

desperate as fuckkkkkk

lemmy for me rn has become an almost perfect replacement. only thing i can feature request is the ability to transfer my data to other instances when needed, in case my current one blows up.

other than that, this place is solid 👍🏼

If you think karma whoring is bad now ...

If this is true, the end is nigh. What kind of content do they think this will encourage? Bots and low-quality rehashings will flood the place further.

Though I guess they'll get some juicy income from requiring this information:

email addresses, personal details, and tax and bank account information.

Good riddance!

“I wouldn’t use the piece-of-shit first-party App, even if you paid me!”

“What if we pay you?”

“…”

It's going to be a Karma OnlyFans out there soon.

We're about to see the Great Flood of Reposts and Karma Farming.

All ye Redditors that got annoyed at the protests, this is what you brought upon yourself.

Shitposts, shitposts everywhere

To be honest, if I were in Spez's shoes, I wouldn't have gone after the third-party apps but instead created actual incentives to subscribe to Reddit Premium like anonymous posting, enhanced privacy settings, enhanced search functionality, the ability to post images and videos in comments, etc.

Also I would've added a partner program where approved creators can monetize their artwork, videos, nudes, etc. Rather than have such creators astroturf the shit out of your platform to push their Fansly, OnlyFans and Patreon accounts, Spez could've cut out the middle-man and profiteered directly from content creators and porn stars.

I would've even poised RPAN to become a direct competitor to apps like Periscope, Kick and Twitch.

Here's the interesting bit for me:

To begin verification, you must have at least ten gold and 100 karma, according to the code.

and

users will have to maintain a certain level of activity and accumulate a designated amount of gold and karma each month to remain eligible for payouts

Sounds like an attempt to drive up reddit gold sales? I deleted my account and still had that one free gold award from forever ago. Feels like the easiest way to do this is have a second account that buys gold and awards it to the primary earning account to meet the minimum.

Quick maffs $20 to get 10 gold awards, which also gives the recipient 1000 coins (worth 2 gold awards for another account, so you'll probably see subs devoted to a black market for discounted gold awards for that accumulated coin) and 10 weeks of reddit premium. It honestly sounds like a very complicated subscription.

All those ShowerThoughts that were blocked by bots, only to be reposted for Karma by a different person…yeah, somehow that’s going to be rigged.

I'm honestly interested in how they'll get around anti money laundering laws