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US Redditors to earn real money for gold, karma
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- Title
- US Redditors to Earn Real Money for Gold, Karma: Reddit App Hints at Rewarding Contributor Program
- Authors
- John Lopez
- Published
- Jul 12 2023
Very interesting if true. At first I thought "so you can afford to pay users for karma, but don't pay moderators or enable third party apps". But then as I read further I see it as more of an attempt to try and increase revenue by encouraging more purchasing of gold.
This still shows a complete lack of respect for the efforts of unpaid mods who will continue to be unpaid whilst having to handle even more bots and karma farmers now that there is an even bigger economic incentive there.
What impact do you think this change could have over there? Would this be a good idea if it had happened a year ago?
I feel like this would've made way more sense before they introduced community awards.
Reddit used have have a culture around Gold (and later Silver and Platinum), and it was something that people seemed to earnestly want to get. Community Awards diluted that culture, and largely made them meaningless. There's too many awards for any shared meaning to be built around them, and they tend to get spammed so much that awards no longer indicate that someone has made a valuable contribution.
And I swear the Reddit Gold used to have more useful benefits than Reddit Premium currently has [citation needed].
I’d actually argue that Silver and Platinum made them meaningless. The whole point of Reddit Silver was that it wasn’t real. It was literally the poor-man’s Gold.
Reddit Gold had its value because it was Reddit Gold. When they introduced the new tiers, Reddit Silver was a meaningless award—it functioned the same way as Reddit Silver was supposed to, but now you paid for it. Then, to make Platinum more worthwhile they gutted what Gold granted you.
And by complicating the many different awards with coin values, they all seemed to lose their value.
I used to pay for Reddit Premium and even bought some Gold, but the new award system just ruined it all. I didn’t mind paying $5 to reward a valuable comment, but I do mind paying $5 for 500 coins or whatever it is now.
They used to offer various discounts and subscriptions to other services. Actually a lot of subscriptions did, like Discord Nitro and Game Pass. For whatever reason these cross-promotions have all since gone away.
Other features like The Butler were introduced to all users, so that gold perk went away.
Today the only really useful feature is recent comment highlighting, and plenty of browser extensions and userscripts can handle that for you.
Even Apollo (may it rest in peace) added comment highlighting a few months ago.
It did.
The article says that identites will be verified through third-parties, with tax and bank account information, but I see that as a low bar to hurdle for my knee-jerk reaction: bot use will skyrocket. Set up an account to repost high karma posts, set up another account to scrape the highest karma responses and repost those, repeat ad nauseum.
I think that might be part of what they want though. They've probably realized that a lot of the users that actually create content are leaving and so they want a way to artificially inflate the number of posts being made on the site.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine two bots upvoting each other - forever."
-Orge Georwell, 2024
Bot 1: “Wow, so many updoots!”
Bot 2: “EDIT—thanks for the gold, kind stranger”
This is pure noise for a Tildes post.
Yet for the topic at hand, it perfectly encapsulates everything that all the most seen subreddits have already turned into.
Someone on the Fediverse roughed out a possible money laundering scheme using this new pay-for-posts/comments policy and upvoting bots.
Could always throw the top comments through an LLM with a couple personality prompts. Making it even harder to detect your shameless riposting.
And somehow they figured that out by a code review?
I smell a rat. That's not how this happened.
Bots already do that and have been for years
My personal conspiracy theory is that reddit itself is running those bots to increase content/engagement.
There's actually a couple subreddits where they test drove this and they pretty much instantly turned into bot riddled cesspits.
More low-effort meme comments to rake in upvotes and gold, more incentives to not go against the hivemind.
I'm sure the unpaid mods that Reddit depends upon will be thrilled by this latest move.
They could maybe give a portion of the money from awards to the mods of subreddit where the awarded post or comment was made. Could add up to a decent amount of money for the larger subreddits even if it's a really small percentage
People keep bringing up this whole unpaid mod aspect, but has that ever really been a demand of mods at large? I'm a mod of a smaller subreddit (there's two of us), so my workload is nowhere near what the mods of the largest subs deal with. I was briefly an rPolitics mod; that was terrifying.
I personally have never wanted to be paid for what I do. I've always viewed my work as more of a public service or community service thing. A volunteer. I'm not volunteering on behalf of reddit inc, but for the community that of my subreddit (a state political news subreddit).
All I've ever wanted was good tools and better systems. That's it. And from what I've seen, the mods of the largest subs basically want the same thing.
I've never seen it get attention at large, but there is/was a very real chunk of mods that thought they should get paid for their work. I was one of them.
I do get where you're coming from for the volunteer point of view and I had subs that I moderated because it was a real interest of mine, but over the 17 years there they began to dictate how I am expected to mod more and more without the tools to do so and the latest ultimatums given to subs that protested or began to only follow the site-wide rules is was another large leap in that direction.
Every large social media site pays moderators, why doesn't reddit? Because they've convinced people that providing a free service to a profit seeking entity is a good idea.
There is only one person that gets to tell me how to do something for a profit seeking entity, that's the person signing my paycheck.
Yup, that's basically how I feel about it.
Either fuck off and let me do it how I think it should be done, or pay me to do it the way you want.
I mean, actual evidence shows that for the overwhelming majority of mods, the mere threat of being removed made them fold like wet paper, effectively end the protest- and indeed accept the conditions reddit was giving them.
I think there's a big discrepancy between what mods claim (that they are doing hard grueling work, with shitty tools, for no pay, poor little guys) and their actual actions - clinging to their modship like there's no tomorrow. That's just not how people work. If being a mod was so unpleasant, nobody would be clinging so strongly to it, especially since there is no pay.
From my experience interacting with reddit mods, they straight up enjoy having power over others. It gets them off. That's why they cling so strongly to it, they love having that power. And it's why reddit would never have to pay them. There's no shortage of people out there who enjoy having power over others, especially over big groups.
This comment seems pretty mean-spirited and assuming. Thus far, plenty of mods have left the platform. So have bot and tool developers. You may not be aware of this if you're not in those circles, but those that have been developing the tools used by moderators for years are simply dropping off.
As for "clinging to their position", you have to understand that many mods have been a part of their communities for years. They feel some responsibility to their communities, even if they are frustrated with the administration.
Additionally, what good will it do to be immediately replaced and have somebody remove all signs of protest? If you maintain some control, you can at least air your grievances, or pivot with the protest movement as required. So they admins crack down on marking communities as nsfw, maybe the next step is to individually label posts. Who knows?
For those that stayed and removed restrictions, many are simple following the wishes of their own communities via polls or informal discussions. There's nothing wrong with that either.
This is just not how people work, we aren't really so simple, if we were nobody would stay in an abusive relationship or work a shitty job or [insert myriad other examples]. While, I'm sure some mods do enjoy being petty tyrants, people mod for all sorts of different reasons and stick with it for complicated reasons too. While I do agree with you that they should have all left as a protest, I get that the real world is complicated and people find it hard to give up something they've worked for years on, no matter what it is.
I'd also like to say, that in my 11+ years of being on reddit, I've seen "the mods are all power hungry tyrants" line more times than I can count. However, in my experience the mods who really live up to that stereotype have always seemed a pretty small minority.
Unless you've got before and after numbers showing mod lists of every sub you don't have much to go on. I deleted my accounts and left the subs unmodded, every other mod I was with did the same and had me remove them, many subs got wiped clean and left to be acquired by others either by the mods or the admins acting on their threats.
Either way, I only spoke for myself as that's all who I can speak of.
Your mass characterization of mods as a group with a single driving factor is typical of a shortsighted user that's never built anything. I'd expect your comment to have more depth and nuance.
I haven't seen that comic in ages. But yeah, it rings pretty true.
I never heard nor felt the need for mods to be paid–until Reddit started taking away tools for access and modding for the sake of profit-seeking, then threatening mod teams who protested the move. It's not crazy for people to see these shake-ups being justified by the desire for profits and think, "where's my slice, then?"
I wonder how the prices compare to what people get for selling their accounts to spammers.
There's already plenty of karma farming accounts that know how to game the system. This is just going to make this worse if there is real money on the table. Expect even more useless "funny" comments at the top of every thread, or barely relevant movie quotes, instead of good discussion about the article/picture/video.
Could also incentivize increased negative interactions against perceived threats to your karma farming . Could also create more headaches for mods if users decide they are part of a king making conspiracy.
Yep, exactly. Everyone's always made the point that karma is ultimately worth nothing and is just "internet points". I was always wary of how much an account could actually be worth if sold after karma farming, especially with how irritated people are by it these days. The fact most of them are bots just adds to that. It's pretty normal to see people call out posts and comments that are reposts as karma farming.
This though? This totally changes things, and is going to make reddit infinitely worse.
I agree with this. Those people with multiple alts that all have over 100k makes it abundantly clear how easy it is to farm karma. And they are just doing it for fun.
The average bot can scare up 1k karma before it gets sold on Player Up.
This is going to be a whole new level of crap.
This is so backwards. Reddit should be compensating and rewarding good moderation of effective communities and not paying for contributions.
This will only accelerate the degeneracy.
…and they went and fired all the moderators who could put a stop to it. Imagine expecting a “large” payout (read: 35¢) and then getting your post removed for being off-topic. Now that would be dramatic.
My suspicion is that this has a spectecular possibility of backfiring. When you attempt to remunerate good behavior in any way it tends to move the focus from the natural rewards of the behavior to the unnatural financial reward.
Reddit already has a reputation for fostering groupthink and low effort posts that are easy to agree with and in my mind this could significantly amplify those tendencies.
If one can make actual money by botting and harvesting gold from the community, the chase is on to do so.
I hope Reddit does add this to the app because I imagine it will only speed their downfall, and the sooner that happens, the sooner the communal resources will be freed up and something new, and potentially better, can form in its place.
I feel like this is just going to be a minigame for bots and trolls. To see how bad they can break it/abuse it.
Considering it already has been for some time... Posts made to hype products, with links to where to buy being dropped somewhere in the comments when people inevitably wanted to know where to get this or that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
Thank you. I did not realize this overjustification phenomenon had been formally described. The studies seem to be varied and suggest that while not universal, it is quite real.
If you have been on /r/cryptocurrency for any amount of time in the last couple of years you'll know how it will end. They added this crypto called moons, which is awarded when you get karma from a post on the subreddit. The result is that it got botted to hell, it got to the point where people often complain when they see a post that got obviously botted to the top because it was just manicured to farm moons.
This is the sort of "we're not desperate, we're just cool 😎 " flavor of desperation I'd expect from Twitter. Of course, it's not officially announced yet, but it seems like a bold and stupid choice.
I think this is exactly what they're going for
" contributors will need to provide verification information, including their email addresses, personal details, and tax and bank account information. "
Yeah... I Don't Think So.
I mean if you want Reddit to give you cash money that’s pretty reasonable information to give them. In fact, it’s probably against KYC regulations in the US not to require that information.
Most likely they’ll just delegate it to a third party like Stripe or something. Stripe Identity seems well suited for this task.
Is this what you are talking about? https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/knowyourclient.asp#:~:text=KYC%20Requirements,-Customer%20Identification%20Program&text=CIP%20requires%20that%20financial%20firms,%2C%20address%2C%20and%20identification%20number.
This seems potentially disastrous?
Karma farming and inorganic engagement has already been something that Reddit has to continuously invest tons of resources into. They're now opening themselves up to actors who are financially incentivized to invest more resources into gaming the system.
The timing of this seems especially bad given:
Not to mention that depending on how good the money split is between Reddit and the users, Reddit may be opening themselves up to people building shady stuff on top of this revenue stream (e.g. money laundering a la CS:GO, unregulated gambling, etc...).
I've wondered for years why Reddit hasn't tried to go the Facebook Marketplace route and facilitate the buying and selling that already happens on Reddit: /r/hardwareswap, /r/sffpcswap, /r/mechmarket, /r/AVexchange, etc....
It presents some additional challenges for Reddit, but the value add for all parties seems clear:
"We've solved the problem by letting users donate gold to moderators, allowing them to officially collect donations from their communities." -Reddit in a few weeks/months
Man....fuck Spez.
Also, officially monetizing karma has to be the dumbest possible move in the history of social media.
It is no different than monetizing based on viewtime and interactions like comments and thumbs on other platforms.
The moment Reddit became a sold and bought business, it was noticeable that it was commercialised.
They looked at demographics, looked for markets to expand into, and the UK was deemed to be one of those segments they wanted to grow in.
Suddenly you had AskUK posts on the front page ALL the time. British participation was more and more visible all over. Reading about experiences with the the NHS, but without any further explanation on what that actually is was suddenly more noticeable in all sorts of health related posts for example.
The NHS is the British National Health
Care SystemService (Thank you @liv for the correction). Something that would always some with explanations previously, as it wasn't assumed that it was obvious what that was. Being a site with a predominantly American userbase and all that.It was very obvious that a top-down effort was being made to bring in new users from specific places in the world. And that it was working.
Same with making up lots of new awards to give, then drip feeding free awards to give out to random users over time to build hype. Then giving everyone 1 free award to give away per day, but making all the others cost money.
The latest development regarding API usage was pretty predictable, considering the blatant commercialization in recent years.
I never noticed the rise of UK-focussed content, but did this coincide with that weird thing where Reddit was making subs in French and German and astroturfing them with translated content from other subs? That was wild.
NHS = National Health Service btw :-).
I noticed UK-focused content, but that's because I would surf Reddit in the early morning, when most of the US was just waking up or still asleep, and there'd been enough time for UK-centric posts to gain a bit of traction.
I don't doubt there was an admin-driven push to appeal to UK users, but my experience had as much to do with time zones as anything.
That makes sense. I'm on +12 GMT so the British are all asleep during the afternoon, which is my main social media time.
That might be why the push was less noticeable for me.
In hindsight now that I think about it my country's subreddit (in Latin America) got revived all of a sudden, it used to be a fairly progressive sub full of bilingual speakers and one day a couple of years ago it started getting a bunch of traffic from more conservative people who don't speak English. I have also notice a rise in the amount of accounts that have posts in Spanish, in their country's subreddit, in random subreddits. Perhaps there was a push to promote reddit in Latin America too.
Probably!
My country's subreddit (in English) got more conservative people a couple of years ago too. Not sure why.
Remind me again, if Reddit is pushing this kind of thing, why it's a bad thing to sell my account to shady marketing firms?
People will try to game the system and the first line of defense are moderators. This will increase moderator workload for a job that is already unpaid. It's crazy, because karma farming is something a lot of moderators try to fight and this just seems like it is being rewarded.
So unpaid workers are keeping the paid spammers in check. I don't like it.
It's going to unleash a torrent of shit. It's already a whine fest when a bunch of users submit the same content within minutes of each other with accusations of favouratism, imagine how bad it will get with money on the line. Posts that hit the top of r/all get inundated with awards. If that now translates into cash, the tantrums are going to be through the roof.
Then add in the fact that mods are often some of the most prolific posters in their subs - how long until that becomes weaponized with accusations of manipulation so the mods make money off the subs at the expense of their users? It already happens over meaningless karma.
If their goal is to get a short-term "traffic boost" that looks good for the IPO, so the internal investors who are in the know can then cash out quick, sure this might do something. But as far as doing something good for Reddit, for the users of the community, it won't.
Youtube used to be full of people who'd post snippets of a favorite thing (music, movie, whatever) and people who loved something enough to share about it. How-to, documentaries, subject discussions, all sorts of targeted stuff like that. Things that someone cared about and decided to put out into the world.
Then Google announced revenue sharing and suddenly Youtube became a career. Hardly anyone on the platform posts anything organic that comes from a place of passion. Unless you count passion for money; there's lots of that on Youtube now. The algorithm is full of it. Every thumbnail full of a stupid face, full of 'react' and repost, full of clickbait, full of shorts, full of "like comment subscribe sponsor ad ad ad ad ad ad ad and more ad".
That's what'll happen to Reddit, except it's even easier to scam text-only. How long does it take a coder to put together a bot that scrapes links and posts them (monitoring the top 50 or so news/whatever sites and reposting their posts for Reddit credit)? How long does it take to put together a bot that copies and reposts Reddit comments that were highly upvoted; furthering the meme / joke / noise quota on Reddit that buries any thread in useless crap that brings nothing to the table?
How long does it take to put together a bot that begins harassing moderators of profitable subreddits, bots that do all sorts of things trying to drive those people out so the bot's owner can try to step in and take over? Right now moderators are mostly people who want to help the community for some reason (even if some of them have odd ideas about how to do that, or only do it occasionally if at all). But with money involved, moderators will be going bare knuckles to collect everything.
Bring money into it, and people change. Period. They always do. If Reddit credit (whatever it's called) can be converted to money, people will start juicing at any costs to pull it all down. Won't matter how banal or ridiculous what they're doing is; as long as they pull in that cash.
Reddit does this, it'll implode. But why should the current shot callers at Reddit care? They'd be gone. Off to the next thing, even if that next thing is swimming in their pool of cash. Who cares what got left behind, or how poisoned, right?
Looks like this is definitely real: reddit is discontinuing awards and coins.
Sounds a whole like perverse incentive. Alternatively, Reddit is just going to be another Murdoch-like news outlet if this becomes the case, but presented as grassroot (for astroturfing). No one is going to be paying dollars for a joke comment that gets thousands of upvotes and plenty of awards.
They've been hinting at this for years, I doubt it'll ever happen. Reddit is broke, they dont want to share any money
My exact response. It's old stale vaporware. I'll believe it when I see the economics of how that model actually works out for them and for their... customers.
At first I thought, "Oh cool! So we can finally start paying mods." But that's the problem. WE start paying mods. WE shouldn't have to.
Feels like Reddit is about to make even more money, but for a short amount of time. Inflation is really starting to take a toll and people are running out of fuck you money to throw at Reddit. I'll be interested to see how this goes for them financially, but also to see what kind of glorious mess this will cause in the community.
Ah, yes, the only country redditors are from.
At first I thought this was like Twitch bits. On Twitch, you can award your favorite creators with "bits," a currency you purchase from Twitch, by emoting those bits into the chat. Creators can trade those back for real money (though not nearly as much as they cost, of course).
But then I realized that on Twitch, communities are strictly isolated from creator to creator. If a creator is making money through this venue and not a horrible person, they can pay their moderators out of this revenue (I know some who do or have done).
What reddit is doing is more like Second Life.
On a different note, I know people sometimes used these gold, etc. awards to force extremely downvoted, extremely disliked comments to stay visible. I wonder if reddit will come up with a different way of monetizing that, or if they'd rather drop it and let the awful things public figures and reddit admins have written be naturally forgotten.
EA is about to make bank on that comment from a couple years ago.
I used to post stuff that I made (although not much) into reddit to share with the community that probably (hopefully) liked it, it's not about money, creating content, or stuff like that, there're no pressure to keep producing them or making them absolutely perfect for people's consumption like being a professional youtuber. It is just some stuff a fan made shared to the community.
I don't care about karma, never posted or commented in a big subreddit, but I shared a wallpaper for a game once in the corresponding subreddit and it got around 450 upvotes which is a lot since the top posts of all time on that subreddit got less than 1000 upvotes and it made me happy.
If reddit thinks this change is helping me to create more stuff, they are wrong, involving money with stuff that I made using my spare time for hobbies just took some of the fun from it.
I will be removing everything I ever posted there when this update goes live, and probably post them somehere else. I actually have a new one ready to go, but it's done during the blackouts and I don't really wanna post on reddit at that time, still searching for a place the share them.
Goodbye reddit, I will only be a lurker with adblock on from this day onwards.
It ain't much, but its honest work (?)
Do they not realize the entire thing is reposts? This sounds like a legal hell hole. Imagine your art gets reposted, and you don't get paid.
There's no way for Reddit to administratively keep up with the chaos that'll ensue from this decision.
This is going to lead to even more Karma farming and power users like Digg used to have (anyone remember Mr Babyman?). It's a terrible idea and will probably be implemented in the worst possible way.
I was unjustly banned at an inopportune time.
I had 1.47m comment karma. Fuck sake...
The million dollar decision