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Reddit releases "community points", tokens on the Ethereum blockchain awarded for posts - currently available in /r/cryptocurrency and /r/FortniteBR
Link information
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- Title
- Reddit Rolls Out 'Community Points' on Ethereum to Incentivize Positive Behavior - CoinDesk
- Published
- May 14 2020
- Word count
- 670 words
Reddit says this will incentivize positive behavior, but that's not actually true any more than upvotes do. What it does incentivize is popular behavior, which is a really different thing.
English is my second language and this took me a while to understand lol
Has mitigating this effect ever been discussed with respect to Tildes? I understand the votes are disincentivized by making them small and comparatively low-weighted compared to the labelling functionality, but people still consciously and subconsciously use them as a big indicator of "read-worthiness", which can often lead to a feedback effect with popularity—the week we went without vote counts proved that.
It's good to collect both metrics for the popularity and the quality. The regular votes handle the popularity just fine. The exemplary comment label is the metric for quality, since it comes with an eight hour cooldown right now. That's the way to separate them, quality needs to be a limited use resource. Something like that will exist for submissions someday, when we have enough of them that there's actually competition for the front page.
I also like how the exemplary tokens multiply the votes rather than just adding a flat number. That way you need some level of both quality and popularity to make it. Toss in mild user vote weights based on participation and you have quite a system to play with.
I wonder how a cool down on votes would work out. Maybe one vote every 10 minutes, or something. Might be worth an experiment at some point.
There's some more info available in this post: https://medium.com/@MagoTsan/what-are-reddits-blockchain-based-community-points-363117e53733
These should be related official pages, but I can't get them to load:
Official posts in the subreddits:
This seems to be an extension of the "donuts" thing they've been doing in /r/ethtrader for quite a while: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/wiki/donuts
They both work for me.
Can this be converted to money?
I think that ideas like this are going to shape the future of the web in coming years (I'm not endorsing them). Stuff like this can be used to promote good behavior, while expanding the number of people that have digital wallets. Maybe one day we wont need advertising across the web, but instead each click will "cost" us a tiny small amount of some token, and each video a stream of tiny tokens etc.
Of course there will be ways to abuse this, like it ends up happening with almost everything.
I don't think it can natively be converted to money, but since they seem to be standard ERC-20 tokens it should be possible to sell them just like any of the other Ethereum-based tokens (such as Brave's Basic Attention Token).
I'm finding it hard not to read this as a criticism of moderators. It's like the Reddit admins have positioned themselves as the people who will save Reddit from the moderators.
Yeah, but it also criticizes advertising, collecting personal data, and other things that reddit themselves do heavily. So I think it's mostly just nonsense that makes them seem like they're doing something idealistic by adding points you can spend to post gifs in comments.
Yeah, but with this "liberated from control" comment, as well as the polls feature where "By giving weight to votes, Community Points let a community see how core contributors feel about a question or decision", it seems like there's an anti-mod sentiment running through this. "We're freeing you from control and giving you a bigger voice in your community (i.e. subreddit)!"
I know it's nonsense, but it feels like there's an anti-mod thread running through it.
I think it ties into Huffman's ongoing speil that "on reddit the upvotes decide!"
He's been playing down moderation and curation on the site forever because it's a much easier story to sell to advertisers and investors.
You also get to play down all the nonsense, junk, stolen (copyright breaching) and filth that's pervasive on the site, how much of it is removed, how much of it that should be removed isn't, and get to say that all the junk that's left just didn't make it "in the marketplace of ideas"
Reddit actively tries to marginalize and underplay the role of mods as crucial for running the site while really enjoying deploying new features and forcing mods of existing communities to just deal with whatever extra burdens they add.
Mods have reddit by the short hairs and reddit knows it. Anything they can do to eliminate moderators, they will do.
Imagine what reddit would look like if every moderator took one day off all at the same time - and turned off the automod configs they built for that day as well.
I don't have to imagine it. It exists. It's called voat.co.
Something like that, but also with 900% more spam. ;)
The way I read this, they're just distributing "points". You can't actually use them outside reddit. What's the point of them running on a blockchain? Isn't that just for decentralized encryption?
By being on the Ethereum blockchain, they can be transferred between people and between smart contracts outside of Reddit without Reddit's involvement. Someone could make a website where you need to pay a certain amount of points to get in or just merely prove that you own at least a certain amount. People could buy and sell them between each other.
Reddit's use of it is basically as a toy (or phrased less nicely, "a solution in search of a problem"), but speaking as a fan of Ethereum, decentralized systems, and smart contracts, I like that it's a toy that brings attention to them.
I'm reminded of third-party markets for rare items in games. It seems like it can work, but only if the items themselves are valued by players?
It seems a bit improbable that Reddit can get people to value these Internet points, without a game. But this was true for a while with Dogecoin, even though most people were just playing. Maybe some enthusiasts will think it's fun to be programming smart contracts for Reddit points?
But I think the Dogecoin experience shows that things that work like money attract bad behavior no matter how much you try to keep them a joke. So, these days I think you should avoid making your Internet points too much like money.
Yeah, this is basically like them rolling out the ideal infrastructure for facilitating game item trading scenes (like those that exist for TF2 cosmetics or CSGO gun skins) ahead of actually having interesting game items. Maybe they'll follow up with some kind of content that makes it more interesting, or it will just be a little proof-of-concept that may inspire other game item trading scenes to copy their infrastructure.
Hats. Reddit hats distributed as comment rewards was an April fool's joke.
They've got the technology
(But really the technology was such that the site mostly crashed when people got a lot of hats.)
I too wonder what the points do or are for. Reddit's got a history of releasing features I don't understand what're supposed to do. A lot of them suddenly disappear too. It's like they throw resources in development in the hopes that some percentage will stick.
I built most of the frontend for that hats April fool's joke. 😁
We shut it down midday because it was interfering with legitimate and important uses of the site. One of our learnings from that was to not disrupt individual subreddits' autonomy by changing their UI suddenly.
The other thing we learned was that people are surprisingly strongly motivated by random team affiliation and arbitrary points...
Well, at least this time they are doing something interesting.