SNOOcalypse - document, discuss, and promote the downfall of Reddit.

“Here’s money for having and sharing the correct thoughts” Is a scary notion

and is trying to counter it by throwing them some spare cash.

Reddit has no spare cash, Steve has pissed away better than three quarters of a billion dollars in venture capital. It'll probably be RedditBux or an NFT or something.

In other words: "Please bot our site to artificially push your karma points"

People will put a lot of effort into maximizing their returns with repost bots now. Yuck.

I see a huge issue with this.

I have seen in communities where mods will remove a user's post and then repost it themselves or with an alt and hit the front page.

So you're telling me now the mods have a financial incentive to do this? And what if as a money generating post gets removed simply because a mod doesn't like it, even though it doesn't break any rules?

I also feel like the quality of posts is about to implode even further from this. You're not asking artists or musicians or even meme creators to post, you're asking reposters to repost content that already did good.

the karma accumulated could be used to improve the rate of exchange for Reddit gold into real-world money (possibly USD)

Oh, so all those people with 10+ year accounts, with tons of karma accumulated over the years, and who deleted their accounts in protest for the API changes... are actually a "good thing" so Reddit doesn't have to pay top rates for their comments?

Nice move, very nice... /s

I think I may have some insight here. This isn't something that was reactionary imo, maybe the timing is, but the idea has been around for a while. They have been toying with this idea on /r/cryptocurrency for a while with "moons" and the admins have discussed bringing that same thing to the larger ecosystem. Though, the admins probably are worried about the SEC with moon tokens, so they are turning to regular dollars.

In /r/cryptocurrency this required much more serious moderation (look at the size of the mod team), they have some pretty advanced moderation tools compared to most other subs.

I don't think reddit knows what they are asking for, but they are gonna get it, a whole ton of repost / chatgpt garbage. This is sadly probably the downfall of reddit, if it wasn't the API pricing, this surely will turn it into a bot/karma removed garbage dump.

I posted this elsewhere, but they were already paying people to post content before the protest.

Have a look at this user’s posts prior to the blackouts: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/ Lots and lots of low-effort posts in various UK subreddits.

And read this (which was posted after he got accused of being a karma farming bot), note the admin comment confirming it: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/comments/130zbw6/i_am_a_community_builder_for_reddit/

This link confirms that Community Builders are “vetted and paid by Reddit for their time”: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418715794324-What-is-the-Community-Builders-Program-

Despite claiming they work with mods, the mods of those subreddits don’t seem to be aware of this, as evidenced by this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Leeds/comments/138gi40/reddit_community_builders_please_read_details/

They already had a massive bot reposting issue, and now they’ll bay paid to that? Absolutely will get worse. Unbelievable

The old reddit is dead and gone. They (corporate) know what they're doing. They've pivot to the commercialized internet. The crowd that pays "influencers", "creators", or what have you. The crowd that gives money to people who are famous for being famous. The crowd that pays for entries in a database shown as icon badges on their profile.

This is a significant part of the internet and the people on this planet. More importantly they are monetizeable. That's what reddit is now. The existence of this isn't what you like but it will continue to exist regardless. There are people on this planet who are into that. That's what reddit is today. The old reddit is no more.

Ask these websites are suddenly trying to figure out how to actually make money 😂 it's just not gonna happen. It never was.

I have a bet with a friend on reddit being significantly smaller or dead in 5 years, its looking pretty good for me.

This is the same thing Twitter tried (is?) doing. Spez is really going full Musk.

That's a bold strategy Cotton, let's see how it works out for them.

This is a dumb idea

Yesterday I requested that Reddit deletes any and all data associated with my Reddit account under the GDPR. It was so hard, because my account was 9 years old and I really had so much fun in my subreddits. I tried to create high quality content, just to do my part and help Reddit grow as a diverse community.

Now that I read this I have no doubts anymore that it was a good decision to go and destroy all my content there. I'm making popcorn and watch this shithole burn. Lemmy makes it easier, because I know many good people have found a new home for sharing great content and just having a good time. Sry for the rant 0.o

Also, it really feels like reddit demotes older, higher karma accounts these days. I have one which is close to a million karma and 13+ years old and it's a grind to get upvotes on it. If I use the same methodology on younger accounts it's legitimately like a 10x difference in karma production.

But either way, I will never attach my real name to a reddit account anyway, so this is pointless anyway.

Hilarious that Huffman openly admitted that Reddit “isn’t profitable” (somehow) and they have to squeeze 3PAs out to try to make up for that, but apparently they found spare funds in the budget to pay spambots to keep reposting content to keep things from going barren.

Reddit will pay a million content farms to repost memes before they pay a single moderator for [squints at paper] running their website

Copying my comment from the other threads:

reddit started trialing a "Community Points" program in 2019 in /r/ethtrader, /r/cryptocurrency and /r/fortnite , where posters and commenters could earn "Community Points" that were supposedly backed up with crypto that you could eventually cash out. They announced an expansion of the program in December 2021 but, afaik, they never actually did so. Which might have something to do with the fact that one of the /r/cryptocurrency mods made $10,000 by selling community points. I don't know if the program has actively continued since then; maybe someone who was in the three trial communities can say.

My point is that reddit has been working on something similar to this program for at least five years now. And this article isn't based on any announcement by reddit, but by someone examining their source code. It's possible that this code has been present for a while and reddit has leaked it's existence to try to attract back some of their lost contributors. Or even that it hasn't been present but they included the old code in the newest app release and then pointed it out for the same reason.

In any case, this article isn't based on any official announcement, and reddit has been "trialing" a similar program for over four years. I wouldn't hold out any hope that this actually sees daylight anytime soon, or that it'll work well if it's actually released.

Reddit The Company would only be doing this if engagement and submissions had fallen off significantly, and they're scrambling for a way to prop that up.

And it's like they're doing a Digg speed run, essentially handing over priority to power users.

The first one is demographics; since 47% of the users are Americans, and 21% of them are 10-19yo, it’s safe to say that ~60% of the users are ineligible, and thus will only contribute for free.

Just want to point out that there are a ton of Telegram communities focused on bypassing these types of limitations, because $0.10 USD for 1000 upvotes goes a lot farther in rural India than it does in Indiana.

By offering an incentive program, they've just opened up the door for a whole new third world economy. They should have stuck to fighting 3rd party API access tbh.

Ny guess is they imagine it becoming like YouTube, where some popular tubers can monetize their channels and sometimes make a living. But that is also how Medium and Substack would, and both lose money and suck at the same time.

I'm in the 1% for karma earners.

Gimme my fuckin' money, Spez. $1 for every karma. So I'll get over a million.

Quota tried this before with Quora Partners. There, you’d get paid for asking popular questions. However, users quickly gamed the system and began spamming thousands of worthless, nearly-identical questions, which boosted the site’s SEO rankings for a while before Google caught on. Reddit thinks investors will just hand them money when they see their inflated stats, but I am sure that many will see through their tricks.

Ugh, I was hoping I could just cash out on the karma I already had. This is pointless. If they thought karma whoring was bad before, this is going to push it to a whole new level.

That's so stupid that it's funny again. Steve Huffman will milk this Reddit cow to death. Without repost filtering this incentivizes bot makers, with years of experience, to flood Reddit with garbage because the common user can't tell. Come in, come in, my bots and ~~user~~ slaves to create content for the show. Also awards give incentive to post provoking content and rage bait, you even have this shit on steam for almost useless award rewards.