Community Points allow members of Reddit communities to own a piece of their community, earn rewards for quality contributions, and unlock special features.
Read all about it at the above link. There's way too much to process here. This is going to be wild.
Community Points are the first step towards a better future for online communities. In order to be truly independent from platforms like Reddit, communities need to be owned by their members in ways that platforms cannot take away. With the advent of blockchain technology, we now have a way to establish this freedom in a decentralized and secure way.
The way to be independent of Reddit is by having a token on a blockchain maintained by Reddit?
Today's online communities are not like this. They are trapped inside apps and platforms, where they do not have independence or control anything of value.
That's hilarious, when they literally just trapped users in their app and killed 3rd party apps.
Reddit is talking about decentralization and stuff like that like they aren't a centralized platform themselves. Giving control to the community, but remember if we don't like what you're doing with your communities we'll threaten your moderation team!!!
I'm sorry but this is some dystopian bullshit that's all centred on the false premise that communities are anything other than the people who choose to count themselves among them and engage in them.
Reddit is just the tool some communities chose to use to gather their members and communicate. That's it. If a community decides that Reddit is no longer the appropriate tool for the job, they can leave and build their community elsewhere. That may be a bit of an oversimplification, given the resources and tools those communities might lose through the transition, but strictly speaking, Reddit can't do anything to stop the members of any particular subreddit going elsewhere, and a cryptocurrency absolutely is not going to fucking facilitate the ownership or mobility of a community.
It's a bullshit form of control that they want their users to willingly bind themselves to. Suddenly you're not just participating in a community, but you're genuinely invested, tied to something with a perceived monetary value, that even if you can theoretically remove from Reddit and take elsewhere, won't have any more value than people choose to place on it, and won't represent the community that generated it in any meaningful way.
It's literally "Hey, the more you use Reddit, the more of our crypto you'll earn, which could be worth more than zero one day! You better keep using Reddit, huh? You wouldn't want to lose that potential for more than zero eh? In fact, why don't you encourage more people to use Reddit too? Then they'll generate their own crypto, and the more people use our crypto, the more it'll be worth for everyone! See, if you get five more people to use Reddit, and those five people also get another five people each to use it etc etc etc..."
I love how they talk about community independence yet Reddit can come in at any time and remove the mods if they don't like the content those communities are producing
This reads like shit. it starts off with this ground breaking tone, then its just crypto bs? and then the article just ends abruptly. The fediverse is the solution to the problem theyre talking about not some shitcoin. sheesh
Okay. Each sub gets fresh points according to it's size, activity and admin preference.
Every month your karma in a sub gets converted into these new points. These points can then be used to tip others, buy animated emojis or badges to show off. They are also used to make your vote count more in polls.
Mods can give commenters fines for misbehaving and make posts earn less points.
Sounds very capitalist. I guess it makes everybody go to a few big subs, as little subs don't earn anything. And those big subs are overrun by a few big players who floated to the top and stay there because of their influence. Little subs get overrun by alt-right as the fines mods can give there are just pocket money.
But that's what you get when ideology and dictators rule.
Oh what complete fucking energy wasting bullshit that can be handled by a simple db. Just more corporate buzzword bingo from these jackasses in charge.
Glanced over it. Complete word salad. Corporate nonsense: baffle them with bullshit.
You get points from communities. These points are stored on the block chain, because why not? The points themselves come from reddit, but the communities distribute them. Since they're on the block chain, reddit can't take back your magic bean points or whatever once you get them. Nevermind that they're worthless and that reddit controls the only platform that they're even remotely useful on.
For now, Reddit will cover gas costs for distributing Points to users and allowing them to spend Points on features such as Special Memberships.
Emphasis mine. Someone has to pay for it, because that's how the block chain works. For now it's Reddit. In the future? Who knows!
How does this benefit the consumer? It doesn't, really. Potentially it gives posters more control over a subreddit, but looks like mods will still hold essentially all the power when it comes to a subreddit, which is how it works now.
How does this benefit reddit as a business? It doesn't, really. They're handing out magic beans with the selling point being that they can't take them away from you once you get them. It costs them money to do this, because it's on the block chain as opposed to some in-house database. This replaced coins, right? They killed an income stream and replaced it with an expense.
They get to tell investors that they're into the block chain when they launch their IPO, I guess. All I can say is buyer beware. Chances are high the powers that be unload their stock options in the IPO hype and then get the hell out of dodge. They might have waited too long, though. The tech bubble deflated, and I don't know if the books are impressive enough to draw in the big bucks from investors.
If you want genuine control over your community, start one on the Fediverse and self-host an instance. No admins will kick you off since you're your own admin and head mod rolled into one.
Got an email from Reddit the other day telling me to "spend my Reddit coins while I still can". It reminded me that I still have a Reddit account, so I just login and delete it (mass delete all my posts and edit all my comments since July).
Today's online communities are not like this. They are trapped inside apps and platforms, where they do not have independence
Trapped in apps like the official Reddit app? Because they ruined 3rd party apps? What are they sniffing over there, the trapping of communities is their own doing.
I'm done with reddit, so either way I don't really care. Tbh I don't think this will necessarily be a dumpster fire. It might even be interesting, depending on the specifics of this implementation. It's probably fueled by higher ups hearing hype words like blockchain. My expectation is that things will mostly just continue as normal, but now the management and CEO's etc can masturbate to the idea of having a blockchain application.
wow, thats impressivly tone deaf. "break free from walled communities, with our walled community! you will be free to do what you want with your community points, inside this one community you cant remove the points from!"
So it's basically Reddit NFTs. Let's just call it as it is.
It is time for them to take back ownership and control. It is time for a change.
Lol. You're still on Reddit. You're not controlling shit.
As blockchain tokens that are owned and controlled by communities themselves — not by any app or platform — Community Points represent a way for Redditors to own a piece of their favorite communities.
You don't own it, it's made by Reddit, distributed by Reddit, and only useful on Reddit and not anywhere else. What's the meaning of decentralization and ownership if it's only useful in one place?
So this explains why they didn’t force Reddit premium for third party access. It was an obvious way to generate revenue, want API access become a premium user.
They had a whole new way of raising and paying out. Crazy.
Yes, get the internet back to the people, with money, but we don't call it money. Also you were free to go and do what you want but we took this away, see you're restricted, but now we give this option back, well ...only partly because now it's soaked with money, we mean community NFTs. Isn't this fucking exciting!!!!?? We make a shit ton of money, I mean... You will make money! Yeah! Get into the group!
Good lord. They've looked at the last few years of crypto and thought..."Yeah, that looks like a good way to do things! What could go wrong?" What a ridiculous scam. The fact that the Cryptobros at /r/CryptoCurrency are excited tells me all I need to know that this is a scam.
In case anyone missed it, it will cost 1000 Community Points or, more importantly, $5/subreddit to basically get some sort of "subreddit premium" status. The $5 is for users who don't accumulate 1000 CP's per month to retain their subreddit-premium status.
Community Points represent a way for Redditors to own a piece of their favorite communities. [...] They can even be used in custom tools outside of Reddit and on other platforms.
How the fuck would this work, I wonder? I tried to read through some but it makes little sense to me. It sounds like putting karma on blockchain and making it into a currency acting as reddit gold.
Rest is just regular cryptobro talk formulated so that Reddit looks like it cares about communities - or am I missing something?
That is absolutely hilarious. Yeah Reddit, I totally buy that you want internet communities to not depend on platforms like Reddit. This would be totally monetizeable for you, not that you care about monetization and not that monetization has proven to work at cross-purposes with making good internet websites/communities. And once you mentioned blockchain, well that's when I recognized the subliminal cues suggesting a well-thought-out proposal that positively impacts the world.
EDIT: Ugh just saw that again, they just linked an old post, this one apparently from 2021. I don't think it changes things much insofar as they're presumably planning to replace awards with something and this proposal presumably describes it. But I already didn't see them successfully implementing the thing as written, and knowing now that it's from 2021 it just makes me more certain that whatever they roll out is unlikely to be exactly what's described here.
I'd say knowing this was written two years ago makes the text less hilariously on-the-nose but that depends on whether they'd write something different today doesn't it, I'm not sure they wouldn't.
Interesting idea but it's still too close to the reddit platform. Looks a lot like reddit gold, except you can take your 'gold' elsewhere. This is a cool idea, despite the knee jerk reactions in this thread.
It's a partial step towards a DAO, but looks rushed, half baked, and done for the wrong reasons. Some reddit profits will trickle into this currency. If they wanted to provide actual benefits instead of just making themselves rich they'd distribute profits to CP holders and allow CP holders some governance roles site-wide instead of being boxed into a community. Serfdom vibes.
In the real world, communities are independent entities, free to choose where and how they hang out. No one tells them what to do or where to go.
I guess the people who run Reddit really think none of their audience was educated by say... Snoopy.... or seen a "no skateboarding" sign in their life. You can just hang out anywhere IRL!
Earn points through generating content and moderation? Okay, sure, why not?
Use those points to weigh votes in community governance? Suuuure, okay I can see how that could be cool.
The points are on the blockchain? Uh… so what’s stopping rich assholes from buying up points and using their capital to take over communities?
If the points are non-transferable then I can see the merit of a points system… but then why would you need a blockchain at all? It’s all still a closed off walled garden despite what they are pitching.