Reddit's crappy app has code for a "get money for your karma" program

This is just going to encourage even more spammy, low quality, easily consumable clickbait content.
Good luck, Steve.

Whew, I instantly feel validated in my decision to leave Reddit. If this gets applied it will encourage a bot apocalypse in Reddit, which is already something they're struggling with.

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"

“Shit, the people who actually cared about the platform and contributed good content are leaving. Quick, throw money at the problem instead of fixing the issues we created!”

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.

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/

Congrats to the themed/novelty accounts like the person who posts the watercolors, Shittymorph, Snoodle, and the others who regularly post highly upvoted content. I'd add PoppinKream, but they're here now.

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

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

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.

If karma is worth money can I sell my 50,000 point account to someone who promises to use it for evil and make Reddit worse? Maybe Russians or scammers? Or Russian scammers?

So all those people who rip videos from youtube (not linking to them but download and reupload, usually with intro/outro and watermarks edited out) are now going to get paid for it?

How is that not theft, again?

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.

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

Permanently Deleted

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.

so they can't pay for their shitty api and killed off thirdparty clients because they "can't afford them".. but can pay random users for shitty karma? sounds right.

I'm in the 1% for karma earners.

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

Considering how easy it is to bot a post to the front page, this is going to come down to that being more expensive than he cash you get for your post, and having seen how YouTube pays out... How does reddit plan to compete there?

Until they ban you with little to no explanation

they're really getting desperate huh

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

This just reeks of desperation and doesnt sound thought out in the slightest.

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.

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.

I know there has been a lot of doommongering recently about the innevitable demise of Reddit. However, I feel like this change will be the worst thing the will have ever done if it comes to fruition.

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

Watch it be 1 cent per 100k karma.

Between this and twitters incentives this seriously feels wrong. Like, social credit score wrong.

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.

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

Holy shit this is pathetic, sad and incredibly dumb.

Aside from the valid points made by other comments, giving Reddit even more information (how else are they going to verify your age? Copy of driver's license would be my guess) is just asinine. At this point, if you're still on Reddit and you sign up for this you deserve what you get.

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.

September is coming

I guess they just really don't understand why reddit was worth visiting in the first place.

They want to turn redditors into instagram whores haha.

Eliminate 3rd party tools, try to force people on to a terrible app with a shitty interface, and then incentivize the content farms. A recipe for success if ever I've heard one.

You know what might have been a better idea? If they'd offered a profit sharing agreement to third party apps through some sort of affiliate program that allowed them to sell gold and split the revenue. They could even have kept the obscene api rates for AI scrapers by giving a massive discount to affiliated apps. This way reddit would get the revenue it was missing out on, users could support their preferred app while also giving money to reddit, and really, everybody wins.

But then spez wouldn't get to be Elon jr, so that obviously wasn't going to work.

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.

antique meme appraiser suddenly becomes an actual job at c/AntiqueMemesRoadshow

Everyone should make a concerted effort to abandon reddit. I, and many others, left digg.com back whenever that whole shitfest imploded and many other sites have been abandoned over the years when they went to shit due to bad leaders/service became shit.

Use lemmy or whatever else that isn’t reddit. Let it die. The biggest thing on reddit is the nerdy shit like network, linux, windows, android, etc. troubleshooting and help from actual people of various backgrounds, some very skilled, to normie users and everyone else.

If you absolutely “must” use reddit for some reason, and overall I don’t see a must-use use there except aforementioned troubleshooting help, then use adblocked desktop version or if you’re a normal person who doesn’t view reddit on non-mobile (lol) then use a custom api app. Apollo has one, and on android the revanced team (behind the superior YouTube app alternative to the google one) has implemented custom api patches for all the popular reddit apps like sync and such. They all block ads and generally deny Steve what he wanted. Use those instead of the official. Never use the official app!

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.

Is it a conspiracy that Twitter and Reddit, center-lib spaces, gone down at the same time?

I won't give too much credit to people like Musk and Hoffman, it's just too useful for right-wing actors to sink these platforms down since a lot of their accounts were banned there, and none of their projects like Parler or TruthSocial got from the ground.

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

• Earn xx gold and karma each month

"Thank you for all your passion driven volunteer work. Let us reward you with slavery".

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

I was going to say “I hope they never actually implement this”, but then I remembered that I don’t have a horse in this race. Now I hope they DO implement it. It’ll be funnier.

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

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.

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

So I wasn’t crazy when I began speculating to the sub that I mod Reddit would/could implement partners program(predictions I have made (charging mods to moderate), making subs that don’t generate ad revenue hard to run. Subs being turned into subscriptions and users also putting their content behind P***yWalls in an effort to warn them at least going nsfw has been well recieves and my Spez shelters are getting traction at last

Marty Byrd loves this idea

This is a dumb idea

Lol

I could have been paid to post my gif collection instead of have a job?

Finally. I'll be able to determine exactly how many bored apes my upvotes are worth!

Be over 18 and live in the U.S.

And here I thought I could still get some money out of my Reddit account. Damn you, America