by lftherios on 5/14/20, 11:39 AM with 228 comments
by Sargos on 5/14/20, 4:04 PM
I think this is a neat experiment and it will be fun to watch what happens but I'm skeptical that this moves the subreddits in a positive direction.
by flixic on 5/14/20, 3:20 PM
Dynamics within subreddit members got so bad that the subreddit split, and now almost all the action happens in r/EthFinance that does not have any community currency. The main deterioration was actually corruption. Because "karma" had monetary values and "karma monetary policy" could be set by admins, there was massive concentration of wealth for mods, with no incentive to change the rules.
by brodouevencode on 5/14/20, 3:39 PM
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/p...
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/gjedc1/uroo...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/gifi24/92_of_t...
In reddit parlance: "tfw internet points becomes more of a real thing, also <something something political>"
by jondubois on 5/14/20, 4:13 PM
1. They will launch.
2. They will find out that Ethereum doesn't scale.
3. They will move to an off-chain solution.
On the plus side, the extra demand generated by Reddit will boost Ethereum transaction fees to insane levels which is going to make the Ethereum price go up (because higher fees = more lucrative mining). Then the Ethereum/Reddit insiders who organized this elaborate corporate scam are going to cash out.
I can't believe how quickly people forgot about CryptoKitties. Surely Reddit developers know about Ethereum's limits.
It seems that we have entered into a new economic era. It's called "Let's use cryptocurrency as a way to collaboratively fool our corporate employers for personal profit".
1. Find a big corporation whose managers are naive enough to agree to participate in some hyped up and non-scalable blockchain project.
2. Convince your managers to start such a project and do it in such a way that this project is going to boost demand for cryptocurrency X.
3. Employees buy cryptocurrency X.
4. Project launches, cryptocurrency X struggles to handle the load and as a result, transaction fees skyrocket, sharply driving up the token price.
5. Employees sell their cryptocurrency X at the peak.
6. Users complain about high fees. Employer realizes that this is not going to work and abandons the project.
7. Price crashes back to what it was before. Corporate employees are pleased with their profits. Corporation has no clue that they've just been scammed by their own employees. End users of the service who had to actually pay for the transaction fees paid for most of the cost.
Companies should be launching their own blockchains, not ERC-20 tokens; that only benefits Ethereum.
by jetrink on 5/14/20, 2:26 PM
i have seen many people spill their guts on–line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money–value. [...] i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul.
by montenegrohugo on 5/14/20, 2:18 PM
That said, this measure will just lead to bots reposting (or in the near future generating GPT-2 like garbage) content in order to farm community points/ethereum.
As soon as you add in a financial incentive the whole situation gets ugly.
by thinkmassive on 5/14/20, 1:41 PM
> In order to start contributing, users need to sign up to the "Vault," Reddit's local blockchain wallet, accessed via scanning a QR code through the official Reddit app.
It's not clear whether the Reddit mobile app is becoming a full web3 browser, but this makes it sound like there's a real wallet in there:
> There is a warning though. A private key is provided once a user creates their Vault, which is stored locally on their smart device. Meaning if the user doesn't create a back up of their key and loses their phone, they will be unable to access their community points, with Reddit claiming even they will be unable to help.
Cryptocurrency wallets are way too complicated for most people to use properly. It should be interesting to see if Reddit can raise the bar with an open solution. Hopefully it isn't some pointless proprietary implementation that actually uses a "proof of authority" network (aka shitty database).
by 127 on 5/14/20, 2:28 PM
by Klonoar on 5/14/20, 8:14 PM
e.g, when Stellar was aidropped to Keybase users, that's... technically the start of a taxable chain of events. I donated mine to the Freedom of the Press foundation, and thus had to report it.
I had a time of it back during the second crypto craze, which I'm thankfully out of. I know how to report this crap. I am not sure, to this day, whether joe schmoe average user even realizes they have to.
So in this case my question becomes: is Reddit foisting a tax liability on their users without them understanding this? Does this ever come up in discussion and I've just missed it entirely?
by goda90 on 5/14/20, 6:29 PM
by _curious_ on 5/14/20, 2:12 PM
GIFs...in...comments? That will quickly lead to a worsening user experience, who thought this was a good idea?
"In the Reddit app your wallet is a full Ethereum wallet that has a private key and recovery phrase. You are able to use that wallet anywhere you would normally use an Ethereum wallet by exporting it."
Does this mean it can be converted to (or spent like) cash?
by lftherios on 5/14/20, 1:50 PM
by fouc on 5/14/20, 1:55 PM
by udia on 5/14/20, 1:36 PM
Would this new feature would reward users any more than the existing karma/gilding mechanism? I am skeptical that the typical Reddit user would have even have a cryptocurrency wallet.
by gitgud on 5/14/20, 2:07 PM
by floren on 5/14/20, 2:17 PM
I'm sure there will be no negative repercussions when rolling out a system that gives you money for posting pun chains and XKCD links.
by CM30 on 5/15/20, 8:53 AM
Is it as bad as it could be? Depending on how it's implemented no; a system that just rewards points like this automatically is far worse than one that can be used to tip people for good work.
But the incentive shifts it brings are similar, and can be very, very bad for the future of a community or social network.
Just ask DigitalPoint. Ages ago they used to allow people to earn money from the ads displayed in topics they'd posted in via an adsense revenue sharing scheme.
The end result? The site's post quality took a serious nosedive, as people from low income countries signed up en masse to try and earn what they saw as 'easy' money. People used meaningless one liners in every topic on the off chance they'd get ad revenue there, or posted new topics with thin content for the same reason.
The site's reputation pretty much collapsed due to this, and even now it's not exactly seen as a place where meaningful discussions take place.
Same sort of goes for Quora too. We all know they pay people for posting questions, so now we get a ton of pointless questions that no one actually cares about because there's money involved.
So I'm not exactly thrilled by this announcement, nor about the effects it could have on Reddit as a whole if implemented site wide.
by ihuman on 5/14/20, 2:08 PM
by solotronics on 5/14/20, 10:34 PM
by uncletammy on 5/14/20, 5:27 PM
Back around 2015 they hired a dev called Ryan X Charles to build a Bitcoin based rewards system into Reddit.
https://ryanxcharlestimes.com/fix-reddit-with-bitcoin-7da3f8...
It proved to be a difficult task because it was right about the time that the Bitcoin core devs started actively discouraging Bitcoin's use in payments. This paired with a new investment round at Reddit resulted in the project being abandoned.
I do believe if they had seen this project through, Reddit would be in a much more healthy state right now
by ilaksh on 5/15/20, 1:14 PM
For example, I am the main moderator on r/robots these days. When I came in, I got feedback from the users to clarify the content that belongs in the subreddit. They indicated that they wanted about equally to post about robotic art as well as real robots. Right now about 70% of posts are about real robots and 30% are about robot art or something called that.
But my point is, the posts that get upvotes are generally not the quality posts. The things that determine upvotes are number one, how easy is it to consume? So if it's a GIF rather than a video, it is likely to receive at least 10 times as many upvotes.
Maybe tied for number one, does it have some kind of base emotional effect? Most of the time means, is it sexual or vaguely sexual? Sometimes that means, does it look kind of like a cute baby robot?
Another one is, is it reductionistic? In other words, headlines or overall posts that tend to over-simplify something tend to be more popular.
Another one: randomness affects vote count significantly. Also, vote manipulation seems to be a factor. When we had some seemingly 'professional' redditors come in that really, really wanted to be mods and I let them for a couple of days, it seemed like they must have been willing to do anything to get their posts upvoted. And also to mod any and all subs that would let them. Which is why I kicked them out.
But the point of this is that in-depth videos of real robots will get few upvotes just because they are longer, and the ones that do better may just have good thumbnails but aren't actually good videos.
Which is to say that I have been watching the judgement of our community closely for months, and the posts that receive upvotes are absolutely not the best posts in general. I mean, sometimes good ones get upvotes. But sometimes they are ignored and utter trash gets upvoted.
It's really changed my perspective on democracy. Sometimes I want to quit being a mod there, but I am not sure the other mods care enough to bother remove the ads and spam that pop up every week or so masquerading as normal posts.
by robmerki on 5/14/20, 3:08 PM
by burtonator on 5/14/20, 6:06 PM
For example, if there was a currency for 'coal' then the 'environmental' community could basically reject that currency.
Right now if coal mining makes a ton of money that's all that matters. They can dominate the local economy.
by MaximumMadness on 5/14/20, 4:25 PM
My best guess is that it sees such high traffic & is populated with non-crypto focused Reddit users. Let's the company get a big dataset with a group of consumers who aren't predisposed to Crypto.
I reached out to Reddit for comment but they just gave me a classic canned response.
by sl1ck731 on 5/14/20, 2:20 PM
With all of the changes in the past year or two of the Reddit team trying to monetize it in any way they can I've noticed I find less and less interesting content.
by Taylor_OD on 5/14/20, 4:03 PM
Looks like they figured it out.
by ComputerGuru on 5/14/20, 4:27 PM
by caogecym on 5/14/20, 3:17 PM
by Mindwipe on 5/14/20, 8:30 PM
Yeah, still no deal.
by ddevault on 5/14/20, 2:10 PM
And to pre-empt the replies: no, I don't want to hear a defense of whatever ponzi scheme you've sunk 10 grand into. Cryptocurrency is the MLM of tech.
by corobo on 5/14/20, 3:05 PM
by seibelj on 5/14/20, 1:49 PM
by aiyodev on 5/14/20, 9:43 PM
by c_prompt on 5/14/20, 2:17 PM
1. Does trading values (e.g., money for content) make for a more peaceful environment in social networks and other online communities?
2. Does allowing an easy and voluntary way to reward content creators improve the quality of the content (e.g., higher accuracy, fact-based arguments, better ideas, more toleration of different ideas)?
3. Can users make enough money from content creation without relying on advertising (thus disrupting journalism and even removing the draw for companies to sell private information)?
4. Will users start to think in terms of exchanging values and, if so, will these thoughts then spillover to other parts of their lives?
[1] https://valme.io/c/journal/c_prompt/f5qqs/an-open-letter-to-...
