Reddit rolls out community currencies on Ethereum
coindesk.com
coindesk.com
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.
If the coin has no monetary value - then it could work, but then what’s the point?
The job of moderation is soul sucking and involves rule creation and rule enforcement. You end up dealing with rule breakers regularly as opposed to only occasionally, skewing your perspective.
There is little overlap with content creation.
You could see karma/upvotes as a sort of proto-money, with a limited range of monetary qualities.
This just takes the same effect, and magnifies it, by fully monetizing those points, so I anticipate it will lead to better content and curation, just as karma/upvotes did when introduced.
People like to complain about FOX New's conservative bias (and to a lesser extent MSNBC's liberal bias), but they miss the fact that their real bias is towards viewership, and they've become news entertainment products, not sources of journalism.
NYT did a really good job covering this recently with their podcast Rabbit Hole:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/podcasts/rabbit-hole-prol...
I'm curiously drawn towards anyone whom has people shouting "don't give them a platform!" or has suggestions that their ideas are so powerful that they may somehow corrupt minds weaker than, presumably, their own superior ones.
So I semi-regularly listen to these "alt" people. Alex Jones, McInnes, molyneux, and so on. The co-opting was largely realizing that in-between some of the crazy (there's a fair amount to filter out in Jones' case), there are these kernels of truth, often backed by government documents or reports.
The co-opting ideas, I guess, was a general realization that the common narrative doesn't necessarily reflect the entire reality. Even things which are presented as cut and dry, are often a frustrating messy grey once you dig into them. It's also given me a general skepticism of commonly held opinions about people in general. These "literal cult leader", "literal nazis", etc... have turned out to be less monsters and more humans with nuanced opinions which don't necessarily translate to 5min clips.
Different communities are good for different things and there is such a thing as community standards. It doesn't have to get to the Alex Jones political level either, just think like how weird it is when people hit on each other on Nextdoor [1] or if some guy was trying to sell his lawnmower on Grindr/Tinder.
1 - https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor/status/100265658134170009...
I think of listening to them largely in the spirit of Lincoln's “I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.” There's an entire machine telling me to hate these people, write them off, or that they're overall "bad." So I listened to a bunch of their content to see what it was about. That's kinda it, really.
I haven't turned into some conspiratorial nut job or joined some cult (I don't think!). I listened to a couple of podcasts to try to form my own opinions. The output of the exercise was that I don't think these people are evil demons. I think they're largely just... people. Complex, right sometimes, wrong sometimes, and fun to hate on by the general media.
You freely admit that there's a fair amount of crazy. The signal/noise ratio is absurdly bad, even if we assume there's some kind of signal at all. The (usually banal, obvious) nuggets of truth are often intentionally thrown in as a way to make you let your guard down. If you are not 100% flawless at separating the nugget of truth from the shit, then over time your mind will inevitably fill with shit. Don't overestimate your own mental resilience. If people were half as strong-minded as they thought they were, there'd be no money in advertising.
Never listen to crazies. If there's something non-crazy in what they're saying, somebody non-crazy will be saying it too; listen to them instead.
So, again, I'll throw on a podcast at the gym and try to form my own opinions. If you exclusively get your opinions from clips on twitter or reddit, I don't think the opinions you've formed are actually yours.
Despite being exposed to "dangerous" ideas (I assume you're mostly talking about Jones), I don't think inter-dimensional space aliens are actually behind everything. I've managed to stay at least partially sane.
...or maybe I'm just not ready to believe yet (dun dun dun!) :)
What am I doing wrong?
So it's possible to have a reasonable and logical YouTube. However, even a single video can trigger YouTube's algorithm to attempt to pull you in.
Nice to do this every once in a while anyways, just to find another pocket of Youtube that interests you.
This sibling comment response is literally giving me chills. Is this like a bot or something or someone who literally thinks the idea of sensationalist journalism is like a "huh that's interesting, never thought of that" kind of thing?
I am pretty sure sensationalist journalism predates real journalism... Why would a feudal lord want his subjects to really know what was going on in the world?
This is my big complaint about Hollywood, too: if they charged people after the movie, instead of before; and 100% of the base price went to the theatre itself, while people could "leave a tip" for the filmmakers; then "box office" would actually correlate to the quality of the movie itself, rather than to the amount of effort put into the marketing campaign.
Doesn't sound like a bad thing, IMHO.
> tipping large sums of money
This would kind of suck, given the stupidity of current North American tipping norms. But I'm not sure whether they could actually manage to communicate "the existing tipping system should be venerated" during an experience that directly involves exposure to/use of a different tipping paradigm. It'd be like watching a movie about monarchy, as the result of the audience holding a democratic vote on what movie to watch.
To be clear, it's a "different tipping paradigm" because of these properties:
• tipping would be entirely optional, in a selfish-pragmatist sense: there's no way in which a lack of tipping would get you blackballed from the theatre or even given a bad look, because the tips don't go to the theatre or its employees;
• you'd be tipping a collective of unseen workers far away who produced the experience a while ago, rather than tipping an individual close-by who did the work just now;
• there would be no possibility for tipping to get you individually a better quality of service, because your tip would be anonymized through the hub-and-spoke (studio-theatre-audience) delivery model. The studio would just see a pile of tip money, at best traced back to particular theatres.
Really, it's more equivalent to how film-festivals ask for donations; but they'd be asking for donations on behalf of the movie maker, rather than for themselves.
> targeted at rich people who have the money to give large tips
This is true, but 1. I'm not sure it's worse than whatever kind of targeting we have right now given the system's current inventives (which would be... cinematic populism?); and 2. this would put film in line with most of the arts, which generally run off of commissions/patronage.
Society doesn't generally outright reject the output of those fields of endeavor, despite their being mostly tuned to the tastes of their (rich) clients/patrons.
(Society does feel more "detached" from such works, though; there's a lot of "I don't get it" in art galleries, mainly because many works were created to be understood mostly by the patron and the social-milieu of people they showed it to, rather than by any passerby.)
It's not really supposed to, it's just something to think about.
> But I'm not sure whether they could actually manage to communicate "the existing tipping system should be venerated" during an experience that directly involves exposure to/use of a different tipping paradigm.
They could emphasize how bad "being cheap" is. Make "looking poor" and "being stingy" be bad qualities that cause people to look down on you, that ruin relationships, and so on.
I suspect that the "box office" would correlate with how wealthy the audience was (or at least felt like they were) just as much as the quality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMrtLsQbaok
She delvers a "how dare you..." line at the beginning that gets a good round of applause. Then she continues with her speech. Maybe I'm armchair QB-ing it, but she should have called out the audience for clapping. They're clapping for what she's saying, but as world leaders, it's their failure she's pointing out.
Joe Biden is more conservative than Donald Trump in a lot of ways, as far as ideology and policy go. But MSNBC viewers love him and hate Trump, Fox News the opposite. They're not fair weather fans, they're committed to their teams.
Theoretically that should decrease spam and increase high effort posts, but I could see it also reducing open source style contribution and increasing advertising masquerading as content. This is a hard problem to solve.
Developers: Let's fix it with blockchain!
Perhaps with the reddit demographic it may be a little different, however I have always wondered what a similar system would be like on reddit
This is something Joel Spolskey and/or Jeff Atwood brought up many years ago when making Stack Overflow.
You can get people to do things out of the goodness of their heart, or you can pay them to do things, but it's really hard to do both at the same time.
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.
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>"
I think it would be pretty neat to include metadata in the calculation of the voting power metric as well. Such as how each subscriber votes in relation to other subscribers and assign a higher score to those who vote inline with the community. The goal being to optimize for those subscribers who embody the spirit of the community. Of course that brings up issues of echo chambers but other kinds of metadata could be factored in to offset that too. I would have to think on it for a while to come up with something I felt was as meritocratic as possible.
I've seen a lot of great subs and communities take a pretty dramatic shift when the influx of new users is too great. It's basically the "eternal september" problem -- when the new users start to overwhelm the old users, they're no longer able to be effectively inducted into the community and the community makes a hard shift, usually to lower effort content as the quicker it can be consumed, the quicker it can be upvoted or otherwise appreciated (and usually it's quicker and more accessible to create than truly valuable content).
Or more straightforward--any community which experiences significant growth will eventually devolve into memes.
The one mitigating factor can be moderation (e.g., Hacker News). But if the mods can be replaced as well, then there's nothing holding it back.
92 of the top 500 subs are controlled by 5 people. [0]
Yesterday this post was locked, and so many of the comments were removed by mods with no self-aware irony at all - I just checked and saw very few [REMOVED] posts, I think they removed the evidence they removed them - crazy. Check ceddit.
Two mods, Cyxie and AwkwardTheTurtle moderate 1196 subreddits. They have more control over content on reddit than Sinclair Media has over news stations.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/fko21a/9...
I saw this and went to check - in the few subs i confirmed, they are not top mods. Top mods have the actual power, to assume that they are setting the agenda for every sub by being the 14th mod out of 28, or the 9th and so on is impossible, given how fractious moderating teams can be.
Drama is leaking into HN without anyone doing a sanity check on the claims.
This is the most important comment on this page. The reasons for this are varied, but it's pretty obvious that cultural changes have occurred on HN during this pandemic.
Right now, criticizing any of the “default mods” will get you banned, making any post like the one I referenced will be deleted, Reddit is engaging in censorship like they never have before.
Take a look at r/WatchRedditDie/ and tell me how it’s nothing.
That’s not even new.
That is also moving the goal posts- exactly the kind of stuff you see on Reddit and not on HN.
The point was about the claim- ‘ 5 people “controlling Reddit” ‘ and how it’s been absorbed and discussed without reflection.
Not about default mods banning people for meta drama.
Why would they be? The whole point of reddit is that users can create communities with whatever moderation and content policies that suit them. People visiting the subreddit aren't prisoners, they can view another subreddit, start their own, or just abandon reddit altogether. Who cares?
As terrible and kneejerk as/r/politics may be, it doesn't need to be some neutral ground of perfect arbitration for many reasons, the least of which is that it would be asking an insane amount of work from its volunteer moderators. If it skews left who cares? There are plenty of places to discuss politics online that skew to the right.
Then advertise as such and don't pretend otherwise.
How is it misleading people? is /pol also misleading people?
every chance they get. it's more honest that way
You've explained that someone might voluntarily visit a website on the internet that contains partisan content, but you haven't explained why this is a problem. They're not trapped on reddit, they didn't pay a cover fee to enter, who cares?
I took cyxie, mentioned on the list and checked a few subs - they are not the top mod of any. It’s almost certainly true for all the other cases.
How is the claim “they control the news feeds” in any way substantiated ?
Looks more like power users playing subreddit Pokémon, and then doing nothing with the subs they are a part of.
He is not a top mod, being present on a mod list doesn’t imply control.
Someone of those power users was top mod for one of the subs I knew of - had 0 moderating impact or activity.
Cyxie is mod 14 on r/pics. Hardly a position of influence and power.
It’s not even a statement of actual harm- just that in case the teams don’t check, these guys could be getting away with removing stuff and therefore exerting some form of control.
There may be some kernel, of truth, just to be absolutely and needlessly generous with the claim.
However the truth is not going to be close, by a galactic mile, to the worthy of the drama with which this topic has been en-robed.
I‘ve been a mod. If a shadowy mod had the ability to enforce their will effectively over a single sub, let alone multiple teams - frankly they would be amazing and should write books on their team management, work ethic and obsession.
This user was trying to gin up an outrage campaign over something (which looks to me to be) pretty obviously benign. And since the outrage campaign called out five specific users, and he persisted in it after being told off, he was banned for harassment. None of this seems unusual. And the only connection I see to the current thread is "Reddit moderation is controversial, so putting currency in to the mix will also be controversial."
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.
https://medium.com/ethereum-optimism/ovm-deep-dive-a300d1085...
And zk-Roll-Up pushes up scalability to 1,500 transactions per second, which is entirely adequate for site-wide adoption of Ethereum-based tokens by Reddit.
Also, most of the transactions between Reddit users can be done off chain if needed. I'm not sure how they've designed their architecture, but it does make sense to aggregate multiple transactions into fewer, big transactions instead of small microtransactions for every comment.
This is a very optimistic proposition. I think they might never get there. Based on what I read so far, I have concerns that the final solution will be too complex, brittle and vulnerable.
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.
It is also, secondarily, basically the “social media” equivalent of a newspaper - a mechanism for YC to push their opinion of how the world should work and create a consensus around that ideology.
Putting ads next to someone else’s content isn’t the only way you can make money off it.
What I mean is this calculus happens regardless of medium.
And what about paying professionals to hear you out years on end?
> It’s like being the friend that’s full of great advice but doesn’t get any in return. Or the friend who has the car and is always sought out for rides.
No it isn't like that. What you're describing is giving in the context of human relationship, but what she's describing is more like being exploited for someone else's profit (e.g. we'll pay you in "exposure").
Nit: you probably mean something more like "productized" or "marketed," not "commoditized." Commoditized implies something worse than what you're saying, that not only have you sold your feelings and thoughts online, that they're indistinguishable from anyone else's.
> Nit: you probably mean...
That was a quote. You probably meant to go back in time to 1994 to nitpick humdog herself.
Like people complain about online ads. But we get so much capability and content for free this way. Maybe we aren't looking at the full picture.
This is a tricky problem because people don't like paying for things.
You may not have profited in dollars, but you profited some utility out of it. Otherwise people wouldn’t be posting. Or they can do it on their own website. But then not enough people would see it.
People who do drugs usually admit that they don't get some sort of lifetime benefit out of them. There is often regret. Social media use is often similar (and yes, this is social media and I should know better than to waste my time on HN). Some people get notoriety, money, etc from their use of social media, but most don't and even those that do may regret it or could have been fairly or just as successful without it. (Cal Newport makes some great arguments along these lines.)
> in other words, most people lurk; and the ones who post, are pleased with themselves.
> it wants to commodify human interaction, enjoy the spectacle regardless of the human cost. if and when the spectacle proves incovenient or alarming, it engages in creative history like, like any good banana republic.
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.
There are multiple sub-reddits that are essentially just karma farms already.
I'm curious how this will play out.
> 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).
> Reddit has stated that since most users don't own any ETH, the social platform is ready to cover the cost of gas "for now," for those using its in-built Vault, but those using other Ethereum wallets may be required to pay for the cost of gas themselves.
Reddit definitely could have built a marketplace that let people trade karma from different subreddits, with a way to deposit and withdraw USD. Like you mentioned though there's the legal challenge of getting licensed as a money transmission service if you do that. But also, why do all that work when all that infrastructure already exists on Ethereum? Plus you get the added benefit that Reddit's tokens can be traded every other asset on Ethereum too.
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?
At any rate, I would like to see Reddit acknowledge this.
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?
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.
It’s the reason why the good content on Reddit is in super niche communities that have a high buy-in or some mechanism to maintain natural exclusivity.
It’s the reason that the common advice on Reddit is to not even look at the default subs and to avoid posting your favorite subs in popular threads.
It’s the reason that there’s so many migrations in the internet because every site’s content is constantly going downhill as it grows.
It’s the reason that the comment section on small YouTube channels is amazing but “YouTube comments” are a meme for being vile.
Kudos to Reddit for trying something novel here. I’m sure it will fail but it’s noble in the attempt. Having to work or pay to be part of good communities might be enough to keep them from eventually turning them south.
I suspect there are gatekeepers, and this is decentralization theater, but I hope I’m wrong.
If it can be migrated, it's not really reputation.
Reputation is not an e-points score.
Say HN comes out with a coin, and they accept reddit coins as a form of account linking. If I can only do this process a single time, my identity hasn't gained any reputation illegitimately.
You misunderstood me. A "reputation counter" co-opts the word "reputation" to refer e-points, which is something that's entirely different. But the fact that the terminology is misleading doesn't mean e-points have any actual relation to reputation, properly understood.
E-points are a broken system that you get when you try cheaply quantify something that is nearly unquantifiable (hammer, meet screw). Calling e-points "reputation" is what you do when you want to pretend your system does something it actually doesn't, or when you're too confused to know the difference.
The platform usually assumes that monetization will cause market forces to drive the production of quality content. What usually ends up happening is that it drives the production of addictive content. That means repetitive, catchy, click bait, sensationalism, hate/fear porn, and trolling.
The very worst sorts of content are what drives engagement.
YouTube is the best example. It used to contain a good amount of quality content. Then they threw the monetization switch. There is still good content, but it's diamonds buried in an increasingly vast pile of shit.
There's an argument to say a system built on such a premise is exploitative.
Either way, I don't really have a strong intuition for how incentives will work here. At the very least, a barrier-to-posting will filter out some bad actors and some good actors.
This isn't like Reddit gold but more of a fundamental new tool for Reddit communities to experiment with.
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.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/steve-bannon-world-o...
For what it's worth, that actually happened but with real money instead, there were entire local economies in Macedonia and other countries simply financed by the advertising income of "fake news" sites: https://money.cnn.com/interactive/media/the-macedonia-story/
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.
It still exists, although it's far below its peak interest [1] - and of course dogetipbot went bankrupt after an insider spent the cold storage, as is traditional.
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=dogecoin
https://redditblog.com/2015/12/19/announcing-reddit-notes/
https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/3/7968397/reddit-backtracks-...
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
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.
Wouldn't it make it worse? The more vigorously you ciclejerk, the more the jerk will reward you with a brand new kind of e-points.
I think too many people but too much faith in quantified reward mechanisms.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure the real goal is to sell tokens and to shift to a microtransaction model where users have to pay for "premium" features. That's why there's a hard cap on tokens and they're consumed on use.
Worse though, I think it might be an underhanded way to sell influence for money if it doesn't stay a closed system. While the users are distracted with "premium" stickers and emojis, bad actors will be paying real money to buy visibility and influence.
For me, the appeal of Reddit is that I can jump in and participate and it's fairly democratic, at least in the smaller subreddits. As soon as they turn it into money = visibility = credibility it's ruined.
Looks like they figured it out.
[0] - By driving more traffic, more engagement, better content, and/or other intangibles.
Yeah, still no deal.
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.
Notice the higher signal on Hacker News, with no compensation, because high quality contributors want to contribute with no compensation and moderation is consistent and intentional.
I thought we had already arrived at the answer to that: "nothing (good)"
Quality content, properly understood, is almost always created because of other-than-economic incentives. In actuality, economic incentives are in conflict with its production, and quality only emerges with the economic incentives are (at least partially) subdued.
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-...