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Comment by floren | Hacker News Reader

Remember when Keybase rolled out free crypto for users, and it was immediately flooded by fake accounts, people were trying to hack github accounts to beef up their new Keybase user, etc? The Keybase community on reddit was overrun with idiots begging for help getting crypto, and whining that they weren't getting crypto.

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.

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I think that you are confusing two things. An airdrop with "free money" and an actual experience with community points and collectibles (like badges) that you mainly earn.

People currently pay Reddit real actual useful money (dirty fiat) for stupid shit... so if they instead say "You can buy these things for Posting Points, earned whenever you get t3h upd00ts", well, I expect people in poor countries to start posting like mad in the hopes of getting Posting Points which they can resell to Americans and other people with more money than sense.

> well, I expect people in poor countries to start posting like mad in the hopes of getting Posting Points which they can resell to Americans and other people with more money than sense.

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/

Sounds like gear and gold grinding services for popular games/MMOs in Asia in decades past.

I wonder what happened to the people running those MMO gold farms...?

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/steve-bannon-world-o...

I think I saw that episode of Black Mirror.

You can thank all the Nigerians for that (seriously). Everyone in poor countries was flooding Keybase for free Stellar. Really sad.

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