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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

As a mod don’t you earn a lot of karma or gold?

I don't know about karma or gold, but I earned a few death threats as a subreddit moderator. Now that was truly rewarding.

Crazy. I post under my real name on reddit and I'm a moderator for our local community. I've never gotten any sort of real threat, but its concerning that it ever happens since I'm so easily found in reality.

It's one of the dangers of moderating on the Internet. Back when I was doing it, I had to deal with everything from death threats to foreign police (suicidal users) to white supremacists to the FBI (bomb threats) on a fairly regular basis. It's proportional to the size of the community and how strong the social expectations are, but the interconnected nature of the Internet means that you'll get drive-by attacks just by being accessible. I know more than one mod that had to resign their duties/accounts because someone started stalking them across other platforms and in real life.

> As a mod don’t you earn a lot of karma or gold?

You earn karma by posting popular content. You can do that whether you are a mod or not.

(Well, in some cases a jealous mod might remove your posts, and then re-post them as their own. So if you are willing to abuse your mod position, then you can earn karma by leeching off your users.)

Nope - none of the above.

Besides why would I want “karma” or “Reddit gold?” Worthless pseudo-internet currency

They said the same thing about bitcoin.

Also correct!

It’s funny how the responses are so critical of the idea, which reveals that Reddit hasn’t really done all that much with karma- in the sense that the idea of using reputation systems as actual currency, or social credit and the like, was regularly theorized as a future post-scarcity sort of thing in sci-fi stories, yet the company never went far enough with it to experiment in that decision. So Reddit karma is less valuable than MMO in-game currency.

that's probably a good thing, because karma isn't really a representation of actual quality so much as it's mass-market appeal and bandwagoning.

you can crank out great posts in a 100k-1m user discussion sub all day and you'll never make anywhere near as much karma as popping into PCMR and doing "NVIDIA bad" "4060 too expensive" one-liner shitposts. 100x the karma for 0.1x the effort.

You can’t pay rent with karma or Reddit gold.

Wait, you mean these internet points are fake??

Gold hasn't existed for years when they cancelled it and made reddit premium which also happened to be 3x as expensive and offered less.

That was also when I stopped my subscription and the start of the downfall of reddit IMO. This started way before spez was CEO. I think it was Ellen Pao during her time of "making reddit profitable".

But I don't think reddit will ever be profitable. The value extraction on users and the big money interests are so counter to niche communities that made reddit what it was, that reddit will just kill itself over it.

I'm sure it will still exist in some form. But not as we know it (or have any kind of use for). Similar to how predecessor https://digg.com still exists but is just around to serve no one.

Is there a market for converting karma or gold into fiat without breaking terms of service?

No.

How?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com