Reddit Unveils Its Blockchain-Based Community Points System
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
"It is time for communities to break free of walled gardens and take ownership of their existence online."
Bite me, It cames really from Reddit.
Here is wallet garden url: https://www.reddit.com/community-points/documentation/introd...
Ideas like these have been around the "WEB3" space for a while, I remember a few years ago I was a part of "cent" which had a blockchain-based upvote system. The only issue, at least back then, was slowness of transactions and generally how much set up it required (you need a wallet, you need to put money on the wallet, etc).
It's very interesting to see Reddit's approach to this. And it's obviously related to their crack down of third party apps, as they seem to want to lock people into using the reddit app (the "easiest" way to set up the system).
I think it's good to offer flexibility for governance, but this is a complicated system so it'd be good for reddit to actually offer ready-made rules for subreddits to implement. One question that I'm left with, though, is how much control reddit will have over the token and the smart contract. I would expect for the system itself to be "governed" in such a way or is Reddit going to hold the keys of the kingdom. It would have been interesting to see a collaboration with other tech firms for a more open governance solution?
It'll be interesting to see the effects of introducing real market mechanics to the upvoting system. Overall, I'm interested.
But I'm wondering about distribution and ownership. It says that community points are "are owned and controlled by communities themselves — not by any app or platform" but I'm not so sure about this, as in order to distribute points you need to go through reddit? So Reddit needs to have special permissions to be able to modify how points are allocated. Not only that, but the "community tank", it's not clear how you can interact with it or who even owns it.
It seems to me like Reddit is just acting as a sort of middle man between a token they're facilitating the creation of and the community. Although the community can "choose" how to distribute this based on rules... the actual distribution (which I assume is smart-contract based) is handled by Reddit. So it's really unclear, to me, the role Reddit actually plays behind these community tokens.
Although the marketing says "people will own a piece of the pie based on contribution" and that this cannot be taken away, etc, etc, I fail to see how communities can interact with the token from an ownership perspective in a way that is not mediated by Reddit.
So although probably good for governance, something smells fishy behind it all when it comes to ownership.
"It is time for communities to break free of walled gardens and take ownership of their existence online."
"Today's online communities are ... trapped inside apps and platforms, where they do not have independence or control anything of value."
@dang may I please have this thread deleted? I don't want more misinformation to spread. Sorry for the hassle and extra work.