Announcing Reddit notes

redditblog.com

21 points·cryptoz··5 comments

From the comments on the announcement thread:

If you're wondering why this is all so vague and weird...here it is for you:

- Reddit got funding and as part of that wanted to share some ownership with the community. Basically, they would like Reddit users to own part of Reddit.

- The thing that made most sense was to create a little database that distributes these "shares" based on activity.

- They can't call them shares, or even indicate that they represent partial ownership of the company because the FCC [sic] considers that the creation of public stock, which should be on a regulated stock market.

- There are currently a number of bills at various places in congress that would de-regulate this a bit, but none that I know of that would make what Reddit wants to do (and should be able to do) legal.

- So...boom...their response is to be suuuuper vague. Which I'm fine with, since they're dealing with a very large and terrifying bureaucratic institution.

http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2pt25f/announcing_redd...

You are lucky if you get one because there are less than there are accounts, and what you can do with it when you get one is to tip it to someone else.

I don't see this working myself, but I have faith in them to make it work.

"Reddit Notes" does not immediately imply that it's a cryptocurrecy. I thought it was a Read It Later service from the name.

Well it's missing the crypto part of cryptocurrency, but I agree it's pretty obvious that they are planning for this to be some sort of site-wide currency. My guess is they saw Dogecoin and the tipping culture it created, and they now want to own that aspect of the Reddit community.

It's worth noting that the engineer in charge of the project is very into cryptocurrency: http://ryanxcharles.com/archive/hold-more-bitcoins-than-you-...

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