“Reddit performs reverse alchemy; turns gold into crap”
The very definition of enshittification
Goldschlager?
TL;DR: user contribution will go down, astroturfing will go up. Reddit is shooting its own foot, again.
The pic shows $6/gold, or $2/gold. Top contributors would get $1/gold. So Reddit is pocketing 50%+ of the value. Except that the platform kicked off the ones who’d actually contribute with it, so users will barely use the new system. You know who would do it, though? Corporations. For them it means “pay one dollar for advertisement, get half dollar back” is a treat. Astroturfing will get rampant.
To be eligible for the Contributor Program, you’ll need to be older than 18, live in a “supported location” (which at first is just the US),
I remember doing maths as this subject popped up; the program would exclude 70% of the userbase. And there are few things that piss people off more than feeling unrewarded - “you rewarded him, why not me? I’m not contributing, fuck off.”
Rathschmidt said Reddit will use things like […]
Except that nothing fucking works properly in Reddit. And Reddit will certainly not put reasonable measures against its own short-term profit, so that’s likely just lip service.
Yeah, nothing seems to work properly online. It’s so complicated trying to manage deep data analytics without OracleSAP. My conflict free vaping startup switched to OracleSAP and now everything runs so well we created an office ultimate Frisbee league. It’s bae, fam. (This post has been guilded 2654 times!)
Incredible system! You buy gold for $1.99 each, then the awardee can cash it out (terms and conditions apply) for $0.90 (or $1 for top contributors). Just put a PayPal in your profile and cut out the middleman and his 100% markup. Meh, whatever time to spin up a repost/karma bot - might as well cash in if reddit is this intent on their site going to shit. I’m just going to feed the top aita posts of all time into an ai bot and let it create garbage “golden up vote” bait.
Illaborate on that a little, how the bot gonna work?
Most of the bots all work the same, as an example they find a popular post and repost it knowing it will be popular, and if you have multiple bots all the better while you copy popular comments from that same thread and make those comments knowing they will be a net gain. Of course karma didn’t matter so the reposting of popular content was just to make the bot look like a real user by having content and comment history for the real end goal of propaganda networks where articles can be posted and bots can go agree, disagree, or be antagonistic (trolling) to xause dissent towards specific groups. Advertisement networks where products or services are promoted by either posting links and discussions, or by searching for discussions in progress and recommending things. It all boils down to manipulating and influencing for a favorable outcome, it helps control the narrative when you can promote or bury the statements and things you want and doing that requires lots of followers or lots of bots.
So to solve an already pretty fucked up and growing bot problem they are going to incentivize bots?
How very fucking stupid and spezzy of them.
Positive spin take: will encourage higher quality content and comments. Will incentivise spending more time posting and commenting and greater care put into both.
Likely reality: Rush to lowest-common-denominator posts. Sensational titles to grab attention. Comments are less likely to write things the hive-mind doesn’t want to hear, so less variety in comments. White-knighting increases. More porn by professional posters.
Almost-certain to happen: change in content. It’s a gamble that the new content will be as popular as the old content. Reddit had a platform up until June this year. No matter what happens, they abandoned that platform to re-shape it into something else. Which seems like it would be a hard sell to investors. “You know our core product and user base that you’re interested in? Well, what if we told you that we were creating something to gather an unknown amount of new users! And all we have to do is alienate our current user base!”
So they’re now stooping to paying pennies to convince people to return? Good luck with that. You’ll never offer me enough to return.
With no strong confidence I think it mabe more of a crypto style “own a reddit post” kind of idea
So… no gold on NSFW content, why? Just more of the same puritan BS that killed tumblr? I get advertisers don’t want their ads next to just anything, but gold isn’t ad-based.
Oh it’ll be ad based very quickly.
They’re going to turn the “thanks for the gold kind strangers!” crowd even more annoying
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“In the past, there were both paid and free coins that had been distributed, making it incredibly challenging,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said.
With the introduction of the Contributor Program, thanking a kind stranger for giving you gold takes on a new meaning.
Part of what makes Reddit so useful is that most great posts aren’t made with an expectation of payment, meaning that people share their expertise, a handy tip, or a funny joke just because they want to.
I’m also worried that bad actors might find ways to abuse the Contributor Program to earn a quick buck without actually making meaningful contributions.
The Contributor Program is also rolling out starting Monday, and it will be available on the web and Reddit’s mobile apps.
While the protests across the site over the API pricing have largely died down, some users expressed their unhappiness toward CEO Steve Huffman during the recent run of the r/Place interactive canvas.
The original article contains 778 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
If the systems are so simmlar, why create a new worse one and retire an the old one. Am i not seeing somthing?
Because they want OG users with 60k gold from forever ago not to be able to redeem it for cash
Im amused that it takes away the only bit of human input the system had, Why you gave the award/upvote in the first place
