Make content, get paid.

  • Mereo@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    327
    ·
    1 year ago

    The concept behind the program is straightforward. Redditors who receive substantial gold and karma from other community members can potentially convert these virtual rewards into real-world money that can be cashed out.

    sigh, that’s desperation. This means that the discussion on Reddit will not be natural or organic, it will cease to be human. Redditors will be like dogs, where they shitpost and post comments that everyone agrees with so they can make money, basically doing what the master tells them in order to get their treat. Reddit as we know it will cease to exist.

      • effingjoe@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        86
        ·
        1 year ago

        It is like that already, but try, if you can, to imagine how bad it will get if the incentive isn’t fake internet points, but actual money.

    • Crunchypotat77@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      39
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Basically Quora.

      Quora started to pay people to ask questions, rather than reward the people who put efforts into answering.

      I skipped that stupid thing instantly.

      • KᑌᔕᕼIᗩ@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        15
        ·
        1 year ago

        “I caught my 12 year old son playing Minecraft so I smashed all his things and beat him. Was I wrong?”

        That was roughly one of the so-called questions I saw on Quora recently. Absolute garbage.

        • Crunchypotat77@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Well they get paid to ask absolute garbage so you’ll see oodles of these shitty “questions”

      • Marxine@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        14
        ·
        1 year ago

        That explains why content quality over there is so damn bad, I didn’t know about that before since I skipped the Quora train.

        • Crunchypotat77@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 year ago

          I used it for some time before, since it was just people asking questions and doubts and curiosities.

          But once this paid stupidity started, it was adios time.

    • Halosheep@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      32
      ·
      1 year ago

      Looks great for engagement when everyone is greedily making posts for the most likes though. Just another step towards a golden facade for IPO.

    • SCB@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      31
      ·
      1 year ago

      Worse, I don’t think it’s desperation. I think the senior leadership genuinely sees this as a good idea. That implies they view reddit no longer as a series of communities that organically develop and more as a social network that should pursue reach and “quality” content.

      To me, that’s way worse than desperation. That’s like the exact opposite of what reddit was stated to be when I first joined.

      • TomTheGeek@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        18
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        That’s like the exact opposite of what reddit was stated to be when I first joined.

        It is exactly the opposite of what Aaron Swartz created.

      • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        It is a good idea from the point of view that a lot of platforms are compensating their content creators for their work to keep them on the platform.

        It is a bad idea because most power users used third party apps to help provide their content, and Reddit just pissed a lot of them off.

    • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah this will make discussion 100x worse now that there’s a strong financial reason to be ungenuine and follow the hive mind. Not to mention this decision has terrible timing with the rise of ChatGPT bots, as if bots weren’t already an issue. Did they think these bots were actually going to use the API? I’m sure communities will love Reddit offering users money to ruin their communities.

      • veroxii@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yeah. Who is going to risk a downvote with real money on the line. Actually I can see brigading wars to “ruin someone financially” being a thing.

    • Neato@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      1 year ago

      Sounds like the exploitation of children that happens on Roblox. They may earn money if they make enough after cuts to withdraw. Just more user exploitation with the carrot-on-stick of getting paid.

    • ItsComplicated@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      1 year ago

      Or…maybe some will use bots to make comments/post/earn money. Possible no humans needed for conversation at some point. Just bots chatting with bots making the “human dogs” money!!

      Makes me wonder what the actual bot convo would look like!!!

    • Hunter2@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      r/cryptocurrency became exactly like that under a similar system.

      This is also observable with all social media, where you can see that the communities shifted greatly once people started making money or getting a following, content just became mostly derivative of “what works”.

    • Lazylazycat@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      111
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I feel like I got out just at the right time!

      It’s such a shame that everything has to be commodifed. Being on lemmy, free of ads and financial incentives is such a breath of fresh air. Community and sharing ideas shouldn’t be driven by money.

      • CaptainHowdy@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        28
        ·
        1 year ago

        I agree, but unfortunately it does cost money (way more than you think) to host something online, even a small Lemmy instance. The more traffic you have, the more it costs. The same goes for time spent on admin, which shouldn’t be free unless it’s a passion project.

        • PupBiru@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          22
          ·
          1 year ago

          which is exactly why the fediverse is so good! you can host it yourself and shoulder the cost, join a free instance, donate something small… the cost is shared among many, which makes it far more acceptable for a lot of small passion projects

        • Lazylazycat@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          13
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          You can say the same for lots of things though. I think if we want to take back control of discourse then we have to accept the cost.

          An example from a world I understand - putting on and taking part in free parties (in the UK and the rest of Europe) has a financial and time cost. But people put on these incredible festivals not for financial gain, and not to even break even as there’s no charge to get in, but because they love music and community. Some things are more important than profit.

          • jose423@lemmy.jgholistic.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 year ago

            Aren’t Reddit moderators already volunteer admins? Still, Lemmy has the same issue as Reddit when considering server costs, if not worse. On Reddit, if a post brings in high volume of traffic, their server (farm?) needs to be strong to handle the influx. On Lemmy, the server instance can go down… theoretically. Not sure how much load a post can cause. But, compared to Reddit, Lemmy federated design means high load situations are suboptimal.

            • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              1 year ago

              Reddit has a harsher delineation between mods and admins compared to Lemmy. It seems common for Lemmy admins to mod some of their communities, while that is really rare on Reddit.

            • Lazylazycat@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              1 year ago

              They are, and yet they have limited control over the discourse as we’ve seen over the last month.

              I get your points - I’m interested and excited to see how the Feddiverse grows and I hope it remains sustainable. I feel uncharacteristically positive about it.

            • prole@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              Sure, but the decentralized nature of the fediverse means that a single failure point is no longer enough to take the entire thing down.

        • Ulu-Mulu-no-die@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          1 year ago

          True but donations help, it’s the best way to support this kind of projects IMO, doesn’t cover admins time and the soul they pour into it but at least the server costs.

        • prole@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          All it would take is one left-leaning billionaire to fund server costs for Lemmy instances with no strings attached, and we’d never have to worry about it being commodified. C’mon George Soros, where are you at? It would be pocket change for you.

          So many far right billionaires putting so much money into their hateful, bigoted causes, while progressive causes seem to die on the vine due to lack of funding.

          • TheGreatFox@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            1 year ago

            Problem is, you don’t become a billionaire without massive amounts of exploiting people for profit, and someone like that isn’t going to support Lemmy since there’s no profit to be had. There are no left-leaning billionaires, only neo-liberal billionaires.

      • BuddhaBeettle@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        23
        ·
        1 year ago

        Remember all those posts that sometimes will come up in r/relationship advice or subs like that portraying really vulnerable people that are really down on their luck (“Im a single mom/dad and have to do horrible things so that my children can eat” “Im an abused teen and can’t escape my home” “Im trying to escape a borderline cult” etc etc)?

        Now, Im sure at least some of those were fake to begin with (I don’t have anything against those subs or those stories, but you can’t guarantee every single one of them is true). Now imagine if they could put a little edit in the end “thank you all, you are so kind, I managed to sign up into reddit’s content program, so if you want to help make sure to upvote and leave some gold, it means so much”.

        In those subs, people were already helping out how they could (I would often see people offering to send food or stuff to OPs home, things like that)… so that’s not gonna backfire at all if its implemented.

    • postmateDumbass@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      32
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      So all those perma bans of high karma long time members for no reason was a money driven directive?

      By suspending the accounts reddit just wiped a bunch of karma they wont pay for but still can use the content.

      • Syrc@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Pretty sure it’s just for karma you earn after after you apply.

    • GunnarStahlGloveSide@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      I was going to say…with what money is Reddit going to pay these posters? Because they couldn’t turn a profit while relying on unpaid moderators.

      It’s completely ass-backwards to pay posters while telling mods to suck it and donate their time.

    • db2@lemmy.one
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      31
      ·
      1 year ago

      Corruption usually comes from the top down. The real trickle down economics.

      • DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        I don’t think money laundering would be worth it. I would expect Reddit to end up with the majority due to the pay out rate.

        I was thinking a mix of theft and fraud. Use stolen credit cards to buy gold for bot/puppet accounts then post on your main account. If a post starts to take off, throw the bots at it to gild and add extra upvotes.

        If someone was doing this, I would expect it to be a side hustle. Use the stolen credit cards early like this to test if they’re valid. Then use them for the main crime of buying goods to resell.

      • Wooly@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        No, I don’t think so. How you would get the dirty money in the system? I’m assuming the content creators don’t have to give Reddit any money to get money back for their content.

        • Scrotal_Sophistry@lemmy.fmhy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          ·
          1 year ago

          Just spitballimg here, could be totally wrong as we’re not 100% sure how this is going to work:

          Get 2 accounts

          Link a prepaid card with dirty money to account 1.

          Comment/post on account 2 (whichever pays more)

          Gild account 2s activity repeatedly with account 1, use bots to upvote spam account 2.

          Deposit payments from reddit into personal account. Now your money is washed

          • Very_Bad_Janet@kbin.social
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Omg that’s good! I wonder what the limit is on how much a single post or comment could earn. Like, say, you have $100,000 to wash - could that go to one post, or 100,000 posts? Does Reddit take any percentage of the earnings (not.sure if that was mentioned in the article)?

  • Metal Zealot @lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    86
    ·
    1 year ago

    Steve Huffman: “Reddit doesn’t make any money”

    Also Steve Huffman: “Please stay on our platform, we’ll pay you?”

    • mk36109@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      31
      ·
      1 year ago

      From what I understood from the article, the money only comes from gold and awards users bought and then awarded to the content. so its more like, “we won’t pay for your labor but we will ask the other, previously free users to pay for it”

      • Monomate@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        1 year ago

        I guess what he meant is that, at the moment, Reddit Gold revenue goes 100% into Reddit’s pockets. But if they start funneling part of this money into contributor’s pockets, it means Reddit is effectively paying them from a money pool that was previously exclusively theirs. Thus, Reddit is “paying them”.

          • Hackerman_uwu@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            Actually a lot more like there is a reservoir of value from which you can sip if you do Immortan Spezs bidding. And you can ride with him through the gates of karma for eternity all shiny and chrome.

  • Stitch@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    75
    ·
    1 year ago

    As soon as users are paid for sharing someone else’s copyrighted content, wouldn’t companies like media outlets start pursuing it as theft for profit?

    Sounds like Reddit is headed down the road of YouTube where UMG is going to start slamming users everywhere with strikes for their revenue, and DMCA will be abused a lot more heavily.

    • athos77@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Just gonna hijack your comment for visibility. reddit started trialing a “Community Points” program in 2019 in /r/ethtrader, /r/cryptocurrency and /r/fortnite , where posters and commenters could earn “Community Points” that were supposedly backed up with crypto that you could eventually cash out. They announced an expansion of the program in December 2021 but, afaik, they never actually did so. Which might have something to do with the fact that one of the /r/cryptocurrency mods made $10,000 by selling community points. I don’t know if the program has actively continued since then; maybe someone who was in the three trial communities can say.

      My point is that reddit has been working on something similar to this program for at least five years now. And this article isn’t based on any announcement by reddit, but by someone examining their source code. It’s possible that this code has been present for a while and reddit has leaked it’s existence to try to attract back some of their lost contributors. Or even that it hasn’t been present but they included the old code in the newest app release and then pointed it out for the same reason.

      In any case, this article isn’t based on any official announcement, and reddit has been “trialing” a similar program for over four years. I wouldn’t hold out any hope that this actually sees daylight anytime soon, or that it’ll work well if it’s actually released.

    • CaptainAniki@lemmy.flight-crew.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah this is going to make a fucking mess with attribution. Expect to see even less OC on Reddit if posting it means you lose your rights AND someone else gets to profit off reposts.

      • dynamojoe@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        1 year ago

        Maybe, if you have sufficient accounts to do so and not get caught. It’s probably not worth the time and effort. Living well (elsewhere) is the best revenge.

  • Tygr@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    73
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Imagine an environment where users are getting paid for gold award content and the moderators are still unpaid for all the work they do behind the scenes.

    With bot detection going away, I can see programmers making several bots to manipulate this to make money, and lots of it, through many accounts.

    Meanwhile, yikes, they are totally forgetting the real users. I’m a few months, there will be at least a 50% chance that comment or post you are replying to is a bot.

    • Seraphin 🐬@pawb.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’m a few months, there will be at least a 50% chance that comment or post you are replying to is a bot.

      It already feels this way. A lot of them are the most basic comments or don’t make any sense at all.

      • delvach@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        1 year ago

        Part of why I liked the Apollo app was that it could show account ages. There’d be a post from a 23-day-old account, and a heavily-upvoted thread with witty comments from a 24-day-old account, replied to by a 22-day-old account, replied to by a 27-day-old account.

        It really sucks because I’m working on stuff I’d love to share with people, but sharing content on reddit would feel dirty. I haven’t done anything but lurk the stable diffusion subreddit using Brave in over a month.

    • T156@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      1 year ago

      Or it’ll end up going the same way as Quora. People just churn out answers for money, irrespective of whether they’re helpful or all that relevant at all.

    • Caminsky@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Contributors should be rewarded. What kind of contributions though? Video? Isn’t that Youtube? Articles? Ok. I mean, if they are really good articles that really give insight into important information, great!. Art? Sure. They deserve it. This is the thing. Once it becomes “commercial”. Then the forums will become safespaces. The whole thing becomes just a giant market and I can see reddit “demonetizing” depending on the content. That will turn reddit into something entirely different to Lemmy. And you know what? That’s alright. The internet is big enough where reddit can coexist with the fediverse. But this is actually a good thing. Because then, lemmy and systems like this can become community oriented. A platform where people can discuss without concerns of what a corporation will or won’t do. A place where the value lies on our contributions as a community in the very same way reddit was in its beginnings.

      Reddit becoming a source of income for contributors shouldn’t be a bad thing. It simply turns it into something entirely different to what we saw back in the early 2000s

  • Bri Guy
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    66
    ·
    1 year ago

    Good Lord. This whole influencer/social media celebrity thing needs to die

  • Uniquitous@lemmy.one
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    65
    ·
    1 year ago

    So wait, not only has their monetization effort so far been a flop, now they’re going to start paying people to post? Woooow. Spez trying to edge out Elon for the Most Incompetent Management award this year?

  • S_204@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    65
    ·
    1 year ago

    Gallowboob will be a billionaire overnight and everyone else will be left in the dust.

    This plan isn’t just stupid, it’s moronic.

  • Paradox@lemdro.id
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    64
    ·
    1 year ago

    >demand money from third party app developers
    >give money to karmawhores

    wut

    • BoomBoomLemon@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      1 year ago

      This payout has got to be fractions of a penny per 100 gold or something similar to the low rates artists are paid for Spotify plays or YouTube views.