Reddit will start paying you real money for your karma::Reddit announced a contributor program on Monday, which awards users actual, real money for their fake internet points. Now, eligible users will be able
Reddit will start paying you real money for your karma::Reddit announced a contributor program on Monday, which awards users actual, real money for their fake internet points. Now, eligible users will be able
Super unpopular opinion but, I do think there will have to be some middle ground. All of us in Lemmy can see the issues with something beautiful and free thing like this. It exists only thanks to highly skilled people putting in ridiculous hours and the donations of a few folks but shuts down, has trouble scaling up etc.
If we want Lemmy to get big enough that the niche communities thrive, we’ll probably need to figure out a way to pay the devs, probably moderators and if we want truly engaging content, the posters.
I don’t know what that looks like but the flip side of the “there are only low effort memes and few good in depth discussions” is that we gwt what we pay for. If we don’t want ads, some form of direct albeit minimal payment seems like an eventual solution.
Honestly I think the best solution would be what ISPs used to do. They would bundle basic email and usenet and web page with your monthly internet access account. You could pay extra if you needed more, either to the ISP or to a specialist provider. The ISP also helped you connect so non techies could still use email etc. More expensive providers like AOL would provide chat and forums too.
But we’ve stripped internet access to data access, basically web site loading. I don’t think you fix it though because you have to be pretty techie to understand why you’d want a non ad based email provider, forget about why you’d want lemmy / fediverse or usenet, chat etc.