Reddit - Fake Internet Points Worth Money!!

[Lurick]

Summary

Reddit has decided now is a great time to turn your fake internet points into real money, not crypto!

 

Quotes

Quote

Reddit announced a contributor program on Monday, which awards users actual, real money for their fake internet points. Now, eligible users will be able to convert their Reddit gold and karma into fiat currency (no, not crypto), which is disbursed once per month.

So far, the Reddit contributor program is limited to users in the United States (to start, at least) who are over the age of 18 and can verify their identity via Persona and Stripe. Accounts must have existed for over 30 days, and only safe for work posts can be monetized.

 

My thoughts

This is, for lack of better words, idiotic. Bots galore are going to invade Reddit, welp I guess that's one way to kill the platform

 

Sources

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/09/25/1719232/reddit-will-start-paying-you-real-money-for-your-karma?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/reddit-will-start-paying-you-real-money-for-your-karma/?guccounter=1

[elfensky]

Proceeds to look at calendar: "It's a bit early for April, is it not?"

No but seriously, unless they somehow prevent AI bots (they won't), it's going to be a massacre. The unpaid mods won't be able to deal with the influx. I imagine some subreddits might require accounts to be multiple years old to post etc..

I can maybe see it as a way to attract more "content"-whales - I remember reading a statistic that something like 1% of users generate 99% of the content, so they might be trying to curate those, but this seems like a very... Crazy for lack of a better word way to do it.

[Needfuldoer]

Why does every interaction have to be micro-monetized?

 

Give me back the 2003 Internet please.

[Fasterthannothing]

O gosh this can't end well

[Lightwreather]

This feels like it's gonna end like the LZ 129 Hindenburg: poorly

[leadeater]

30 minutes ago, Lurick said:

limited to users in the United States

I guess I'm not welcome then

 

[AlwaysFSX]

6 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I guess I'm not welcome then

 

 

No Hobbitses allowed

[Poinkachu]

12 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I guess I'm not welcome then

 

Don't worry, I'm following behind you.

[TetraSky]

In the last few months, I've seen people just handing those out to anyone who asked because they were worthless.
Well! Some people about to get a small payday.

[NadiaMayer]

I hope there would be repost detection other wise repost bots they rich

step one look at rising posts
step two repost then all other subreddits
step three karma
step four profits

 

[LAwLz]

Didn't Twitter also start giving out money to users recently? 

Seems weird that companies would start paying people to do what they did for free already. 
I wonder if this was thought of when they made the API changes. 


Anyway, I am not worried about this causing a massive amount of bots to shit up the site, because the site is already full of bots and karma farmers. Things like KarmaBotKillers have been a thing for ages. As the wiki says, accounts with lots of karma are already considered worth money because they appear more legitimate and as a result can be used to shill for products, or push political narratives, or advertise things. 

How often do you not see someone repost something claiming it was theirs? The reason they do that is to get more karma.

 

This video was made before this announcement too:

[djksm]

16 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

Why does every interaction have to be micro-monetized?

 

Give me back the 2003 Internet please.

i mean i wasnt even alive in 2003 sooo i have no idea how the internet was back then

[Needfuldoer]

50 minutes ago, djksm said:

i mean i wasnt even alive in 2003 sooo

 

50 minutes ago, djksm said:

i have no idea how the internet was back then

It was a lot less centralized, and a lot smaller.

 

There were no large corporate platforms that "everyone just goes to" like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, etc. Discussions were primarily on independent forums like this one. The closest thing we had to a Discord-like experience was AIM and Ventrilo. IRC chat rooms were still around, too.

 

If you wanted to watch cartoons, you went to sites like AlbinoBlackSheep or the Newgrounds portal and watched a loading animation while the rest of the file downloaded. (In some ways, Flash was better than what we have now. It was all vectors, so you could watch at whatever resolution your computer could push. It was also interactive, which led to a wide variety of games. A lot of them were crap, but some became iconic.) If you wanted to watch a video, you usually had to download it as a QuickTime movie if it wasn't available as a streaming RealMedia file.

 

There were banner ads, but no constant cookie pop-ups. Pay walls were virtually nonexistent. There were no auto-play video ads. It was a wild west of new ideas, none of which were fully entrenched yet. If one platform did something stupid that nobody liked, they'd move on to another. 

 

Web pages generally weren't 5 megs of stylesheets and JavaScript, either. Plain HTML and PHP with a little CSS can produce some tight, fast-loading pages. Now bandwidth and processing power are so cheap, why not load every page up with a ton of auto-play video ads that slide all over the place?

[rcmaehl]

This was datamined a while ago from the official reddit app during the whole paid API debacle.

 

Scraping the website is against their terms of service but this isn't going to stop bots from doing it anyway

[Ydfhlx]

7 hours ago, NadiaMayer said:

I hope there would be repost detection other wise repost bots they rich

step one look at rising posts
step two repost then all other subreddits
step three karma
step four profits

 

step 5 automate

---

 

Or an even easier solution:

 

step 1 create sub

step 2 create bots to post random stuff

step 3 create bots to upvote everything

step 4 profit

 

Maybe that's real reason why Reddit restricted API access???

[WolframaticAlpha]

On 9/26/2023 at 12:13 AM, Needfuldoer said:

Why does every interaction have to be micro-monetized?

 

Give me back the 2003 Internet please.

Well, the internet in its initial form was supposed to have monetizable hyperlinks and iirc Tim Berners Lee(inventor of www) and many others fought for it up till the late 90s if memory serves correctly. Seems that everyone is returning to that notion, albeit through enshitiffication.

 

Tbh I wouldn't a micropayment for stuff like news websites. But this.... Eeesh

[NadiaMayer]

On 9/27/2023 at 3:42 AM, Ydfhlx said:

step 5 automate

---

 

Or an even easier solution:

 

step 1 create sub

step 2 create bots to post random stuff

step 3 create bots to upvote everything

step 4 profit

 

Maybe that's real reason why Reddit restricted API access???

hahah webscraper go brr

[ravenshrike]

On 9/26/2023 at 7:26 AM, Needfuldoer said:

 

There were no large corporate platforms that "everyone just goes to" like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, etc. Discussions were primarily on independent forums like this one. The closest thing we had to a Discord-like experience was AIM and Ventrilo. IRC chat rooms were still around, too.

Sorry, you're thinking 2002 internet. 2003 was the rise of MySpace. Tom, we hardly new ye.