Make content, get paid.
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.
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.
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.
Could also have been old-timers that have had accounts repeatedly banned by admins for bullshit reasons. But yeah more likely just bots lol.
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.
Removed by mod
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
How would this even work? How are they going to stop brigading, bots, low effort spam crap for upvotes, massive reposting, etc? How will this actually increase quality of content?
Also: this would mean giving reddit your actual information, right? How else are they going to pay you? Or are they going to try using crypto and nfts?
It sounds like a terrible idea to me, tbh. Maybe they should start with paid moderators to deal with all the extra spam, crossposting, brigading and bots that will result from this move.
To ensure the authenticity and security of the program, contributors will need to provide verification information, including their email addresses, personal details, and tax and bank account information.
Yikes²
You’ll be paid in NFT Snoos.
In all seriousness, this leaves the site wide open to exploitation in the pursuit of monetary gain.
Ultimately that will lead to a degredation of content (even more so than now).
paid in NFT Snoos
I smell an exit scam
They already have crypto and NFTs. Take a look at Reddit Moons and the NFT Avatars
I never really cared about them tacking on a bunch of useless shit on top of Reddit. As a third-party-app and old.reddit user I kind of figured that if they monitized that piece and let me hang out in the underbelly then it wasn’t really a problem. Why not have the normies subsidize the denizens of the old reddit, it’s not like we aren’t using adblock anyway.
But now that they’ve killed off the API it’s only a matter of time before the come for old.reddit so I’m out before they get around to it.
Not sure if there are any ex Redditors old enough to remember the Sydrah debacle?
In which a Reddit user and mod of several communities advertised on LinkedIn that they were ‘a social community manager who had pull in several online communities’ (“has pull” is a direct quote the rest is paraphrased) and that they could be paid to influence the narrative in these communities.
Someone doxxed them and leaked the LinkedIn profile and a vast swathe of the community cried out in horror and revulsion. Oh how the bacon narwhaled on that day!
She’s still a mod of 2xC and at least a few dozen other subs.
Looks like Reddit just legitimised her now ancient play really. It’ll be a website full of Sydrahs after this.
Everyone loves to joke about how moderators are “jannies” and “free labor” but let’s be honest, all the power mods that have control of dozens of subs are making money off it. Political/news subs have loads of value to groups with agendas, and non-political subs still have value to corporations that want to advertise their products.
The only thing Sydrah did that was unique was getting caught.
Wholeheartedly agree.
I always apply the adage: ‘if it can be done it is being done’.
How did you find the mod list on that sub? I’m using browser now to occasionally check Reddit, but it seems like they are removing rhe ability to search for sub mods, or maybe I’m just not looking hard enough.
In old.reddit, it’s on the bottom of the side bar. If it’s not visible, perhaps it can be hidden by CSS, but I think the link in format https://www.reddit.com/r/[subreddit]/about/moderators will be always available. Note that this link points to new reddit; it works there as well.
Not a clue. That website is dead to me.
If you think karma whoring is bad now …
Ok God damnit… Someone fucking explain the shitty ass chat filter to me please? I don’t know what was removed from dudes comment, but I’d kinda like to know if anything will get me banned before I go fucking around and get settled in here…
Sorry bud, not picking on you personal or anything like that, just a FNG from baconreader trying to sort shit out ;)
Edit- not a single “removed” here? I got the word removed removed from another comment…
More edit- yeah that word lol… Can I get banned for bypassing? Like if I say b***h? Can I get a warning or some shit here please?
Huh?
I’m the stupid new guy man, just pushing buttons to see what happens is all :)
Not a thing, sorry dude. Check your settings, maybe your instance added some sort of explicit language filter? That’s all I can think of.
You’re on .ml, they have a filter. The thing that was removed was w h o r e.
Thanks for clarifying :)
I guess the filter is looking for non-woke stuff? Whole lotta cuss words not filtered there…
Gonna guess things the n word, the b word, the r word, etc will be what gets the filter.
Should I switch to .world? It was borked when I went to create my account so I went with .ml, and I didn’t really expect to see any functional differences like comments getting filtered :)
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.
Soon on YouTube “how to make money on reddit”, “top 10 comments that will get you 9999 upvotes”
This!
Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!
We did it, Reddit!
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
“Easy trick for TOP GOLD Reddit admins don’t want YOU to now!”
I agree, though I also believe that Reddit is like that already.
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.
Bot farms.
You mean bigger bot farms. The VAST MAJORITY of reddit posters are bots and serial reposters.
Maybe if you’re on the main subs. I’d say to get rid of those, but it’s best to get rid of all of reddit at this point lol.
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.
“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.
Well they get paid to ask absolute garbage so you’ll see oodles of these shitty “questions”
That explains why content quality over there is so damn bad, I didn’t know about that before since I skipped the Quora train.
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.
Yeah, I never saw any good reason to use Quora.
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.
We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive.
-Steve Huffman-
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.
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.
Looks great for engagement when everyone is greedily making posts for the most likes though. Just another step towards a golden facade for IPO.
I act natural around my friends and they pay me, so I dont know what the big issue is 🤷🏼♂️
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!!!
I’m sure if you go into a political sub right now you can see GPT4 vs GPT3.5 in full swing
It’s Quora.
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.
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.
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”.
Look at gonewild. Onlyfans as far as the eye can see.
Let me get this straight.
People make content, bots up vote content that aligns with their objectives. People get paid for up votes.
So… People are working for bots now?
You’re working for the people who run the bots. Push the narrative and you’ll get paid.
Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
Again, the “Barbie” movie is the only allowed corporate interest on Lemmy, only in theaters July 21st.
You are a bad mother.
Your children are now the property of Carl’s Junior. Fuck you, I’m eating.
Welcome to Costco. I love you.
I think you forgot a crucial step… Bots steal actual content, then direct other bots to down vote and report said original content, and then direct said bots to upvote the stolen content.
I, for one, welcome our new bot overlords
This looks like the way to go full Digg. With payment comes verified accounts, and probably further segmentation of accounts with higher priority than normal accounts. The idea being the paid accounts are professionals with high karma, therefore assumed to provide better content and become prioritized.
This is exactly the way of thinking that destroyed Digg. Although this is tweaked compared to what Digg did, the basic idea is the same, and the outcome will very likely look somewhat similar. The quality of content will fall off a cliff, and the userbase will quickly evaporate.
Even if they never go through with this scheme, it shows the leadership of reddit has lost their perspective, and sense of the community shaping that originally made reddit good.
it shows the leadership of reddit has lost their perspective, and sense of the community shaping that originally made reddit good.
Most importantly, they forgot their history and why Reddit succeeded when Digg failed.
Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.
They have forgotten the face of their father.
It’s transactional. Community dies when relationships become transactional.
Man, you don’t never go full Digg. Everybody knows that.
And we thought bots and karma farming were bad before.
Yeah, this new thing will be botted to hell lol.
Lol “third party API is too expensive”…but let’s give out money to users for fun
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.
I’m honestly interested in how they’ll get around anti money laundering laws
That’s the neat part…
My decision to move here looks better the time goes by
I basically quit Reddit cold turkey. Rather than watch the slow, sad decline of its communities by going along with Reddit management, I’d advocate them to make the transition to the Fediverse now rather than later. The /retrogaming/ community (I need to drop the /r/ for obvious reasons) did this and is doing quite well for itself on Lemmy and Mastodon.
If you could link to their lemmy so other retrogmaing lovers can sub and follow, that’d be amazing!
Reddit must be super nervous and losing a lot of traffic. Burn baby, burn!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hope he wasn’t serious lol, he even has three arrows on his profile pic. It’s such a corporate thing to say.
Spez: “I paid you a small fortune.”
Me: “And this gives you power over me?”
“The Barbie Rises”, only in theaters July 21st.
It’s not about Ken, it’s about sending a message.
And the message is that you should preorder your tickets to “Barbie” today!
Oh jeez please let the writer’s strike be over soon.
We both know I must upvote you now.
“I wouldn’t use the piece-of-shit first-party App, even if you paid me!”
“What if we pay you?”
“…”
It also sounds like a way to drive up gold subscriptions. Reddit has gone full digg.
I won’t lie, I thought about it for a minute
