Holy shit this is pathetic, sad and incredibly dumb.

Ny guess is they imagine it becoming like YouTube, where some popular tubers can monetize their channels and sometimes make a living. But that is also how Medium and Substack would, and both lose money and suck at the same time.

Aside from the valid points made by other comments, giving Reddit even more information (how else are they going to verify your age? Copy of driver's license would be my guess) is just asinine. At this point, if you're still on Reddit and you sign up for this you deserve what you get.

I think I may have some insight here. This isn't something that was reactionary imo, maybe the timing is, but the idea has been around for a while. They have been toying with this idea on /r/cryptocurrency for a while with "moons" and the admins have discussed bringing that same thing to the larger ecosystem. Though, the admins probably are worried about the SEC with moon tokens, so they are turning to regular dollars.

In /r/cryptocurrency this required much more serious moderation (look at the size of the mod team), they have some pretty advanced moderation tools compared to most other subs.

I don't think reddit knows what they are asking for, but they are gonna get it, a whole ton of repost / chatgpt garbage. This is sadly probably the downfall of reddit, if it wasn't the API pricing, this surely will turn it into a bot/karma removed garbage dump.

September is coming

I guess they just really don't understand why reddit was worth visiting in the first place.

They want to turn redditors into instagram whores haha.

Eliminate 3rd party tools, try to force people on to a terrible app with a shitty interface, and then incentivize the content farms. A recipe for success if ever I've heard one.

You know what might have been a better idea? If they'd offered a profit sharing agreement to third party apps through some sort of affiliate program that allowed them to sell gold and split the revenue. They could even have kept the obscene api rates for AI scrapers by giving a massive discount to affiliated apps. This way reddit would get the revenue it was missing out on, users could support their preferred app while also giving money to reddit, and really, everybody wins.

But then spez wouldn't get to be Elon jr, so that obviously wasn't going to work.

That's so stupid that it's funny again. Steve Huffman will milk this Reddit cow to death. Without repost filtering this incentivizes bot makers, with years of experience, to flood Reddit with garbage because the common user can't tell. Come in, come in, my bots and ~~user~~ slaves to create content for the show. Also awards give incentive to post provoking content and rage bait, you even have this shit on steam for almost useless award rewards.

antique meme appraiser suddenly becomes an actual job at c/AntiqueMemesRoadshow

Is it a conspiracy that Twitter and Reddit, center-lib spaces, gone down at the same time?

I won't give too much credit to people like Musk and Hoffman, it's just too useful for right-wing actors to sink these platforms down since a lot of their accounts were banned there, and none of their projects like Parler or TruthSocial got from the ground.

Everyone should make a concerted effort to abandon reddit. I, and many others, left digg.com back whenever that whole shitfest imploded and many other sites have been abandoned over the years when they went to shit due to bad leaders/service became shit.

Use lemmy or whatever else that isn’t reddit. Let it die. The biggest thing on reddit is the nerdy shit like network, linux, windows, android, etc. troubleshooting and help from actual people of various backgrounds, some very skilled, to normie users and everyone else.

If you absolutely “must” use reddit for some reason, and overall I don’t see a must-use use there except aforementioned troubleshooting help, then use adblocked desktop version or if you’re a normal person who doesn’t view reddit on non-mobile (lol) then use a custom api app. Apollo has one, and on android the revanced team (behind the superior YouTube app alternative to the google one) has implemented custom api patches for all the popular reddit apps like sync and such. They all block ads and generally deny Steve what he wanted. Use those instead of the official. Never use the official app!

Hilarious that Huffman openly admitted that Reddit “isn’t profitable” (somehow) and they have to squeeze 3PAs out to try to make up for that, but apparently they found spare funds in the budget to pay spambots to keep reposting content to keep things from going barren.

This is the same thing Twitter tried (is?) doing. Spez is really going full Musk.

• Earn xx gold and karma each month

"Thank you for all your passion driven volunteer work. Let us reward you with slavery".

That's a bold strategy Cotton, let's see how it works out for them.

Reddit will pay a million content farms to repost memes before they pay a single moderator for [squints at paper] running their website

Also, it really feels like reddit demotes older, higher karma accounts these days. I have one which is close to a million karma and 13+ years old and it's a grind to get upvotes on it. If I use the same methodology on younger accounts it's legitimately like a 10x difference in karma production.

But either way, I will never attach my real name to a reddit account anyway, so this is pointless anyway.

I was going to say “I hope they never actually implement this”, but then I remembered that I don’t have a horse in this race. Now I hope they DO implement it. It’ll be funnier.

the karma accumulated could be used to improve the rate of exchange for Reddit gold into real-world money (possibly USD)

Oh, so all those people with 10+ year accounts, with tons of karma accumulated over the years, and who deleted their accounts in protest for the API changes... are actually a "good thing" so Reddit doesn't have to pay top rates for their comments?

Nice move, very nice... /s