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Reddit Will Start Paying You Real Money For Your Karma (techcrunch.com) 65

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Reddit announced a contributor program on Monday, which awards users actual, real money for their fake internet points. From a report: Now, eligible users will be able to convert their Reddit gold and karma into fiat currency (no, not crypto), which is dispersed 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.
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Reddit Will Start Paying You Real Money For Your Karma More

Reddit Will Start Paying You Real Money For Your Karma

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  • sigh (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gibgezr ( 2025238 ) on Monday September 25, 2023 @12:25PM (#63875807)

    Ya, monetizing likes, the karma-whoring was bad enough as it was. Bots reposting everywhere.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday September 25, 2023 @12:54PM (#63875901)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Anonymous Coward

        While the quality of /. has ebbed and flowed over the years, the moderator system has been pretty solid, and IMHO, fair. You want to be a clown on the playground? Sure - have at it. Want to contribute to the conversation? Love to hear your thoughts. Want to be a bully or a jerk? Sure, you can do that - but you're going to be down mod'd to -1 and below most folk's radar.

        Maybe it's part of /.'s audience, I've yet to find a moderator system that works as effectively as this one. Gives everyone a voice - in

        • Re: sigh (Score:2, Insightful)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

          Total nonsense. Moderation is abused continually and nobody cares. I've got trolls following me around modding down multiple unrelated posts in a row just trying to chase me off Slashdot. Unsatisfied with modding down my posts they don't agree with, they simply pick three posts in a row and mod them all troll.

          Slashdot moderation is broken by design. There is no accountability, on purpose.

          • Re: sigh (Score:4, Interesting)

            by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Monday September 25, 2023 @03:31PM (#63876405)

            Um... I was curious, so I looked at your post history. I know you are pretty active, so that got me thinking.
            The first two pages are all posts at score 1 (default), except one, marked as Flamebait. I personally have no opinion whether that's correct or not.
            Third page: all scores not 1 are actually positive. Same for page 4, page 5, I think there are a couple at score 0 at page 6, but, man, you post a LOT of comments :)

            Evidence suggests you are not hunted at all, or if you are, you successfully out-comment the hordes of enemies, kudos to that.

            Now, back to Slashdot moderation, I think it works pretty well. it's not perfect, and sometimes a comment is easily misinterpreted or is indeed unpopular (God forbid, saying something positive about a Microsoft product, that's blasphemy, even if true!) and it might be unfairly moderated downwards. But it's uncommon enough to not be a systemic issue.

            • Comment removed based on user account deletion

              • Well, here's the thing. Pretty much any maker of anything is bound to piss some people off. Some more than others (both pissers and pissed).
                While I agree MS and Apple are pretty bad offenders, I aim to remain objective, and not shit on a good feature because "Apple Bad" or "MS Sux". Call them out when they fuck up, and praise them when they do something actually nice for a change.
                It's not easy to keep balance, people inherently deviate towards extreme, to the point where their arguments become childish.

                But

                • Comment removed based on user account deletion

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
                    Well that might have been the opinion of whomever posted. Different people want different things. At that point in time the ipod requeued Itunes to sync music, witch (correct me if I'm wrong here) was not available for windows at the time, so to, if that was the case, the ipod was useless to windows users, or linux users for that matter. But I suspect that the main basis for that complaint (that turned into a meme), was a basic misunderstanding of whom the ipo was targeted at.It was targeted at the general

            • I post at +1.

              Things have actually lightened up lately, I had two people serially down voting me for a while now, but now I am down to one who only does it occasionally.

            • God forbid, saying something positive about a Microsoft product, that's blasphemy, even if true!

              You're technically correct, but that's only vacuously true [wikipedia.org].

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by mjwx ( 966435 )

              Um... I was curious, so I looked at your post history. I know you are pretty active, so that got me thinking.
              The first two pages are all posts at score 1 (default), except one, marked as Flamebait. I personally have no opinion whether that's correct or not.
              Third page: all scores not 1 are actually positive. Same for page 4, page 5, I think there are a couple at score 0 at page 6, but, man, you post a LOT of comments :)

              Evidence suggests you are not hunted at all, or if you are, you successfully out-comment the hordes of enemies, kudos to that.

              Because everyone gets mod points at the same time, right?

              I've seen the same behaviour with regards to moderation, Every now and then I come back the next day to find 5 posts all with a single -1 mod (so still at +1). Usually this gets corrected by others with mod points or meta moderation. It's been happening less and less over the years but I imagine Drinkypoo has collected more enemies than I have.

              When it comes to mod points I tend to get them in fits and starts, there will be a few weeks where I'll

          • It really doesn't matter. With Slashdot's system you can actually set Troll/Flamebait to have a +5 value. I actually do this because I can pretty easily scroll past any actual crap, but I figure anything controversial enough to draw someone's ire and mismoderation is at least worth a glance.

            But at the end of the day it matters not. It's fake internet points. If you give that much of a fuck about your Slashdot karma you've probably got something wrong with you or a lot of energy that needs a better channe

            • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

              by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

              Even in posting this you let some random internet weirdo know that their petty behavior actually bothers you. What's the worst thing you can do to a troll? Feed them.

              You're assuming they're idiots. I think they're just assholes. They already know what they're about. I don't think they're particularly intelligent, but I don't think they're dumb as you imagine. Pretending comment score doesn't matter on a site with comment scores is pretty dumb.

      • Multiple completely contradictory answers can very often be worthy of upvotes for differing reasons, but only sites like Slashdot really cater for this by making moderation points a limited resource and capping the maximum at +5

        When voting rights are given to every blubbering moron (myself included) just for reading something, votes and karma become meaningless.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Marful ( 861873 )
        The downvote dog piling is very frequent on slashdot, particularly on anything that is framed as democrat vs republican (or liberal vs conservative) and practically exclusive in one direction. But you're right that the -1 floor levels the dogpiling a bit, where as on reddit there is no floor.

        I've also seen bots on reddit that will massively downvote everyone in a thread except a select few power users; i'm wonder if a bot-war is soon to break out on reddit because of this...
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • I've posted the same comment twice as an experiment. The first one would be downvoted hard. I wait a day or two. The second is upvoted hard! It always seems to snowball also, it will go -4 or +4 then rapidly accelerate as people just vote based on the current trend.

      • Reddit has a negative karma floor of -10. Any larger number you see after that is for display only

      • I would generally agree with you that /.'s moderation system is far superior to reddit's bad design.

        THE fundamental reason reddit's moderation is shit is that it provides ZERO context. Was something insightful? interesting? over-rated? funny? Incorrect? You have no idea why something was moderated up / down on reddit. On /. we have a "general" consensus which is extremely valuable.

        I'm not sure I would agree with /. limited mod point range. When something is upvoted to 20K, 40K, or 100K you know that it i

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
        Or you know just stay away from the toxic subreddits (politics religion etc), there are plenty of non toxic subreddits where tis is not a problem, ot if it is the problem is very limited. Disclosure: I have no economic interests in Reddit or any of its affiliated activities, I'm just a happy long time user

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Yea it's going to be a shit-show.

      Unrelated topic, anyone know of any good open source reddit repost bots?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by znrt ( 2424692 )

      chatgpt won't care.

    • Buy my Slashdot karma! Please! Oh wait, I won't sign up for Stripe, Persona, PayPal, eBay, Venmo, WayMo, or New York Times. Payment accepted in Stackoverflow points, SlashBucks, Beer, or Ale. Wife says Wine is acceptable as well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nyet ( 19118 )

      The groupthink on reddit is already ridiculous. This is only going to make it worse.

    • It will become like the "publish or perish" issue with people shoving out as much half-baked crap as they can. You think the quality of posts on reddit are bad now?

  • This will end up as dog shit fast. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Marful ( 861873 ) on Monday September 25, 2023 @12:26PM (#63875811)
    Given how karma farming is manipulated on reddit, this is going to to turn into dogshit fast.

    There are several "super moderators" who are mods amongst many of the top subreddits who will routinely delete any popularly trending post and then repost it themselves for karma farming. If you complain or call them out, you get banned from the subreddit (and all the others they moderate for).

  • ...they just billed me for trolling.

    Seriously, though, they should also have the option of getting reddit's advanced features in place of cash.

  • Porn benefits most (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Midnight_Falcon ( 2432802 ) on Monday September 25, 2023 @12:33PM (#63875839)
    It's well known a large portion of reddit is porn related and feeds into sites like onlyfans and pornhub and whatnot. These content creators get a lot of karma as a result of posting free porn samples -- making them some of the highest karma users -- which was worthless until now. Now, they can get paid for not hiding their main content behind paywalls.

    I see this as eating away at onlyfans etc business model of requiring subscriptions. Subscriptions are hard to get people to convert to, but if you post the content for free and people can do some action (upvote/give karma) for free to get you some money...at scale, this can be more profitable.

  • Donâ(TM)t care (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GreatDrok ( 684119 ) on Monday September 25, 2023 @12:47PM (#63875881) Journal

    So hereâ(TM)s the thing, everything I saw on Reddit was from somewhere else so in the last few months since they killed Apollo with their ridiculous API price hike I stopped going and you know what? I still get all the same info from other sites and all without the toxic reddit-think. Some of the dumbest discussions and opinions Iâ(TM)ve ever seen and I can do without. Reddit can go the same way as Digg.

  • For a website known for it's upvote/downvote bot manipulation, that allows completely anonymous logins without even an e-mail address tied, this sounds like a recipe to make bots go even more wild. Why not just do ad revenue share for posts, which is a system that has less cheating, instead of karma share? If you do payouts based on karma then the website will be even more of an echo chamber than it already is, with everyone afraid to disagree or post an opinion that might not go with the mainstream opinion

  • Confirmation bias (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheStatsMan ( 1763322 ) on Monday September 25, 2023 @01:05PM (#63875939)

    The morality of a website that awards dollars for fulfilling someone else's confirmation bias is truly something to consider. A glorious echo chamber.

  • The /. header which seems to be a copy-pasta from the article is oddly wrong:
    From /. header
    "Now, eligible users will be able to convert their Reddit gold and karma into fiat currency (no, not crypto), which is dispersed once per month." ...but TFA says correctly:
    "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." ...why would someone edit a single word wrongly?

    • ...why would someone edit a single word wrongly?

      Replace "someone" with "a Slashdot editor" and you have both a more precise question, and the answer.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nyet ( 19118 )

      I guarantee you /. will never fix it. I can count the times i've seen them correct even the most egregious errors on one hand.

      I don't get what it is they actually do all day; it takes like 5 minutes to edit a post.

    • Illiterate person "fixing" spelling.

      At least it technically makes sense, even if it is a change in meaning. It's going to get spread out over many disparate users.

      Go ahead and correct the above to desperate. Keep the chain going.

  • So, we've hit the point of them paying people (Score:3)

    by CreepingDeath ( 17019 ) on Monday September 25, 2023 @02:09PM (#63876145)

    to use the site. That sure sounds sustainable. (Still not going back to that site; play stupid games, win stupid prizes yadda yadda yadda)

  • If "just push money at shills!" is where Reddit's leadership are at then clearly things must be going well.

  • I'm sure they will be giving away bundles of cash through this program, right?
  • If that's the case, it's not an exchange of "fake points" for money, it's Reddit "letting" someone give another user a little money while taking a cut. Yet another scam from that platform.

  • Nah (Score:2)

    by atheos ( 192468 )
    Let me know when I can do that from the RIF app, and I might log back into my 14 year account
  • [joke?]You're not monetising my hard-earned Karma, Reddit. I'll never cash out. I want to see my Karma turn into a mountain of uselessness, a proper monument to my idiocy. I'm sure the monument will have bigger balls than me. Cashing out never works. My ten years or so of SL store-owning, selling really cool scripted products, might have gotten me a few hamburgers in total, had I even bothered. Reddit's just pee in the pool compared to that.[/joke?]

  • Remunerate The Register commenters on the comment sections... They're way funnier or informative with a few old-timers telling their stories. Even the trolls are more entertaining there!

    Just kidding for the first part but I'm actually serious about the latter.

  • The powers-that-be at Reddit (and a few external armchair commentators) have recently tried to convince the world that everything is basically back to business as usual at Reddit, post API protest blackout. This pay-for positive-contributions plan reveals that things are maybe not nearly as rosy as all that, after all. Reddit may itself be operating roughly as before, with several of their formerly protesting communities now "under new management"... but they still lost a fairly significant portion of their

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