Reddit is Killing Blockchain-Based Community Points

Reddit is winding down Community Points -- the blockchain-based "internet points" program designed to reward creators and developers -- in favor of prioritizing rewards programs that are less difficult to scale. From a report: "Though we saw some future opportunities for Community Points, the resourcing needed was unfortunately too high to justify," Reddit's director of consumer and product communications Tim Rathschmidt told TechCrunch. "The regulatory environment has since added to that effort. Though the moderators and communities that supported Community Points have been incredible partners -- as it's evolved, the product is no longer set up to scale."

Community Points, which will be phased out by early November, were promoted as a chance for Redditors to "own" a piece of their community. First launched in 2020, Community Points were awarded to users who positively engaged in select subreddits in order to incentivize better content and conversation. The points were essentially interchangeable Ethereum tokens stored in Reddit's Vault, which operated as a cryptocurrency wallet.

Crypto has its work cut out

[SmaryJerry]

if something supposedly decentralized as well as community driven and managed uses up too much of Reddit's resources still then what possible use case could block chain ever have in a social media environment. Not to mention that giving actual rewards with value rather than fake internet points makes there an even bigger incentive for bots than the one that already exists with reddit's upvote system.

Re:

[Kaenneth]

Blockchain wasn't the problem, it was having to report the payments made to users as income to the IRS.

Which would also mean having to know every users Name, Address, SSN or local country equivalent data.

Reddit Community Points

[a5y]

It sounds like a 4chan meme mocking what the archetypal fedora tipping socially oblivious redditor loves, mixed with Sesame Credit.

YOU WILL OWN COMMUNITY POINTS AND BE HAPPY.

One cannot kill...

[ocean_soul]

...what was never really alive.

More idiocy!

[Khyber]

They actually thought blockchain would be anything more than a fucking waste?

Not very tech-minded or savvy. They also forgot the lesson we learned trying this same shit back in the 70s with permissionless distributed databases.

Idiots.

Re:

[Kaenneth]

Blockchain wasn't the problem, it was having to report the payments made to users as income to the taxman. On a mostly anonymous platform, that wasn't gonna happen.

Re: More idiocy!

[RamenJunkie]

It was costing Reddit too much, Blockchain was definitely the problem. The "promise" is decentralization, except clearly it was not, and a regular ass SQL instance would have done the same thing for them for way less cost.

Are they coming after my blockchained ugly monkey?

[thesjaakspoiler]

I invested all my lifesavings in one of such ugly monkey NFT that would be a great investment because it was cryptomagically blockchained to someoneelses computer log.
Since I don't even own the picture, my investment will be worthless when it's unblockchained.