Read all about it at the above link. There’s way too much to process here. This is going to be wild.
Community Points are the first step towards a better future for online communities. In order to be truly independent from platforms like Reddit, communities need to be owned by their members in ways that platforms cannot take away. With the advent of blockchain technology, we now have a way to establish this freedom in a decentralized and secure way.
The way to be independent of Reddit is by having a token on a blockchain maintained by Reddit?
Holy shit.
I did not expect the next wave of new users on Lemmy to be happening this soon.
Poor Lemmy servers.
Batten down the hatches mateys. Tharrr be a storm brewin’ ☠️ 🏴☠️💀
New LemmyFediverse boi since the Great Purge; this is seriously happening again, already? Glad I got out when I did. Compared to the old place, experiencing and interacting with Lemmy is like a calming dip in the Great Link (not a Changeling honest)
Yeah same. There are a couple of communities over there that I kind of miss, although one or two of them have been recreated on Lemmy basic nobody posts on the yet, or they get continually brigated.
I need to check out the other servers though. Lemmy is just so far superior to what Reddit was in how it’s fundamentally designed.
Me neither. How long till old.reddit.com goes away? That was supposed to be the next big spike in the Lemmy growth curve.
I can’t believe I read that whole thing. I take that back, I can’t believe Reddit actually thought this was a good idea and put it out into the world.
Well in January I believe they told third party app developers that they weren’t going to charge for the API this year (but that someone was in the works). Then May I believe is when reneged on that? June? I know the charging went into effect on July 1.
In May/June Spez said that old Reddit wasn’t going anywhere. So we can extrapolate ~October for them to announce it’s ending, and then it being killed by the end of the year.
I’m still using Old Reddit so the second it goes down you’ll definitely be hearing about it, at least from me 😉
At least we got some better mobile apps now. Hopefully Photon gets replaced as a front page on more instances too. That’d get a lot more people to stay.
Photon is really amazing. I hope it gets the support and attention it deserves
Same
Oh well, can’t wait for the all new people to come here
Guys, you missed the block chain boat, this isn’t going to save your IPO
They’ll do something with AI in 3 years or so, if they still exist.
Y’all heard about that Web 2.0 thing?
Although I’m not in any way aware or alive when that was happening back then - that “.com bubble” blast I think? - I surmise that was a real crash-and-burn phenomenon, McKinstry’s “CR6” internet show being one of its casualties, despite its significance in online emergent media history.
Dot.com bubble was web 1.0. Big centralized sites like Reddit are web 2.0.
Isn’t anything post dot com bubble considered Web 2.0?
So we’re still in Web 2.0, or when was the cutoff?
The dot com bubble was late 90s, early 2000s, tons of companies went under. Lot of jobs and VC money lost. People had to rethink how they could monetize, stop a lot of advertising scams, and what was really worth investing in that might return a profit.
Spez has been jonesing for redditcrypto since 2016.
Well yeah how else is he gonna pay for his jailbait cp
With their servers always going down I assume they won’t mine this thenselves. I bet they push that load out onto user clients lol.
right? Blockchain is so 5 years ago
What are you talking about? By the way, could I interest you in some GameStop stock?
Today’s online communities are not like this. They are trapped inside apps and platforms, where they do not have independence or control anything of value.
That’s hilarious, when they literally just trapped users in their app and killed 3rd party apps.
In case anyone’s confused about what this is all about:
$5/month per community
It’s easy to miss, but they snuck in that Special Memberships (subreddit subscriptions, which unlock badges and emojis and stuff) cost $5 a month per subreddit, outside of Reddit Premium. You can also spend 1000 Community Points, but if you don’t have the balance and want the benefits, you’ll be giving reddit money.
It feels like reddit has come to understand how much closer redditors feel to their communities than reddit as a whole - reddit is hated, but users still cling to their communities. A sitewide Reddit Premium badge is irrelevant, even repugnant and a badge of shame, but special flairs and features in close knit communities are still desirable.
This is reddit exploiting their users’ relationships with their communities with a stackable 5 buck alternative to Reddit Premium.
Probably the only smart thing Reddit has done all year. All you have to do is invent some sort of perk for a community and put it behind a monthly paywall. Make it a pooled system with a goal and peer pressure will get you more subs. Discord has been making bank on this concept for a while now.
If they can leverage subreddit tribalism, it might have even have more potential than Discord, which isn’t nearly as interconnected. Or it would have, if they hadn’t hitched this to the blockchain.
Per subreddit?!
ROFL. 🤣🤣🤣👒
Man I remember back in the day when somebody bought me in Argentinium award. I shit a brick when I found out how much that thing cost.
I got a few thousand points to spend on awards, but I never would spend money on an app like that. Such a rip off.
spez pulling off an elon lmao
In order to be truly independent from platforms like Reddit, communities need to be owned by their members in ways that platforms cannot take away.
Is this a fucking joke
Reading this: are they implementing ActivityPub?
Blockchain
Oh sweet lord, no. No, they are not.
Someone at Reddit had Blockchain missing in their buzzword bingo for 2023, I swear.
Like, they’re giving users monopoly money, and try to pass it off as control. Like, the fuck are they gonna do with the monopoly money?
Plus imagine if users actually believe the monopoly money is important. We’re back on the days of BB Forums where you can make a factual point but oops, you’re level 2 and the forum regular (4506 posts) just called you a cocksucker.
Edit: Oh god, the moderator wallet thing. They’re letting moderators moderate themselves. This is going to set off a massive amount of infighting as some admins will take the whole wallet and the other moderators will call them out and the seriousness of the whole thing (moderation teams not getting along) will get drowned out with all the people shitposting about fighting for monopoly money.
This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read.
the fuck are they gonna do with the monopoly money?
Simple - the illusion of control. And, I’m sure the users will.
Thank goodness, I wasn’t the only one. I really thought they were talking about activitypub.
So long as you have Reddit Mobile installed since your vault is tied to it
That’s been their mission ever since they bought and killed alien blue and released a pile of shit in its place. They can’t make a good app so have been slowly tying more and more exclusive features to it, and to new Reddit, hoping that this new shiny useless thing that no one asked for or wanted will get people to use it. I think with interest rates rising, their investors are looking for profits higher than t bills and so this trend that has been going on for the past few years is now kicked into overdrive.
Yeah, it is. It’s nothing new. Here is a post about it from 3 years ago:
I love shitting on reddit as much as the next guy, but I don’t think they are actually implementing this.
They’ve updated their preview feature TOS as recently as last month to push forward with avatars and community points, I reckon they’re just biding time to sync it with the next bull run to maximise value and heighten chance of seeming like they have genius cutting edge foresight.
The bottom of that’s also funny because it makes it clear their smart contract is permissioned and if they don’t like what you do with your virtual goods they can remove them from you. Very immutable, wow, such ownership.
Thanks for this! I was having trouble finding anything with a recent date on it related to Community Points.
That makes me wonder if Reddit is trying to keep this under wraps until release date, so that their remaining userbase doesn’t have another protest. It’s kind of crazy that they have been working on this crypto garbage for three years, yet don’t have the foresight to see that this is going to backfire. Is there anyone, aside from crypto bros., that are even interested in crypto and NFTs anymore?
“Failure to follow and comply with the above rules may constitute a breach of the Previews Terms and result in a temporary or permanent ban from Reddit or certain subreddits or removal of your access to Reddit Econ Goods.”
So they can take your coins at any time if they don’t approve of something that you do.
“By using any Feature, you understand that the Feature may be canceled at any time for any or no reason, in our sole discretion, without advance notice or liability to Reddit. We reserve the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue any Feature (in whole or in part) at any time, with or without notice to you…There will be no refunds if any Feature is no longer usable on or through the Services.”
Also, they can get rid everyone’s coins at any time without reimbursing them. I hope Community Points will be the final nail in Reddit’s coffin. It would be really funny if Reddit was killed by crypto.
Oh there’s a ton of interest but just kept to shitcoiners for now - the subreddits are nothing like they were during the bear market around 2019, back then it was a ghost town even with a subscriber count of 800k but now they’re still very active due to an influx of millions of users (6m subs on the main shitcoin sub).
It’ll all likely swing back up in the next two years and become a media and scam frenzy again, then another crash, rinse, repeat.
Reddit shilling decentralisation and ownership knowing how they’ve acted the last few months is hilarious though, they’ve been prideful of saying “nope you don’t own shit,now fuck off somewhere else” and spez bootlickers have been parroting it endlessly too. Seems odd that they’re the people Reddit are going to have to advertise this… Fauxnership to.
I’m not sure if I agree that crypto is going to swing back up, or at least not like it did in 2021. The subreddit may have more than 6 million users, but it doesn’t have any posts in the past week with more than 1000 upvotes. In reality, the crypto subreddit has a smaller userbase than Lemmy. That’s probably not entirely representative of the entire crypto community, but I think that it does indicate that a lot of people have lost interest.
I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how it all goes down though. Makes me glad I’m on Lemmy now.
It was much worse in 2019, a post hitting over 100-200 was unusual and the comment sections were beyond dead. Most comment sections these days are still filled with hope, in 2019 suicide hotline threads were a weekly occurrence or more.
We’ll see anyway, the BTC halving has led to a run 3 times in a row so far, just like clockwork. Barring another recession I just see the same pattern forming.
So they want to claim they are like Lemmy, but without doing what Lemmy does. Got it.
Glanced over it. Complete word salad. Corporate nonsense: baffle them with bullshit.
You get points from communities. These points are stored on the block chain, because why not? The points themselves come from reddit, but the communities distribute them. Since they’re on the block chain, reddit can’t take back your magic bean points or whatever once you get them. Nevermind that they’re worthless and that reddit controls the only platform that they’re even remotely useful on.
For now, Reddit will cover gas costs for distributing Points to users and allowing them to spend Points on features such as Special Memberships.
Emphasis mine. Someone has to pay for it, because that’s how the block chain works. For now it’s Reddit. In the future? Who knows!
How does this benefit the consumer? It doesn’t, really. Potentially it gives posters more control over a subreddit, but looks like mods will still hold essentially all the power when it comes to a subreddit, which is how it works now.
How does this benefit reddit as a business? It doesn’t, really. They’re handing out magic beans with the selling point being that they can’t take them away from you once you get them. It costs them money to do this, because it’s on the block chain as opposed to some in-house database. This replaced coins, right? They killed an income stream and replaced it with an expense.
They get to tell investors that they’re into the block chain when they launch their IPO, I guess. All I can say is buyer beware. Chances are high the powers that be unload their stock options in the IPO hype and then get the hell out of dodge. They might have waited too long, though. The tech bubble deflated, and I don’t know if the books are impressive enough to draw in the big bucks from investors.
If you want genuine control over your community, start one on the Fediverse and self-host an instance. No admins will kick you off since you’re your own admin and head mod rolled into one.
its main value to the owners is that it is a more direct means of controlling user behavior… once they get people used to “real” rewards, they can better use the platform as a means of controlling discourse… which is why the Mukser is doing it on the other thing, and where they got the idea…
they’re trolls… they want to use it to troll harder…
Thank you for making this more understandable. It really feels like a “the people who pay us more will have a louder voice” and I am grossed out, if that’s the case.
Yeah, I had missed the $5 per month per community part, which does basically boil down to that.
They’re handing out magic beans with the selling point being that they can’t take them away from you once you get them.
And that’s not even true in any practical sense. If reddit decides that the token in your crypto wallet is invalid, then it’ll stop working on reddit. And since they’re the only issuer every possible use is going to be tied to reddit in some sense.
How does this benefit reddit as a business? It doesn’t, really
$5/month per community
You may have missed it, but they snuck in that Special Memberships (subreddit subscriptions, which unlock badges and emojis and stuff) cost $5 a month per subreddit, outside of Reddit Premium. You can also spend 1000 Community Points, but if you don’t have the balance and want the benefits, you’ll be giving reddit money.
It feels like reddit has come to understand how much closer redditors feel to their communities than reddit as a whole - reddit is hated, but users still cling to their communities. A sitewide Reddit Premium badge is irrelevant, even repugnant and a badge of shame, but special flairs and features in close knit communities are still desirable.
This is reddit exploiting their users’ relationships with their communities with a stackable 5 buck alternative to Reddit Premium.
I still don’t really get who gets the money from this special membership? I understand people subscribe to YouTube and twitch personalities because they want to support the creator and they get most of the money, but what incentive does anyone have to buy this community membership here? Is it really just the special avatars/badges/whatever?
Clout in a community they care about. I can’t relate to wanting it, but people buy clout all the time online and in games. This is basically a more personalized Twitter Blue.
They also said something about community points being usable for moderation/governance. Does that mean people can come in and save/buy enough Community Points to enact a coup?
Like, Atheists could get enough Christianity sub credits and ban all the Christians? Or bigots could seize an LGBTQ+ sub? It seems kinda like a nightmare waiting to happen if so.
I think this also clarifys the mystery of why they said offering the API was costing the too much.
As blockchain tokens
Thanks I read enough.
Hey… Hey boss. I got an offer for ya. How would you like a crypto that you cannot take off of reddit! Only exists on Reddit. And gives you “exposure.”
“All the downsides of any other cryptocurrency, and like all the other ones, none of the upsides! It’s redditcoin!” *crowd jeers, C-suites look confused*
Exposure beans! For everyone!
You should continue reading. It’s a comedy gold mine.
Ok truthfully I read more, but that’s where I was like “That’s not going to fly”
" In order to be truly independent from platforms like Reddit, communities need to be owned by their members in ways that platforms cannot take away"
WTF!!! They literally just took communities away from the members because they were protesting Reddit intentionally degrading their site…
Nice to see that reddit started to advertise for lemmy / kbin. 🤣
I read that and thought “This can’t be real. This is too on the nose.” then I read the rest and had to check the URL to make sure it’s not a joke, because it reads like one big joke.
!nottheonion
More like a fuck you, kind of joke.
If you read just the next section that’s where the other shoe drops. Blockchain. It’s blockchain of course it’s blockchain because everyone there has tech bro brain rot.
Community Points
Community Points are the first step towards a better future for online communities. In order to be truly independent from platforms like Reddit, communities need to be owned by their members in ways that platforms cannot take away. With the advent of blockchain technology, we now have a way to establish this freedom in a decentralized and secure way.
As blockchain tokens that are owned and controlled by communities themselves — not by any app or platform — Community Points represent a way for Redditors to own a piece of their favorite communities. They are earned by making contributions to the community, like creating content and moderating. They not only represent ownership and reputation within the community, but can also be used for community governance, moderation, and unlocking premium features. They can even be used in custom tools outside of Reddit and on other platforms.
Most importantly, Community Points are a flexible tool that each community can shape to its needs. Each community has its own Points that it can customize with its own name, symbol, distribution rules, and uses. Every community has its own needs and we expect each to use Points differently and in novel ways that help take them to the next level.
What’s wrong with blockchain exactly beyond the fact cryptoscammers gave it a bad rep ? To my understanding blockchain has the same goal as the fediverse : decentralisation, and we should support it (the system, not the scammers using it).
Edit : Thanks all for the resources, I’ll check that out !
The fediverse solves the decentralisation problem by enabling communities to operate around a basis of trust. Blockchain is antitrust. It is fundamentally built on an assumption that functioning communities cannot exist.
Blockchain solves a problem that doesn’t exist. Give me a problem that blockchain solves and I’ll consider it. A decentralised ledger is an ancient technology that has never needed immutability in order to work.
Also what odds would you give me on whether reddit don’t want to use this blockchain system for a grift? 1/100? 1/1000?
That’s the other problem with blockchain, the foundation of antitrust attracts grifters, because it is a technology that enables grifts. Immutable ledgers lock people in with no escape clause, so they fundamentally enable bigger fool scams. I hate fiat currency as much as the crypto bros, but at least it sometimes allows recourse for scam victims.
Your last sentence makes no sense. Why would crypto bros hate fiat currencies? Or do they just hate every other than the one they support?
Go look at any crypto bro explain what’s so great about crypto currency. They hate fiat because it’s centralised. They basically say it gives the government too much power, not realising that it is an extension of already existing power and not the source of state power.
They’re mostly libertarian capitalists, and as far as I can tell they don’t understand how power works. It seems like they think currency and laws and capital are magic spells, so if you rip up the laws and replace the currency then you’ve dispelled the evil magic and you have liberated the people of Middle Earth.
That’s why they think crypto will work, and why they say “just get rid of the laws”. When you ask how to do that, they don’t know what you mean, because they literally think “get rid of the laws” is the method.
I was making a post about exactly the same thing a few days ago - https://programming.dev/post/1235490 (not sure how to link it cross-instance)
Not an expert but overall yes, the technology seems like a good idea, it’s what it was/is most used that gives it bad rep. The most inhetently bad thing about it might be the environmental unfriendliness with the energy used needed for the verifications and stuff (though there are alternatives to it I think)
But I don’t know much about it beyond the basics, so might be wrong.
Maybe I get downvoted because I’m wrong. Or mayne because I wasn’t inherently negative about blockchain and since it is mostly asociated with NFTs and similar scams, people just automatically hate it. If it’s the former, I deserve it - but would love for someone to say so and explain if that’s the case.
I think you could have explained yourself more clearly. Did you mean to say that otherwise in a vacuum, the only downside to blockchain technology is it’s ecological impact? I’d agree with that, but nothing operates in a hypothetical vacuum.
What’s got some people up in arms is the fact this blockchain is a solution without a problem. It’s going to do things that can already be done easily in a much harder way. Which is what most blockchain deployments do. I think you know that nuance but didn’t articulate it well in your post. Perhaps that’s why you’re being down voted?
Honestly, as I said, I knly know the basics. From what I know about it, at face value and in vacuum, it sounds usable - with the environmental negatives. So more or less, you understood me correctly I think. I may’ve not been too clear, because I only have basic understanding of it - never looked too deep into it.
Maybe (probably) there are more inherent negatives to it that I don’t know about. Maybe the environmental ones just stuck with me because I understand those.
This documantary brings up some very valid points about the subject matter if you have an hour and a half to burn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA
Guaranteed that people smarter than the reddit staff will exploit their processes or code to cause mayhem and chaos.
100% guaranteed.
I hope so. It’ll be fun to watch.
I can hardly wait for someone to find a vulnerability in their blockchain implementation that allows community points to execute arbitrary code.
After watching the literally insane ACE that speedrunners have been able to figure out, I’m pretty sure you’re hitting the nail on the head. Someone is going to get up to some serious skulduggery with this one.
Is this old, or just something that has been in the works for a long time? No one is talking about it on Reddit, so I’m pretty sure that it is old information. This is a post about it from three years ago:
So you get points for posting and for moderating. It’s this literally being “paid in exposure”? Don’t we joke about this all the time how worthless it is?
Oh God, now they’ve actually monetized all the repost bots. It’s like they WANT their site to turn into a bot hellhole.
Well, they kinda do. They don’t have to be human to look like users from the outside.
Looking at this screams that they’re planning to cut and run, though. It’s arson for the insurance money. Nobody would look at this longterm and think it was going to turn out well
deleted by creator
When you get 100,000 exposure, and there are suckers paying $4 for each, how many USD do you have?
(Spoiler: none, but if you’re smart, then you may get USD 200K)
It is time for communities to break free of walled gardens
Lmao how can they say that with a straight face
Lmao
Today’s online communities are not like this. They are trapped inside apps and platforms, where they do not have independence
Trapped in apps like the official Reddit app? Because they ruined 3rd party apps? What are they sniffing over there, the trapping of communities is their own doing.
I’m done with reddit, so either way I don’t really care. Tbh I don’t think this will necessarily be a dumpster fire. It might even be interesting, depending on the specifics of this implementation. It’s probably fueled by higher ups hearing hype words like blockchain. My expectation is that things will mostly just continue as normal, but now the management and CEO’s etc can masturbate to the idea of having a blockchain application.
Today’s online communities are not like this. They are trapped inside apps and platforms,
How ironic… Reddit trying to lock me in was the exact reason why I stopped being active there…
My god, that copy makes me want to vomit. It reads like it was written by an executive in a coke bender.
Community Points are the first step towards a better future for online communities. In order to be truly independent from platforms like Reddit, communities need to be owned by their members in ways that platforms cannot take away. With the advent of blockchain technology, we now have a way to establish this freedom in a decentralized and secure way.
I can almost hear the zoom call they brainstormed this shit in. This is some PragerU level slime. “Crypto Currency will grant users autonomy that they would otherwise never possess!” Right, anything that can’t be bought has no value. Oh THANK YOU for creating this system where everything is tied to crypto, so we can experience real community again! Finally my voice can be heard. Not like that horrible, communistic, voting system that counts every user equally.
It’s time for communities to take back ownership and control says company that just took away ownership and control from communities.
