TL;DR: user contribution will go down, astroturfing will go up. Reddit is shooting its own foot, again.
The pic shows $6/gold, or $2/gold. Top contributors would get $1/gold. So Reddit is pocketing 50%+ of the value. Except that the platform kicked off the ones who'd actually contribute with it, so users will barely use the new system. You know who would do it, though? Corporations. For them it means "pay one dollar for advertisement, get half dollar back" is a treat. Astroturfing will get rampant.
To be eligible for the Contributor Program, you’ll need to be older than 18, live in a “supported location” (which at first is just the US),
I remember doing maths as this subject popped up; the program would exclude 70% of the userbase. And there are few things that piss people off more than feeling unrewarded - "you rewarded him, why not me? I'm not contributing, fuck off."
Rathschmidt said Reddit will use things like [...]
Except that nothing fucking works properly in Reddit. And Reddit will certainly not put reasonable measures against its own short-term profit, so that's likely just lip service.
Yeah, nothing seems to work properly online. It's so complicated trying to manage deep data analytics without OracleSAP. My conflict free vaping startup switched to OracleSAP and now everything runs so well we created an office ultimate Frisbee league. It's bae, fam. (This post has been guilded 2654 times!)
They're going to turn the "thanks for the gold kind strangers!" crowd even more annoying
So… no gold on NSFW content, why? Just more of the same puritan BS that killed tumblr? I get advertisers don't want their ads next to just anything, but gold isn't ad-based.
So to solve an already pretty fucked up and growing bot problem they are going to incentivize bots?
How very fucking stupid and spezzy of them.
Positive spin take: will encourage higher quality content and comments. Will incentivise spending more time posting and commenting and greater care put into both.
Likely reality: Rush to lowest-common-denominator posts. Sensational titles to grab attention. Comments are less likely to write things the hive-mind doesn't want to hear, so less variety in comments. White-knighting increases. More porn by professional posters.
Almost-certain to happen: change in content. It's a gamble that the new content will be as popular as the old content. Reddit had a platform up until June this year. No matter what happens, they abandoned that platform to re-shape it into something else. Which seems like it would be a hard sell to investors. "You know our core product and user base that you're interested in? Well, what if we told you that we were creating something to gather an unknown amount of new users! And all we have to do is alienate our current user base!"
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230925171140/https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23887226/reddit-gold-system-contributor-program
