/r/EthTrader tried this with Donuts a while ago and it led to a community split to /r/EthFinance from all of the drama. Adding a monetary reward for comments and posts really skews the incentives of the community members who choose to participate. When you tie things like this to governance (your coins affect your vote weight on the polls) it really creates a perverse incentive for commercial products to come in and create astroturfing content to farm coins.
I think this is a neat experiment and it will be fun to watch what happens but I'm skeptical that this moves the subreddits in a positive direction.
> Adding a monetary reward for comments and posts really skews the incentives of the community members who choose to participate
People like to complain about FOX New's conservative bias (and to a lesser extent MSNBC's liberal bias), but they miss the fact that their real bias is towards viewership, and they've become news entertainment products, not sources of journalism.
That's an interesting way to describe it - that's really how I consider YouTube as well. The wacky conspiracy videos all do really well because they're interesting (in a what the hell is going on with this guy kind of way if nothing else) and entertaining while reality has a style more like CSPAN.
The conspiratorial and alt-political videos are an extension of reality TV online. Unfortunately if you expose yourself to too much of them you end up co-opting some of their views.
NYT did a really good job covering this recently with their podcast Rabbit Hole:
If you know how to think critically, look for and evaluate source material, account for author bias, etc, you should not be co-opting any nonsense views just by sheer amount of exposure. Think about nuclear engineers; dealing with radioactive material is not dangerous if you know what you're doing.
"co-opting some of their views" for sure happened to me. I don't think it's bad thing, though.
I'm curiously drawn towards anyone whom has people shouting "don't give them a platform!" or has suggestions that their ideas are so powerful that they may somehow corrupt minds weaker than, presumably, their own superior ones.
So I semi-regularly listen to these "alt" people. Alex Jones, McInnes, molyneux, and so on. The co-opting was largely realizing that in-between some of the crazy (there's a fair amount to filter out in Jones' case), there are these kernels of truth, often backed by government documents or reports.
The co-opting ideas, I guess, was a general realization that the common narrative doesn't necessarily reflect the entire reality. Even things which are presented as cut and dry, are often a frustrating messy grey once you dig into them. It's also given me a general skepticism of commonly held opinions about people in general. These "literal cult leader", "literal nazis", etc... have turned out to be less monsters and more humans with nuanced opinions which don't necessarily translate to 5min clips.
You freely admit that there's a fair amount of crazy. The signal/noise ratio is absurdly bad, even if we assume there's some kind of signal at all. The (usually banal, obvious) nuggets of truth are often intentionally thrown in as a way to make you let your guard down. If you are not 100% flawless at separating the nugget of truth from the shit, then over time your mind will inevitably fill with shit. Don't overestimate your own mental resilience. If people were half as strong-minded as they thought they were, there'd be no money in advertising.
Never listen to crazies. If there's something non-crazy in what they're saying, somebody non-crazy will be saying it too; listen to them instead.
fwiw, I actually think what you just said is significantly more "dangerous". "Cutting out someones tongue doesn't prove them a liar" and whatnot. As I mentioned in my (much disliked!) earlier comment, there's this strange notion to me that this wrongthink is so powerful, so alluring, so impervious to reality that no one can possibly sort through it, or reject it, or even walk away unscathed. That you need "mental resilience" to blanket shield yourself from someone's heretical ideas is a bit too 1984 for my tastes.
So, again, I'll throw on a podcast at the gym and try to form my own opinions. If you exclusively get your opinions from clips on twitter or reddit, I don't think the opinions you've formed are actually yours.
Despite being exposed to "dangerous" ideas (I assume you're mostly talking about Jones), I don't think inter-dimensional space aliens are actually behind everything. I've managed to stay at least partially sane.
...or maybe I'm just not ready to believe yet (dun dun dun!) :)
There are reasonable people who also can give you the "general realization that the common narrative doesn't necessarily reflect the entire reality", I would point to Noam Chomsky as a source of that very same wisdom but without the mania or toxicity.
I've always felt that the framing of "don't give them a platform" is off as it's more like "don't make me support and amplify these things I really disagree with".
Different communities are good for different things and there is such a thing as community standards. It doesn't have to get to the Alex Jones political level either, just think like how weird it is when people hit on each other on Nextdoor [1] or if some guy was trying to sell his lawnmower on Grindr/Tinder.
I think you really need to listen to the NYT podcast. Your comment eerily similar to the experience of one of the people they follow who was deep in the rabbit hole.
That's largely the point I'm making ^_^ but I'm just trying to clarify that it's not necessarily some scary negative thing, or that I've been warped or something.
I think of listening to them largely in the spirit of Lincoln's “I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.” There's an entire machine telling me to hate these people, write them off, or that they're overall "bad." So I listened to a bunch of their content to see what it was about. That's kinda it, really.
I haven't turned into some conspiratorial nut job or joined some cult (I don't think!). I listened to a couple of podcasts to try to form my own opinions. The output of the exercise was that I don't think these people are evil demons. I think they're largely just... people. Complex, right sometimes, wrong sometimes, and fun to hate on by the general media.
I may live in a completely different world here, but I've never seen a single conspiracy video on YouTube. All I see when I open YouTube is videos about science, tech, diy projects, etc.
You simply haven't viewed any conspiracy videos. My YouTube was very clean forever as well but a few days ago I saw a bright light in the sky (far brighter than any reasonable star or satellite I'd seen) and I googled around to see if there was anything about it online. Watched a YouTube video of a bright light in the sky with no explanation provided. Next day I watched a suggested Joe Rogan video taking about UFOs. Now a good third of my suggestions are UFO conspiracies. It's been getting better as I avoid them but YouTube was very quick to suggest multitudes of conspiracy because of a single Google search, and I had no history of interests like that.
So it's possible to have a reasonable and logical YouTube. However, even a single video can trigger YouTube's algorithm to attempt to pull you in.
I pay for Youtube Premium, but I find it curious (and objectionable) that their "View in Incognito" function (in Youtube) will not reflect Premium-ness. They show ads. They still know who you are -- because it's just an option to leave Incognito mode to get back to Premium/not-incognito mode.
This sibling comment response is literally giving me chills. Is this like a bot or something or someone who literally thinks the idea of sensationalist journalism is like a "huh that's interesting, never thought of that" kind of thing?
I am pretty sure sensationalist journalism predates real journalism... Why would a feudal lord want his subjects to really know what was going on in the world?
And it's not even ideological bias, it's more like the tribes from Survivor.
Joe Biden is more conservative than Donald Trump in a lot of ways, as far as ideology and policy go. But MSNBC viewers love him and hate Trump, Fox News the opposite. They're not fair weather fans, they're committed to their teams.
Ideally, they would produce content that people would, after watching, be happiest that they did watch (or most regret if they instead hadn't watched.)
This is my big complaint about Hollywood, too: if they charged people after the movie, instead of before; and 100% of the base price went to the theatre itself, while people could "leave a tip" for the filmmakers; then "box office" would actually correlate to the quality of the movie itself, rather than to the amount of effort put into the marketing campaign.
>This is my big complaint about Hollywood, too: if they charged people after the movie, instead of before; and 100% of the base price went to the theatre itself, while people could "leave a tip" for the filmmakers; then "box office" would actually correlate to the quality of the movie itself, rather than to the amount of effort put into the marketing campaign.
I suspect that the "box office" would correlate with how wealthy the audience was (or at least felt like they were) just as much as the quality.
I bet your scheme would get a lot more movies encouraging giving money to artists, tipping large sums of money, and targeted at rich people who have the money to give large tips.
> a lot more movies encouraging giving money to artists
Doesn't sound like a bad thing, IMHO.
> tipping large sums of money
This would kind of suck, given the stupidity of current North American tipping norms. But I'm not sure whether they could actually manage to communicate "the existing tipping system should be venerated" during an experience that directly involves exposure to/use of a different tipping paradigm. It'd be like watching a movie about monarchy, as the result of the audience holding a democratic vote on what movie to watch.
To be clear, it's a "different tipping paradigm" because of these properties:
• tipping would be entirely optional, in a selfish-pragmatist sense: there's no way in which a lack of tipping would get you blackballed from the theatre or even given a bad look, because the tips don't go to the theatre or its employees;
• you'd be tipping a collective of unseen workers far away who produced the experience a while ago, rather than tipping an individual close-by who did the work just now;
• there would be no possibility for tipping to get you individually a better quality of service, because your tip would be anonymized through the hub-and-spoke (studio-theatre-audience) delivery model. The studio would just see a pile of tip money, at best traced back to particular theatres.
Really, it's more equivalent to how film-festivals ask for donations; but they'd be asking for donations on behalf of the movie maker, rather than for themselves.
> targeted at rich people who have the money to give large tips
This is true, but 1. I'm not sure it's worse than whatever kind of targeting we have right now given the system's current inventives (which would be... cinematic populism?); and 2. this would put film in line with most of the arts, which generally run off of commissions/patronage.
Society doesn't generally outright reject the output of those fields of endeavor, despite their being mostly tuned to the tastes of their (rich) clients/patrons.
(Society does feel more "detached" from such works, though; there's a lot of "I don't get it" in art galleries, mainly because many works were created to be understood mostly by the patron and the social-milieu of people they showed it to, rather than by any passerby.)
It's not really supposed to, it's just something to think about.
> But I'm not sure whether they could actually manage to communicate "the existing tipping system should be venerated" during an experience that directly involves exposure to/use of a different tipping paradigm.
They could emphasize how bad "being cheap" is. Make "looking poor" and "being stingy" be bad qualities that cause people to look down on you, that ruin relationships, and so on.
news 'ideally' has nothing to do with 'want' it is about the latest new information. It is not supposed to be entertaining, it is supposed to transfer information. Again, those are ideals, and reality of human behavior rarely meets them.
She delvers a "how dare you..." line at the beginning that gets a good round of applause. Then she continues with her speech. Maybe I'm armchair QB-ing it, but she should have called out the audience for clapping. They're clapping for what she's saying, but as world leaders, it's their failure she's pointing out.
I think it _could_ work out well if posting a comment had a tiny cost. This would incentivize users to be mindful about what they write in their comments. I think this would be really fun to watch. The only thing is that there is a "chicken or egg" problem now, which would have to be solved with some sort of a donation from the Reddit itself.
Yes, I believe it's well understood in the social sciences that when you give people an extrinsic reward for some activity, it drastically reduces any intrinsic rewards they were getting for it. Some weird quirk of human psychology.
You can get people to do things out of the goodness of their heart, or you can pay them to do things, but it's really hard to do both at the same time.
Are there any schemes where it costs some tiny amount of eth/gas/whateverCoin to post content?
Theoretically that should decrease spam and increase high effort posts, but I could see it also reducing open source style contribution and increasing advertising masquerading as content. This is a hard problem to solve.
It is worth seeing if these negatives outcomes actually occur and of so they are not counterable in some way. If these risks can be mitigated then what is left is perhaps quite a useful tool - a metric for community contribution that can be used to make sybil-resistant governance decisions and monetary reward within a local economy.
Yes, this is why governance in this system should be tied to your original earned points so it cannot, at least directly, be bought. The scheme that this system currently employs, for instance, is weight = min(earned_points, current_transferable_points).
This is not governance of a state. It's governance of a private entity. Having token holders control the subreddit is no different than having shareholders govern a company. Assigning shares to owners, and having decisions made through shareholder vote, has proven to be the best way to govern large companies.
It’s not really clear if having a lot of these virtual tokens count the same as “wealth” though. Are there “wealthy” World of Warcraft players because WoW gold can turn into USD or are they just “rich?” I think it’s worth experimenting with at the very least.
Damn near, if not entirely, everything has monetary value to someone. Someone is going to want the premium features without putting in the work; they can buy coins from the people that do put in the work to buy the premium features.
The introduction of karma/upvotes had a similar impact on forums, and eventually led to forums improving in quality.
You could see karma/upvotes as a sort of proto-money, with a limited range of monetary qualities.
This just takes the same effect, and magnifies it, by fully monetizing those points, so I anticipate it will lead to better content and curation, just as karma/upvotes did when introduced.
I personally think it would definitely be useful to use the metric even without monetary value - imagine Reddit communities where the contributors have real, direct influence over rules, moderation style, mod team.
The job of moderation is soul sucking and involves rule creation and rule enforcement. You end up dealing with rule breakers regularly as opposed to only occasionally, skewing your perspective.
Ever use d2jsp back in the day? Massive community / forum with a currency tied to each user ( and a black market to go with ), atleast back then it worked
Perhaps with the reddit demographic it may be a little different, however I have always wondered what a similar system would be like on reddit
I've been part of r/EthTrader that is one of the subreddits that has this feature and had it for about 2 years now.
Dynamics within subreddit members got so bad that the subreddit split, and now almost all the action happens in r/EthFinance that does not have any community currency. The main deterioration was actually corruption. Because "karma" had monetary values and "karma monetary policy" could be set by admins, there was massive concentration of wealth for mods, with no incentive to change the rules.
EthTrader now has 5% of distribution allocated to mods (changed by community vote). Initially it was 15% (I agree this was too high). These two new subs will be at 10% for the mods. Monetary policy was only influenced by mods for the initial distribution which was set at 15%. After that it required a vote and eventually it did get lowered.
The craziest thing about this isn't just that so many people are controlling the literal news feeds to millions of others, but that they can do so while being anonymous, were not chosen or elected in any reasonable way, have zero accountability, and do not even have a public record of what they delete and censor
It’s much worse than that. It’s not many people, it’s a very small number that “run” Reddit.
92 of the top 500 subs are controlled by 5 people. [0]
Yesterday this post was locked, and so many of the comments were removed by mods with no self-aware irony at all - I just checked and saw very few [REMOVED] posts, I think they removed the evidence they removed them - crazy. Check ceddit.
Two mods, Cyxie and AwkwardTheTurtle moderate 1196 subreddits. They have more control over content on reddit than Sinclair Media has over news stations.
I saw this and went to check - in the few subs i confirmed, they are not top mods. Top mods have the actual power, to assume that they are setting the agenda for every sub by being the 14th mod out of 28, or the 9th and so on is impossible, given how fractious moderating teams can be.
Drama is leaking into HN without anyone doing a sanity check on the claims.
This is the most important comment on this page. The reasons for this are varied, but it's pretty obvious that cultural changes have occurred on HN during this pandemic.
Right now, criticizing any of the “default mods” will get you banned, making any post like the one I referenced will be deleted, Reddit is engaging in censorship like they never have before.
Take a look at r/WatchRedditDie/ and tell me how it’s nothing.
And dang has mod privileges on every single HN thread. Could you spell out exactly why this is supposed to be worrisome, instead of just hinting at it?
At least with Facebook and Twitter the editorializing is driven by their corporate culture and profit. With the Reddit mod system that water is way more muddied.
You can literally go to the user page and see where the user is a mod. cyXie[0], who has been mentioned, is mod in hundreds of subreddits. /r/gaming, /r/pics, /r/movies, /r/IAmA and /r/EarthPorn are their top 5 by members, with anywhere in between 26 to 100 million members, depending on how much those communities overlap.
That depends on how much policing over the other mods (specially those above you) the rest of the team enforces. If the mods generally don't mess with another mods decisions, or if people don't complain (I've posted complaints after a post of mine was unfairly deleted from a sub) they can "get away" with whatever action they take.
Sure, and that’s a far cry from the click bait claim that “5 mods control 92 of the top 500 Reddits.”
It’s not even a statement of actual harm- just that in case the teams don’t check, these guys could be getting away with removing stuff and therefore exerting some form of control.
There may be some kernel, of truth, just to be absolutely and needlessly generous with the claim.
However the truth is not going to be close, by a galactic mile, to the worthy of the drama with which this topic has been en-robed.
I‘ve been a mod. If a shadowy mod had the ability to enforce their will effectively over a single sub, let alone multiple teams - frankly they would be amazing and should write books on their team management, work ethic and obsession.
On Reddit, moderators are only allowed to add or remove moderators below them on the list. Therefore, the moderator who is listed first—generally the one who initially created the subreddit—can not be removed by anyone else, and has the power to remove all of the other moderators, making them the de facto "owner" of the subreddit.
I'm not necessarily trying to say this is better or worse than major media networks, but one issue is that it does appear to offer a greater illusion of 'this is what the people are actually saying'.
> were not chosen or elected in any reasonable way
Why would they be? The whole point of reddit is that users can create communities with whatever moderation and content policies that suit them. People visiting the subreddit aren't prisoners, they can view another subreddit, start their own, or just abandon reddit altogether. Who cares?
It matters a great deal because of the subreddit namespace land-grabs. Someone coming to reddit for the first time might naturally go to r/politics (which has become notoriously left-leaning) and not be aware of the rich history of censorship there.
> Someone coming to reddit for the first time might naturally go to r/politics (which has become notoriously left-leaning)
You've explained that someone might voluntarily visit a website on the internet that contains partisan content, but you haven't explained why this is a problem. They're not trapped on reddit, they didn't pay a cover fee to enter, who cares?
It's a problem because it sells itself as something else. I don't care that it's partisan, I do care that it's partisan but bills itself as something else to millions of eyeballs.
As terrible and kneejerk as/r/politics may be, it doesn't need to be some neutral ground of perfect arbitration for many reasons, the least of which is that it would be asking an insane amount of work from its volunteer moderators. If it skews left who cares? There are plenty of places to discuss politics online that skew to the right.
I have long held the position that the role of subreddit moderator should be elected by their respective communities rather than handed over to the first person to grab the namespace. There's no reason this position couldn't be determined in real time either. If a moderator does something against the wishes of the majority of the subreddit members it should be possible for the community to immediately replace the moderator. Blockchain's propensity for governance makes all of this feasible but I highly doubt reddit will ever implement anything of the sort. Political and monetary incentives are already too deeply entrenched from the top down to ever allow the power balances to shift to something truly meritocratic.
To accomplish this the community needs a sybil-resistant way to vote. This was a main, even primary, feature of community points in my opinion, and i hope experimentation in this regard can lead to a new relationship between mods and the communities they serve.
Well that would be a start but I think it's pretty obvious you would want to base subscribers' voting power on duration of subscription, community involvement/contribution, their standing in the community and so on. This way you would avoid other communities subbing solely to influence the outcome of an election.
I think it would be pretty neat to include metadata in the calculation of the voting power metric as well. Such as how each subscriber votes in relation to other subscribers and assign a higher score to those who vote inline with the community. The goal being to optimize for those subscribers who embody the spirit of the community. Of course that brings up issues of echo chambers but other kinds of metadata could be factored in to offset that too. I would have to think on it for a while to come up with something I felt was as meritocratic as possible.
The problem with a lot of that is "low effort" versus "high effort" content.
I've seen a lot of great subs and communities take a pretty dramatic shift when the influx of new users is too great. It's basically the "eternal september" problem -- when the new users start to overwhelm the old users, they're no longer able to be effectively inducted into the community and the community makes a hard shift, usually to lower effort content as the quicker it can be consumed, the quicker it can be upvoted or otherwise appreciated (and usually it's quicker and more accessible to create than truly valuable content).
Or more straightforward--any community which experiences significant growth will eventually devolve into memes.
The one mitigating factor can be moderation (e.g., Hacker News). But if the mods can be replaced as well, then there's nothing holding it back.
I'm personally longing for transparent moderation logs (like lobste.rs does) coupled with user-elected moderators. AFAIK this was one of the defining features of Aether (https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/) but it's still in development.
I hadn't considered the transparent moderation logs before but that's a great idea, so props to lobste.rs for that. Not sure that I've seen Aether before either, I'll have to check it out sometime.
This seems a) completely irrelevant to the topic, and b) almost completely irrelevant, full stop. Why is anyone supposed to care that a mod on /r/EarthPorn is also a mod on /r/Movies? Is /u/Cyxie pushing a sinister political agenda by selectively moderating which /r/DadJokes I can see? If I'm missing something, it would help if you or someone else could take the implicit and make it explicit. Spell out for me what this ominous warning is warning me about.
This user was trying to gin up an outrage campaign over something (which looks to me to be) pretty obviously benign. And since the outrage campaign called out five specific users, and he persisted in it after being told off, he was banned for harassment. None of this seems unusual. And the only connection I see to the current thread is "Reddit moderation is controversial, so putting currency in to the mix will also be controversial."
Downvoters, I wasn't being snarky, this is a genuine question. This whole subthread is baffling to me. I read through the thread[0] from yesterday as well, and I see a lot of people who seem to intuitively assume this is really bad, but no explanation as to why.
2. They will find out that Ethereum doesn't scale.
3. They will move to an off-chain solution.
On the plus side, the extra demand generated by Reddit will boost Ethereum transaction fees to insane levels which is going to make the Ethereum price go up (because higher fees = more lucrative mining). Then the Ethereum/Reddit insiders who organized this elaborate corporate scam are going to cash out.
I can't believe how quickly people forgot about CryptoKitties. Surely Reddit developers know about Ethereum's limits.
It seems that we have entered into a new economic era. It's called "Let's use cryptocurrency as a way to collaboratively fool our corporate employers for personal profit".
1. Find a big corporation whose managers are naive enough to agree to participate in some hyped up and non-scalable blockchain project.
2. Convince your managers to start such a project and do it in such a way that this project is going to boost demand for cryptocurrency X.
3. Employees buy cryptocurrency X.
4. Project launches, cryptocurrency X struggles to handle the load and as a result, transaction fees skyrocket, sharply driving up the token price.
5. Employees sell their cryptocurrency X at the peak.
6. Users complain about high fees. Employer realizes that this is not going to work and abandons the project.
7. Price crashes back to what it was before. Corporate employees are pleased with their profits. Corporation has no clue that they've just been scammed by their own employees. End users of the service who had to actually pay for the transaction fees paid for most of the cost.
Companies should be launching their own blockchains, not ERC-20 tokens; that only benefits Ethereum.
Alternatively, Reddit could roll this out slowly and give Ethereum 2.0 a chance to land. By 2021/2022 when Ethereum 2.0 Phase 2 lands, scalability of Ethereum should be much greater than it is today and it should be a solved problem.
Also, most of the transactions between Reddit users can be done off chain if needed. I'm not sure how they've designed their architecture, but it does make sense to aggregate multiple transactions into fewer, big transactions instead of small microtransactions for every comment.
>> Reddit could roll this out slowly and give Ethereum 2.0 a chance to land
This is a very optimistic proposition. I think they might never get there. Based on what I read so far, I have concerns that the final solution will be too complex, brittle and vulnerable.
I don't buy into these second layer solutions. They are still limited in terms of scalability (they just push the limit back a bit) and operational complexity tends to get out of control and that makes them much more vulnerable to exploits (especially DoS attacks which attempt to prevent or delay state changes and attacks which try to roll-back state changes).
With opportunistic rollups on the OVM you are using a second layer with thousands of TPS that leverages the exact same smart contract L1 code. No added complexity with acceptable performance for known use cases and it works today (It was shipped a week ago so still fairly new).
ZK-Roll-Up add no complexity. The settlement happens entirely on-chain, so the same from the perspective of outside parties as regular transactions. The off-chain portion is not needed for outside parties to verify the validity of transactions.
And zk-Roll-Up pushes up scalability to 1,500 transactions per second, which is entirely adequate for site-wide adoption of Ethereum-based tokens by Reddit.
ERC-20 transactions are much less compute intensive than the CryptoKitties contracts. At ~10-15 transactions/second this should be enough in the near term to support these community coins. Longer term Ethereum 2.0 will bring a much higher throughput.
That's one possible outcome. It's a small experiment and doesn't seem like a fully formed product yet. It could introduce accountability if tweaked differently. Maybe they'll try things like Bitcoin with the lightning network. Maybe a competing platform has a clever implementation of a similar idea and people migrate to it.
This brings to mind Carmen Hermosillo's 1994 essay, Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace[1].
i have seen many people spill their guts on–line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money–value. [...] i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul.
It’s great she had this self realization , but it doesn’t change things. It’s like being the friend that’s full of great advice but doesn’t get any in return. Or the friend who has the car and is always sought out for rides. After a while they may feel burned out overburdened or they feel like they contribute to humanity or whatever...
What I mean is this calculus happens regardless of medium.
And what about paying professionals to hear you out years on end?
>> i have seen many people spill their guts on–line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money–value. [...] i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul.
> It’s like being the friend that’s full of great advice but doesn’t get any in return. Or the friend who has the car and is always sought out for rides.
No it isn't like that. What you're describing is giving in the context of human relationship, but what she's describing is more like being exploited for someone else's profit (e.g. we'll pay you in "exposure").
> commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money–value.
Nit: you probably mean something more like "productized" or "marketed," not "commoditized." Commoditized implies something worse than what you're saying, that not only have you sold your feelings and thoughts online, that they're indistinguishable from anyone else's.
They haven't tried to overtly, aggressively monetize hacker news. Also subjectively the quality of the comments is still pretty high compared to other similar sites.
Hacker News is a marketing tool for Y Combinator and the companies they invest in - there’s a reason it’s on news.ycombinator.com and not e.g. hackernews.org, and a reason YC’s application periods and companies get hyped up on here. There’s a reason that pg’s writings get discussed ad infinitum.
It is also, secondarily, basically the “social media” equivalent of a newspaper - a mechanism for YC to push their opinion of how the world should work and create a consensus around that ideology.
Putting ads next to someone else’s content isn’t the only way you can make money off it.
All true, but there is also a lot of interesting stuff on the site, because there are a lot of interesting people. I don't really care if YC startups get to post at #6 on the front page occasionally. Plus, they're often interesting, so it's "targeted advertising" but done the right way.
Maybe how the board brought in enough money to continue hosting the blog and people could post their content for free? Bloggers can always go the self hosting route if they don't like content farms.
Like people complain about online ads. But we get so much capability and content for free this way. Maybe we aren't looking at the full picture.
> that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul.
You may not have profited in dollars, but you profited some utility out of it. Otherwise people wouldn’t be posting. Or they can do it on their own website. But then not enough people would see it.
In the economic sense of the word "utility", yes, they do. "Total satisfaction received from consuming the good or service". People wouldn't do drugs if they didn't get some benefit out of them, whether it be a high or something else.
I think lonelappde understands that and is saying that just because something gives you utility and it maximizes some sort of current idea of utility, it doesn't make it good and doesn't necessarily maximize you cumulative lifetime utility.
People who do drugs usually admit that they don't get some sort of lifetime benefit out of them. There is often regret. Social media use is often similar (and yes, this is social media and I should know better than to waste my time on HN). Some people get notoriety, money, etc from their use of social media, but most don't and even those that do may regret it or could have been fairly or just as successful without it. (Cal Newport makes some great arguments along these lines.)
> in other words, most people lurk; and the ones who post, are pleased with themselves.
> it wants to commodify human interaction, enjoy the spectacle regardless of the human cost. if and when the spectacle proves incovenient or alarming, it engages in creative history like, like any good banana republic.
I love the "old internet". Thank you for sharing this. I've tried hard and unsuccessfully to help others realize about the "ills" of adtech and how the hubs we've built extract money from our input, and the value we derive is... unfulfilling.
I understand the need for rewarding valuable community contributors. Even if Reddit, Hackernews and other Forums have traditionally worked in a voluntary fashion. And this is certainly some cool tech and a showcase of how cryptocurrencies can be useful.
That said, this measure will just lead to bots reposting (or in the near future generating GPT-2 like garbage) content in order to farm community points/ethereum.
As soon as you add in a financial incentive the whole situation gets ugly.
There's already a financial incentive - controlling the narrative is valuable. There are already bots posting/generating content on Reddit and other social media sites.
My first thought was whether this would require a browser with an Ethereum wallet (Status.im, Brave, Metamask, etc) to participate. It sounds like they're building this into the Reddit mobile app:
> In order to start contributing, users need to sign up to the "Vault," Reddit's local blockchain wallet, accessed via scanning a QR code through the official Reddit app.
It's not clear whether the Reddit mobile app is becoming a full web3 browser, but this makes it sound like there's a real wallet in there:
> There is a warning though. A private key is provided once a user creates their Vault, which is stored locally on their smart device. Meaning if the user doesn't create a back up of their key and loses their phone, they will be unable to access their community points, with Reddit claiming even they will be unable to help.
Cryptocurrency wallets are way too complicated for most people to use properly. It should be interesting to see if Reddit can raise the bar with an open solution. Hopefully it isn't some pointless proprietary implementation that actually uses a "proof of authority" network (aka shitty database).
Oh, I overlooked this tidbit that makes it sound like other web3 browsers should work:
> Reddit has stated that since most users don't own any ETH, the social platform is ready to cover the cost of gas "for now," for those using its in-built Vault, but those using other Ethereum wallets may be required to pay for the cost of gas themselves.
Why does it need to be decentralized? It's kind of stupid that just to avoid legal roadblocks like selling a security, Reddit will use a decentralized blockchain instead of just a database. There's no technical reason for it, just legal and political.
If this was only run on Reddit servers then nothing interesting could be done with it. These BRICKS and MOONS are ERC20 tokens which means they can be traded with other users on things like Uniswap, used as collateral for loans on Compound, and integrated into games such as Cryptovoxels. Being a token enables a lot more use cases than simply being another number in their servers.
Seems like this is their first attempt at commoditising engagement. By using ethereum, the tokens are trade-able inside an already liquid system. It also removes trust from the equation.
It doesn't look like anything with actual value is being traded? All I got from the story was that "political" means reddit admins can't take away someone's tokens.
Decentralization isn't really the point - it's going from non-tradable Reddit karma to tradable ERC-20 tokens.
Reddit definitely could have built a marketplace that let people trade karma from different subreddits, with a way to deposit and withdraw USD. Like you mentioned though there's the legal challenge of getting licensed as a money transmission service if you do that. But also, why do all that work when all that infrastructure already exists on Ethereum? Plus you get the added benefit that Reddit's tokens can be traded every other asset on Ethereum too.
One thing I never see talked about with this kind of stuff is taxes.
e.g, when Stellar was aidropped to Keybase users, that's... technically the start of a taxable chain of events. I donated mine to the Freedom of the Press foundation, and thus had to report it.
I had a time of it back during the second crypto craze, which I'm thankfully out of. I know how to report this crap. I am not sure, to this day, whether joe schmoe average user even realizes they have to.
So in this case my question becomes: is Reddit foisting a tax liability on their users without them understanding this? Does this ever come up in discussion and I've just missed it entirely?
This is probably one of the first instances that will trigger congress to fix the tax laws for crypto. There will be many more. The current tax code is written for corporate investors and foreign exchange traders, which have little bearing on game tokens, community tokens, and other use cases that will exist. These use cases are not going away and normal people are not going to suddenly file a few hundred pages of transactions on their capital gains forms just because they used some apps.
I think that's a very optimistic outlook, but I'm not sure it fits with a realistic viewpoint that they're taxed that way because people treat them like stocks, not cash.
At any rate, I would like to see Reddit acknowledge this.
I don't think anyone is getting in trouble with tax authorities for not reporting the loyalty points they receive in promotions. I think tax authorities target enforcement at revenue sources that make sense to tax, and don't pedantically go after people for these kinds of taxable events.
I think a big reason I use Reddit as much as I do, is the availability of two things. old.reddit.com, and third party mobile apps(I use an open source one that I've modified to my liking). This is yet another feature that won't ever work on those. I forget Reddit even has chat, which is available in old.reddit.com, but feels so disconnected from the experience that I don't even care.
"Users can hoard their points or spend them on unique features such as badges, custom emojis and GIFs in comments."
GIFs...in...comments? That will quickly lead to a worsening user experience, who thought this was a good idea?
"In the Reddit app your wallet is a full Ethereum wallet that has a private key and recovery phrase. You are able to use that wallet anywhere you would normally use an Ethereum wallet by exporting it."
Does this mean it can be converted to (or spent like) cash?
I wonder how this will spell out for communities that already support images in comments. Are they now circumventing reddit's monetization scheme? For example, /r/anime has a bunch of images you can insert. Only works on the Old layout though, no apps and not the new layout.
That's interesting, and to be expected from that sub, but how is Reddit going to comply with KYC if this implementation is to scale and their currency can also be transferred/used as cash?
How on earth did people ever post quality content on the internet without it being monetized? /sarcasm
Would this new feature would reward users any more than the existing karma/gilding mechanism? I am skeptical that the typical Reddit user would have even have a cryptocurrency wallet.
Nobody has the secret to maintaining quality content and discussion at scale though.
It’s the reason why the good content on Reddit is in super niche communities that have a high buy-in or some mechanism to maintain natural exclusivity.
It’s the reason that the common advice on Reddit is to not even look at the default subs and to avoid posting your favorite subs in popular threads.
It’s the reason that there’s so many migrations in the internet because every site’s content is constantly going downhill as it grows.
It’s the reason that the comment section on small YouTube channels is amazing but “YouTube comments” are a meme for being vile.
Kudos to Reddit for trying something novel here. I’m sure it will fail but it’s noble in the attempt. Having to work or pay to be part of good communities might be enough to keep them from eventually turning them south.
I wonder if using an ERC-20 token increases the chances of being able to migrate reputation to another site. That was supposed to be one of the appeals of using non-fungible tokens (NFTs, like ERC-721) for e.g. collectible card games and other in-game items.
I suspect there are gatekeepers, and this is decentralization theater, but I hope I’m wrong.
That depends mostly on whatever method is used to increment the reputation counter. If you disallow the "account" balance to go up from anything other than on-site activities or a one-time transfer, a lot of the abuse cases are mitigated.
Say HN comes out with a coin, and they accept reddit coins as a form of account linking. If I can only do this process a single time, my identity hasn't gained any reputation illegitimately.
> That depends mostly on whatever method is used to increment the reputation counter. If you disallow the "account" balance to go up from anything other than on-site activities or a one-time transfer, a lot of the abuse cases are mitigated.
You misunderstood me. A "reputation counter" co-opts the word "reputation" to refer e-points, which is something that's entirely different. But the fact that the terminology is misleading doesn't mean e-points have any actual relation to reputation, properly understood.
E-points are a broken system that you get when you try cheaply quantify something that is nearly unquantifiable (hammer, meet screw). Calling e-points "reputation" is what you do when you want to pretend your system does something it actually doesn't, or when you're too confused to know the difference.
From what I've seen monetization is usually associated with a sharp drop in content quality, at least for open platforms.
The platform usually assumes that monetization will cause market forces to drive the production of quality content. What usually ends up happening is that it drives the production of addictive content. That means repetitive, catchy, click bait, sensationalism, hate/fear porn, and trolling.
The very worst sorts of content are what drives engagement.
YouTube is the best example. It used to contain a good amount of quality content. Then they threw the monetization switch. There is still good content, but it's diamonds buried in an increasingly vast pile of shit.
Charlie Munger's quote "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome" comes to mind. If money is the incentive, it will attract a different kind of content and audience than without monetization.
Well in the YT case it seems that you're relying on content creators passion for creation to substitute for paid labour.
There's an argument to say a system built on such a premise is exploitative.
Either way, I don't really have a strong intuition for how incentives will work here. At the very least, a barrier-to-posting will filter out some bad actors and some good actors.
I agree there too. I have long criticized Medium as a magazine with unpaid writers. I was specifically speaking to the quality question, not to the other aspects of the platform and its economics and ethics.
Reddit doesn't care about community quality, only about ad impressions and engagement. The faster they can become more of a clickbait factory, the better it is for their bottom line.
These points are awarded based on contribution to specific subs and can be used within the local economy of that sub as monetary unit as well as for influence in governance (original earned points matter here so influence isn't directly purchasable).
This isn't like Reddit gold but more of a fundamental new tool for Reddit communities to experiment with.
Remember when Keybase rolled out free crypto for users, and it was immediately flooded by fake accounts, people were trying to hack github accounts to beef up their new Keybase user, etc? The Keybase community on reddit was overrun with idiots begging for help getting crypto, and whining that they weren't getting crypto.
I'm sure there will be no negative repercussions when rolling out a system that gives you money for posting pun chains and XKCD links.
I think that you are confusing two things. An airdrop with "free money" and an actual experience with community points and collectibles (like badges) that you mainly earn.
People currently pay Reddit real actual useful money (dirty fiat) for stupid shit... so if they instead say "You can buy these things for Posting Points, earned whenever you get t3h upd00ts", well, I expect people in poor countries to start posting like mad in the hopes of getting Posting Points which they can resell to Americans and other people with more money than sense.
> well, I expect people in poor countries to start posting like mad in the hopes of getting Posting Points which they can resell to Americans and other people with more money than sense.
For what it's worth, that actually happened but with real money instead, there were entire local economies in Macedonia and other countries simply financed by the advertising income of "fake news" sites: https://money.cnn.com/interactive/media/the-macedonia-story/
This seems like a bad idea. Any kind of monetary reward for using a community site shifts the incentives of the people that post there, and encourages low quality posts on the off chance they'll get rich from them.
Is it as bad as it could be? Depending on how it's implemented no; a system that just rewards points like this automatically is far worse than one that can be used to tip people for good work.
But the incentive shifts it brings are similar, and can be very, very bad for the future of a community or social network.
Just ask DigitalPoint. Ages ago they used to allow people to earn money from the ads displayed in topics they'd posted in via an adsense revenue sharing scheme.
The end result? The site's post quality took a serious nosedive, as people from low income countries signed up en masse to try and earn what they saw as 'easy' money. People used meaningless one liners in every topic on the off chance they'd get ad revenue there, or posted new topics with thin content for the same reason.
The site's reputation pretty much collapsed due to this, and even now it's not exactly seen as a place where meaningful discussions take place.
Same sort of goes for Quora too. We all know they pay people for posting questions, so now we get a ton of pointless questions that no one actually cares about because there's money involved.
So I'm not exactly thrilled by this announcement, nor about the effects it could have on Reddit as a whole if implemented site wide.
In ~2014 there was a brief craze for the spoof "Dogecoin" cryptocurrency, IIRC largely on reddit.
It still exists, although it's far below its peak interest [1] - and of course dogetipbot went bankrupt after an insider spent the cold storage, as is traditional.
I also remember them making this announcement (and it wasn't Dogecoin, as the other commenter says). I can't seem to find an announcement about this though.
I don't mind the little badge trinkets you get on reddit right now to pay for a reward for someones post you like. This isn't that at all this will suck. There will be a ridiculous amount of farming / shilling / astroturfing.
It proved to be a difficult task because it was right about the time that the Bitcoin core devs started actively discouraging Bitcoin's use in payments. This paired with a new investment round at Reddit resulted in the project being abandoned.
I do believe if they had seen this project through, Reddit would be in a much more healthy state right now
You have to realize that there is a difference between popular posts and quality posts.
For example, I am the main moderator on r/robots these days. When I came in, I got feedback from the users to clarify the content that belongs in the subreddit. They indicated that they wanted about equally to post about robotic art as well as real robots. Right now about 70% of posts are about real robots and 30% are about robot art or something called that.
But my point is, the posts that get upvotes are generally not the quality posts. The things that determine upvotes are number one, how easy is it to consume? So if it's a GIF rather than a video, it is likely to receive at least 10 times as many upvotes.
Maybe tied for number one, does it have some kind of base emotional effect? Most of the time means, is it sexual or vaguely sexual? Sometimes that means, does it look kind of like a cute baby robot?
Another one is, is it reductionistic? In other words, headlines or overall posts that tend to over-simplify something tend to be more popular.
Another one: randomness affects vote count significantly. Also, vote manipulation seems to be a factor. When we had some seemingly 'professional' redditors come in that really, really wanted to be mods and I let them for a couple of days, it seemed like they must have been willing to do anything to get their posts upvoted. And also to mod any and all subs that would let them. Which is why I kicked them out.
But the point of this is that in-depth videos of real robots will get few upvotes just because they are longer, and the ones that do better may just have good thumbnails but aren't actually good videos.
Which is to say that I have been watching the judgement of our community closely for months, and the posts that receive upvotes are absolutely not the best posts in general. I mean, sometimes good ones get upvotes. But sometimes they are ignored and utter trash gets upvoted.
It's really changed my perspective on democracy. Sometimes I want to quit being a mod there, but I am not sure the other mods care enough to bother remove the ads and spam that pop up every week or so masquerading as normal posts.
Hopefully this can incentivize for better moderation. Many subreddits have become the empires of power hungry "volunteers" who carefully prune wrongthink content.
> Hopefully this can incentivize for better moderation. Many subreddits have become the empires of power hungry "volunteers" who carefully prune wrongthink content.
Wouldn't it make it worse? The more vigorously you ciclejerk, the more the jerk will reward you with a brand new kind of e-points.
I think too many people but too much faith in quantified reward mechanisms.
You are absolutely right, which is why I was "hoping". I just had an awful experience with a power tripping moderator on a mental health related subreddit. I have no recourse, I just had to move on.
Community currencies are REALLY interesting in that it allows for local inflation but also prevents currencies in one community from dominating opposing communities.
For example, if there was a currency for 'coal' then the 'environmental' community could basically reject that currency.
Right now if coal mining makes a ton of money that's all that matters. They can dominate the local economy.
Does anyone have thoughts on why they included r/Fortnite in the initial beta?
My best guess is that it sees such high traffic & is populated with non-crypto focused Reddit users. Let's the company get a big dataset with a group of consumers who aren't predisposed to Crypto.
I reached out to Reddit for comment but they just gave me a classic canned response.
This launch involves two subs, r/fortnitebr and r/cryptocurrency, and builds from an existing centralised version that r/fornitebr, among a few others, was already using. So this moves their points onto the Ethereum blockchain. It is indeed interesting to expose non-crypto users to the Ethereum version. For instance, of the two subs r/fortnitebr has so far 4x the number of transactions and new addresses despite being roughly comparable in subscriber size (it has more active visitors by roughly 2.5x). Personally i think that speaks commendably to the ux that Reddit has been able to achieve.
Just what Reddit needs, an even better reason for bots and reposting. It will be interesting to watch this play out.
With all of the changes in the past year or two of the Reddit team trying to monetize it in any way they can I've noticed I find less and less interesting content.
Yeah, "we want to encourage positive behavior, so we added money" doesn't strike me as being realistic.
I'm sure the real goal is to sell tokens and to shift to a microtransaction model where users have to pay for "premium" features. That's why there's a hard cap on tokens and they're consumed on use.
Worse though, I think it might be an underhanded way to sell influence for money if it doesn't stay a closed system. While the users are distracted with "premium" stickers and emojis, bad actors will be paying real money to buy visibility and influence.
For me, the appeal of Reddit is that I can jump in and participate and it's fairly democratic, at least in the smaller subreddits. As soon as they turn it into money = visibility = credibility it's ruined.
I talked to someone years ago who was brought on at Reddit to help do something similar but ran into issues with the coins potentially being construed as equity in the company.
It's a token, not ETH. Basically it's a made up ledger that is stored in the Ethereum blockchain. The only way money comes into the picture is that moving tokens around in the ledger costs Gas (think of Gas like mining fees for BTC), which is paid for with ETH. As the article says, Reddit is paying Gas costs for now.
Neither do I, but does it have to? Like any business, Reddit has ways that it makes money and ways that it spends money. This could be considered valuable [0] enough to the site that they continue to cover the costs of running it.
[0] - By driving more traffic, more engagement, better content, and/or other intangibles.
The crucial question is if subreddits will be able to completely keeps themselves out of this wild scheme, I don't think r/AskHistorians is going to appreciate getting this weird distortion imposed on their existing incentive structure for instance.
I think this definitely answers "what is blockchain good for". It will allow subreddits to monetize effectively and encourage users to post quality content using economic incentives.
Yeah, this is what reddit needed - now bots will keep reposting content not only for Karma(and they are coping whole comment trees, not just main submission) but for real money (or at least something tradeable for $)
Content gilded or awarded value by Reddit users at large isn't the same as quality content.
Notice the higher signal on Hacker News, with no compensation, because high quality contributors want to contribute with no compensation and moderation is consistent and intentional.
Hah! If the web and cryptos has taught us anything, this will be abused to hell with SEO content and all kinds of scummy techniques to get posts to the post. Expect allegations of mod power abuse, stolen content, shady cross subreddit "collaborations" and much more not that people can make money on their submissions.
> It will allow subreddits to monetize effectively and encourage users to post quality content using economic incentives.
Quality content, properly understood, is almost always created because of other-than-economic incentives. In actuality, economic incentives are in conflict with its production, and quality only emerges with the economic incentives are (at least partially) subdued.
There are some interesting use cases being looked at by big companies such as Microsoft’s decentralised identity provider, Starbucks for coffee supply chains, and Many banks for interbank transfers etc.
Not sure I see the need for a blockchain here, couldn't they just store points in their db and scale much better with less complexity? Whats the blockchain advantage here?
These BRICKS and MOONS are ERC20 tokens which means they can be traded with other users on things like Uniswap, used as collateral for loans on Compound, and integrated into games such as Cryptovoxels. Being a token enables a lot more use cases than simply being another number in their servers.
Not exactly the way I proposed it to Steve Huffman [1] but happy to see reddit experimenting with the idea of value for value. A few questions they hopefully will try to answer:
1. Does trading values (e.g., money for content) make for a more peaceful environment in social networks and other online communities?
2. Does allowing an easy and voluntary way to reward content creators improve the quality of the content (e.g., higher accuracy, fact-based arguments, better ideas, more toleration of different ideas)?
3. Can users make enough money from content creation without relying on advertising (thus disrupting journalism and even removing the draw for companies to sell private information)?
4. Will users start to think in terms of exchanging values and, if so, will these thoughts then spillover to other parts of their lives?
I think this is a neat experiment and it will be fun to watch what happens but I'm skeptical that this moves the subreddits in a positive direction.