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This is not as bad as what Digg did way back, and then Digg very quickly became irrelevant.
But it's kind of in the same direction, and I suspect that this could easily have a negative impact. Creating desperate noise that will drown out meaningful content and debate.
Lmao what could possibly go wrong
What kind of idiots are in the boardroom or senior leadership meetings saying, "This is a great idea!" Must be some hella salesmen in there to convince people this won't run the site further in the ground.
Reddit is letting you to use its platform for money laundering.
All I can think is "here come the drums". It will be a train wreck...
Oh great, a new way to launder money! /s
Someone tell Menendez.
Any old heads remember Living With style forums? This did not work out well for them.
LMK when they're desperate enough for karma conversion, I've got a half mil ready to go
Fuck reddit but a broken clock is right twice a day. Advertisers pay reddit because there are eyeballs on their site. Eyeballs are on their site because of the things people post. Shouldn't the people making those posts be getting a chunk of that advertising money? Maybe some payment to mods for all their hard work? Do all the negative commenters prefer that reddit just.. keep all the money for themselves and their shareholders?
wHaT abOut thE BotS? Yes, the bots are a problem, they are a problem because reddit actively decides to let them run rampant. There are many tried and true solutions to this problem and with an incentive system they actually become easier to control. It's easier to control people with economic incentives. You can't stop every bot but you can stop most bots and you can make botting harder and more expensive to the point that it's not worth it for most would-be bot users.
All of the last 20 years of social media engagement on the internet has been companies falling for the Pepsi Challenge.
The Pepsi Challenge was an ad campaign by Pepsi to get people to blind taste Coca Cola and Pepsi side by side and decide which one they liked better. Pepsi won a majority of the time, which led to a disastrous reformulation of New Coke (before customer complaints caused a reversal back to Coca Cola "Classic"). Now the consensus is that the Pepsi challenge was given in the wrong quantity to measure: people preferred a sip of Pepsi over a sip of Coke, but the preferences shifted back the other way when asked to drink an entire can.
Modern internet feedback loops reward users for very short term bursts of preference, leading to an engagement loop where each step seems like the best step for happiness and engagement, but where the overall loop leaves people feeling shallow and disengaged. Clickbait works at getting clicks but people don't actually like or respect the sites that do it. Same with influencer accounts working the recommendation algorithm rather than user satisfaction.
Providing a monetary reward will speed up that disconnect, and I think places where influence is rewarded with actual money will bring out a downward spiral.
If the posts are somebody else's work with the watermark cropped off... probably not?
It sounds good in theory but look at how people behave just for the fake internet points. Every top comment in any reasonably large subreddit reads like a bot trying to input all the right words to make the hive mind reward them. It’s why subreddit simulator is so creepy.
I guess you could say that’s pretty much how all communication works but at such a large scale, it starts to get very homogenized and the site starts feeling like one person interacting with themselves. There’s no room for actual discussion because anyone deviating from the hive mind gets buried and attacked. I’m not even talking about politics, go to a guitar subreddit and imply that wood makes a difference in guitar tone. You will get downvoted and all the responses will be over the top indignant which shuts down all discussion.
If you can turn your pandering in to cash, this only gets worse.
Like others said, it sounds good in theory to let users profit as well as the site itself, though ultimately, I think the whole idea of profit in this context is antithetical to online discussion.
In my opinion, an ideal forum or discussion board isn't about farming karma, awards, or real currency. It's about speaking your mind about subjects or topics you are passionate about or have something you want to chime in on. Adding an additional monetary incentive only corrupts those involved, which includes Reddit as we've seen. But I also think this extends to the users as well. If people are compelled monetarily to post opinions that will gain awards or upvotes, discussion will become even more inorganic, for lack of a better term. In my opinion, the site will have lost sight of generating meaningful discussion, even more than it already has.
It's why I like how Lemmy doesn't have universal karma or awards. The incentive of using the site rests solely on the content of the discussions you have, save for the exception of moderators who want to coalesce power. I think monetization is just bloat and only serves to make social media more addictive than it already is.
While I'm not saying Reddit should go the donation-only approach, as I think it is too late for that, I do think keeping monetization to a minimum is in the best interest of any forum.
How is this not going to increase the amount of bots, endless re-posts and in general FUD they get inundated with?
On the surface it sounds great and all, but to me it seems like it will accelerate the site being the shithole that it was headed to. Introducing money into anything like this typically brings out the worse in people.
Why do they care if it does? Creators get paid on a per-gold basis, which means people are paying reddit in the first place for gold. Whether bought gold is spent on bots or human users is probably entirely immaterial to the Admins. Reddit sees engagement and (ideally) spending go up.
Reddit could crack down on bots if they want to. It's almost entirely a separate issue. Adding money likely isn't going to change much since obviously bot farms already have a profit motive to spam reddit and the payouts aren't huge.