Reddit’s blockchain-based “Community Points” rewards crash after sunsetting::Tokens based on subreddit reputation saw dips over 85% after the announcement.
While most people likely never noticed the loss of their Community Points, some who actively acquired them, or even bought more on the blockchain, are reporting losses of thousands of dollars. Conspiratorial claims of Reddit having “rugged” the currencies—pulling money from the system before a sudden shutdown—floated on social media.
I’m gonna laugh so hard if people get insider trading charges on shit coins because of this.
Someone spent thousands of dollars? Or many users collectively spent thousands of dollars?
I’m not sure which is more believable.
Well, it is likely the same as with mobile gaming. A few whales spend thousands of dollarinos on a game because they just happen to be rich.
…or at least so addicted they’ll spend themselves into trouble
Even then, they’re not likely spending as much as the rich fuckers. No matter how addicted you are, there’s only so much you could spend before you’re just out of money.
There’s streamers to consider nowadays, too. Many live service competitive mobile games have streamers that get fed money from advertisers to fund their in-game purchases.
Why on earth would you invest money into reddit coins?
Who could possibly have predicted this?!?
Oh. Yeah. Anyone with two working brain cells.
That’s a high bar, I mean they are still on Reddit after all
This was obviously going to end up flat on its face, but still, seeing Reddit fail is some satisfying schadenfreude ngl.
“take your reputation anywhere you want on the Internet.”
How is this supposed to work exactly? Does any other site care about your reddit karma?
It doesn’t.
Crypto bros are really fond of the whole “use the blockchain to take your assets from one platform to another” grift, but it:
- Doesn’t work if the other platform doesn’t support it
- Could be done without a blockchain if both platforms agree to share a database
It’s like you said: Do any other websites care about your Reddit karma? No. Why would they? It’s only 2 uses are to make people addicted to Reddit through gamifying their opinions and filtering bot accounts by having a minimal karma threshold to post on subs.
This is basically the issue of almost every hypothetical use of the blockchain that advocates throw around.
“You could move all your skins from Counterstrike to Valorant?”
OK. Putting aside the unbelievably complex technical and practical issues, why would either Valve or Riot want this? In this scenario Valve is making it easier for their customers to leave, and Riot is effectively giving you a bunch of cool skins for free.
These people watched Ready Player One, totally ignored the part where the entire premise was “One single corporation controls basically all interactive media and that’s really bad” and decided that this sounded like a cool idea.
Basically every software engineer laughed their ass off once they realized they were serious about that stuff.
It just shows such an intense lack of understanding of how software and business works. Thinking that blockchain is just some magic powder that can bring their wishes to reality.
It’s what happens when the only use case for a tech product is its ability to interest venture capital.
We’re seeing the same thing now with “AI”
Eh, no, I’m going to disagree with you there.
Yes, AI is trendy, hyped, and a buzzword at the moment, but at the core of it there really is a very useful and practical technology (and it’s also much more varied than just LLMs). Take for the fact that generative AI is actually being used in practice, to do more or less what it was advertised to.
You’re right to say that generative AI has at least some practical applications. That’s a valid distinction as compared to crypto, and it’s exactly why the venture capital world pivoted to it so hard.
However if you compare how these companies are selling their technology to what it actually does, the gulf is astonishing. Almost every story of a company actually trying to use this tech has been a disaster. And what we hear from advocates is the constant refrain of “It’s early days”, but that’s exactly what we heard about crypto and distributed blockchain for over a decade. Meanwhile a lot of the experts are increasingly of the opinion that most of the proposed applications of AI will never reach the point where the tech actually works as advertised. Sooner or later, it’s gonna recommend a food bank as a tourist destination. And human validation isn’t going to solve this because inattentional blindness is a thing.
I do think that there are probably, eventually, real uses for this tech, but we’re clearly no where near them yet. Right now it’s still all just magic beans.
You need to be more specific than just say “AI” here. Experts do not say that AI will never reach a point of true general intelligence, but they may say that LLMs cannot do that.
AI is a big field, and it has seen massive improvements over time. Sure, don’t oversell its current capabilities, but we don’t really know where the current path leads. Current AI is already plenty impressive.
The more obvious flaw is not why would they want to do it but why would they want to do it with blockchain.
Exactly! And it’s not like crossover content doesn’t happen between publishers already without blockchain. Look at Fortnite. All it takes is a promo code.
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Anyone remember Klout, I think it was this but before blockchain.
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What could possibly be the point of a decentralized currency that is utterly dependent on a centralized system?
Just another database posing as “blockchain” to sound hip.
Answer: no point.
Probably to get the normie crypto people to use Reddit.
“Normie crypto” sounds like an oxymoron
Why the hell did people buy this crap with real money
Because they didn’t accept monopoly money at the time?
Classic investment scam- offer a valueless item at a price, get everyone hyped up about the new item which is supposed to gain value, get people to invest, let the insiders in the company know so they can sell off, then get rid of it altogether. I hope they get prosecuted for this.
Did Reddit actually accept any money for these junk tokens? It kinda sounds like they didn’t, they just issued them and then decided to quit using them. If they did accept money for them, then yeah, sure sounds like securities fraud.
In general, the cryptocurrency “industry” cannot exist without crime (ransomware, fraud, money laundering, etc.) – but this one just seems like a bad product that was cancelled. Most major cryptocurrencies should be considered to be backed by crime, in the same sense that dollars used to be backed by gold and silver: the underlying value of Bitcoin is that you can use it to pay criminal ransoms or acquire fentanyl. But this one just seems to have been backed by fake internet points.
I can’t believe they ever had value.
they never have
For some reason, i read that like Jon Snow from Game of Thrones with “ey’ neveh’ave”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Reddit’s Community Points, a blockchain-based rewards system for quality posts, comments, and other contributions in a subset of subreddits, is going the way of many similar tokens launched during the crypto boom times: away.
As of November 8, coins like the “MOON” that r/CryptoCurrency used for tips, premium features, and even voting shares will be removed from users’ Vaults.
Shortly before 3 pm, MOON had dropped just below $0.02, a loss of more than 85 percent, with fellow Reddit currencies BRICK (r/FortNiteBR) and DONUT (r/EthTrader) seeing similarly precipitous plunges.
Conspiratorial claims of Reddit having “rugged” the currencies—pulling money from the system before a sudden shutdown—floated on social media.
Its newer Contributor Program, which rewards users with actual money from the Reddit gold and karma they accrue, is one such example.
With a certain number of Community Points, moderators could offer “Special Memberships,” which would allow for badges, GIF embeds, animated emojis, or other upgrades.
The original article contains 538 words, the summary contains 154 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I was on reddit for 15 years and never once heard of these until people posted articles on Lemmy.
Same I figured it was just one of their trendy marketing strategies and a way to monetize the platform.
Is it … solar powered?
Solar FREAKIN Crypto!
It’s indisputable they failed to think this through, but did Reddit make any money off the attempt alone?
Is this entire switch to blockchain and then abruptly stopping it a net loss, or a minor, short-term net gain?
Serious question, because while I have a general understanding of what blockchain is, the whole who benefits/who loses and how that happens thing has become far too complex for me to really follow, so I’m hoping someone here can tell me.
Also, they didn’t shut it ALL down, apparently there are still some rubes to be fleeced via blockchain:
Notably, Reddit’s NFT marketplace was not targeted for closure.
So. Net loss? Net gain? Neutral? What’s your best guess, and why?
Likely only Reddit can say. I don’t think Reddit was ever trying to make money off Community Points directly (in contrast to their NFTs), but rather to boost engagement. Whether or not it did, and by enough to offset the costs of starting and maintaining the system, we’ll likely never know.
You’re probably right on all counts, but thank you for your response. Anymore when people start talking about the never ending shell game of crypto my eyes just glaze over, lol. “We’ll likely never know” seems to be the final line of every crypto story these days, when it comes right down to it.
I think it really boosted the worst kind of engagement. I found a whole spam network there modded by a single egomaniac who spent their whole life creating subreddits, maintaining different personas on the site, crossposting posts between all their alt accounts and subreddits, to external subs they didn’t control, etc. People who noticed spammy behavior were silenced and many who spoke out were harassed by them through false reports or just the person calling them slurs in comment threads. Admins recently banned all their main subs and accounts, but they constantly lost individual alt accounts for this behavior. They still operate smaller subs on the site and behave the exact same way.
The belief amongst some is that reddit basically did a rug pull. People could and would buy these crypto points with real money, so reddit likely made money. Odds are it just was not successful outside of niche subreddits, hence:
Its newer Contributor Program, which rewards users with actual money from the Reddit gold and karma they accrue, is one such example. “Part of why we’re moving past this product is that we’ve already launched, or are actively investing in, several products that accomplish what the Community Points program was trying to accomplish, while being easier to adopt and understand,” Reddit’s director of consumer and product communications, Tim Rathschmidt, told TechCrunch.
Crypto also hopefully seems to be on the decline, and it’s possible Reddit did not want to appear to be behind the times.
Those karna whores be crying lulz xD
heh.
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