This seems like an interesting but risky experiment if Reddit really does tie something like this to user contributions.
First it seems like a massive regulatory headache. From Reddit's perspective, are they going to send out 1099s to their users? Will they require them to have real names and addresses on file? From a user perspective, will I need to worry about my Reddit activity when filling out my tax returns.
It is also a gamble for Reddit as there is a psychological principle know as the overjustification effect [1] that is at play here. Once a person is paid for a habit they previously only did for enjoyment, the habit will generally become less enjoyable. Reddit turns from a hobby to a job.
Finally there is the issue of "circle jerking". Reddit is already notorious for its annoying and dangerous group think. Can you imagine if people could actually turn their karma into straight cash? The incentive will be even higher to simply echo back to the group what you think it wants to hear.
slg really hit the nail on the head here. the overjustification effect is well known and hints at how potentially dangerous this idea is to Reddit's future.
I see the point Sam's trying to make by doing this, but does Reddit have a contribution problem? Hardly! If millions of people contribute to make a site awesome voluntarily, for no greater reward than the attention of their peers (and a desire to build a great community), introducing a new incentive might very well alter the magic bit that makes Reddit so great.
What about directing this 10% towards philanthropic or political goals instead? So by contributing my time towards making Reddit better, I'd get that attention I want and help make the world a better place.
This could have a dramatic impact on reddit's raison d'être, making it a powerful (and defensible) power for good.
Even attaching a charity financial incentive to what I do is enough to trigger my time-for-money logic and conclude my time would be better spent working, eg, 1 hour of contracting a day instead of 1 hour of redditing a day would do WAY more for charity than my reddit contributions would.
The problem is that once you monetize my time explicitly in any way, it both transforms the class that activity is in (no longer recreational!) and causes me to evaluate how successful that time is at being monetized (worse than mowing my neighbors lawn!)
The reality is that the mere suggestion of reddit doing this has already caused me to start reevaluating my relationship with reddit, because they've made it so obviously commercial.
I think reddit may have seriously blundered in this idea.
Exactly, all evidence suggests this could easily reduce user contributions by 50% or more. Why not instead do something that would actually increase intrinsic motivation? E.g. since IIRC people still retain copyright over the writing they publish, why not make it easier for people to turn that content into newspaper articles, blog posts, books, etc.
I'd be happy if I could just download all my comments. Right now it's restricted to the most recent 1000. I've been complaining about this to the admins for years and they keep saying they're working on it.
I have to ask, how notorious? Is this a documented effect (on Reddit, not in general) or just the noise that people on the site are repeating much like any other meme?
Most accusations of "circle jerking" I hear there consist of shock and horror that certain communities seem to have certain beliefs/thoughts/ideas in common and that they were dared to be disagreed with. (I.e, you really should not be all that surprised when you try to float progressive ideas in /r/republican, or vice versa, and find your comments downvoted)
It's to the point where I almost reflexively downvote anyone on Reddit who brings it up, since 99 out of 100 times, it's a complaint that they were disagreed with, rather than anything that adds to the discussion at hand. (Which, IMO, is the explicit purpose of downvotes)
I have to ask, how notorious? Is this a documented effect (on Reddit, not in general) or just the noise that people on the site are repeating much like any other meme?
I think there have been some incidents which were dangerous and notorious. In particular, the misidentification of the Boston Bomber was one case that attracted mainstream attention[1].
Funny, since i find that to be the best example of communal remorse and reflection that i can dredge up for reddit. Compare reddit's turnaround to how quickly and thorough redactions take place in establishment in-groups of journalists or business leaders or politicians. The fact that an amorphous group of humans can come to have reddit's institutional memory and remorse is astounding imho. The boston bombing error is known and passed down like folklore from old members to new, keeping similar actions on check.
Feeling remorse about being so wrong is not laudable, it's just normal. The problem is that they got it wrong in the first place.
> The boston bombing error is known and passed down like folklore from old members to new, keeping similar actions on check.
No it's not. The Boston bombing thing was just the most high-profile example in a long line of similar problems. Here's one from before the Boston Bombing:
There's a hilariously sad current bandwagon effect going on about the user Unidan, a "reddit-famous" biologist who, after a petty argument with another user, turned out to have less credentials than he claimed and to have manipulated votes using sockpuppets.
This is possibly the most hated guy on Reddit right now. Not whoever started the whole boston bombing witchhunt. Not someone who actually did anything harmful. Just a guy who got "unfair karma". And unlike with the boston bombing, there is zero self-awareness about how idiotic this whole thing is (and how common it is for anyone remotely popular on that site to manipulate votes in some way). It's a sad display, and I cannot imagine what this would turn into with more concrete monetary incentives.
If you think it's about the karma, you are seriously misinformed.
Voting accomplishes two things - giving/taking meaningless points, and determining where (and if) your posts are ranked on the board.
The problem with Unidan is that he used a botnet to cheat the system. When you're on the new queue or have just commented in a large thread, a single vote or two can be the difference between ending up at the top of the thread (or board) or never being seen at all.
It's not about the points, it's about the fact that the voting system is pretty damned sacred to Reddit. By breaking pretty much one of the only global rules, he cheated people out of a chance to have their own posts/comments seen. We can only speculate as to how long it was going on.
Creating "useful content" is not a valid excuse for usurping community for your own self-aggrandizement. Even HN has a voting ring detector. Why do you think that is?
I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to be banned and what not. I'm saying it is stupid and pathetic that he is despised to the core more than a pedophile strangling kittens would be on that site.
Know any pedo-kitten-stranglers that made the front page via one of the default subreddits? You seem to be very quick to disparage a lot of people who are mad for very understandable reasons.
If by "Recognizes its mistake", you mean "have a majority of people who were not involved talk about how the other guys fucked up using the 'we' pronoun".
It sure is easy to point out your own flaws when you're in someone else's body.
Right, so you end up with these subreddits full of people reaffirming each other's viewpoints. Nobody wants to hear anything challenging their views, but at the same time they stomp their feet and whine without a hint of irony, "why doesn't the other side just get it?" This also leads to schisms resulting in vicious infighting. It's pretty much the complete opposite of an environment conducive to intellectual development.
There is extreme group think in subreddits like /r/politics and /r/libertarian. The main problem is that the quality of content degrades extremely quickly as the community grows. It has been eternal september there since Digg v4.
Is that unexpected though? Or even a necessarily negative thing? I don't think so - especially in the case of a political ideology discussion forum like /r/libertarian, most of the people who went there to seek it out and subscribe to it, more likely than not, share those beliefs.
What is the difference between describing something as extreme group think, and describing it as a circle jerk? How does one differentiate between this being a valid description, and an unwillingness to accept that one's position is the unpopular one?
> Finally there is the issue of "circle jerking". Reddit is already notorious for its annoying and dangerous group think. Can you imagine if people could actually turn their karma into straight cash? The incentive will be even higher to simply echo back to the group what you think it wants to hear.
This was the first thing I thought about.
If you check /r/subredditdrama and /r/karmaconspiracy you can see literally hundreds of exemples where people go absolutely nuts for imaginary internet points: coordinate and downvote other people's content, mods with massive subreddit bans, etc. Can you think about what they will do for cash?
Can you imagine if people could actually turn their karma into straight cash? The incentive will be even higher to simply echo back to the group what you think it wants to hear.
Sure, but this is differs little from cable news, content mills, or many blogs. Fortunately, subreddits make it easy to filter-out the shallow echo chambers.
Karma is not mentioned at all in the article. They may have in mind a more "liquid" version of Reddit Gold (which you can pay in Bitcoin for some time already, btw).
The regulatory aspect only comes in when shares are cashed out probably. The new RedditCoin wouldn't legally be shares so it's not bound to the same regulations. Only once the Coin is cashed into a share would it transfer and get bound to the same regulatory hurdles. At least that's the way that they'll probably try to set it up to avoid those issues.
"Securities" includes more than stock--it includes debt instruments (i.e., bonds), equity instruments (i.e., stock), and derivatives of debt or equity instruments (i.e., options).
A cryptocurrency backed by shares in reddit would probably be treated as a derivative security, and would almost certainly be regulated by the Securities Exchange Commission.
Additionally--not sure what "former SEC" lawyer they talked to, but unless they structure this offering very carefully, they will run afoul of both state and federal securities registration laws. If they structure the offering to avoid those laws (which is legal, i.e., as a private or in-state offering), then the cryptocurrency would be so limited in its availability that only an extremely tiny handful of users would ever be able to own it unless Reddit goes public.
So if they give vouchers to 100 Mio users that are redeamable if the company gets public. This would work? I mean if they give 10% of the company to reddit users via vouchers and the company gets worth 100 Billion that would be 100 Dollars per person.
First it seems like a massive regulatory headache. From Reddit's perspective, are they going to send out 1099s to their users? Will they require them to have real names and addresses on file? From a user perspective, will I need to worry about my Reddit activity when filling out my tax returns.
It is also a gamble for Reddit as there is a psychological principle know as the overjustification effect [1] that is at play here. Once a person is paid for a habit they previously only did for enjoyment, the habit will generally become less enjoyable. Reddit turns from a hobby to a job.
Finally there is the issue of "circle jerking". Reddit is already notorious for its annoying and dangerous group think. Can you imagine if people could actually turn their karma into straight cash? The incentive will be even higher to simply echo back to the group what you think it wants to hear.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect