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.
Eiim@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
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.
ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
banneryear1868@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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. Admins recently banned all their main subs, and they constantly lost alt accounts for this behavior, but they still operate smaller subs on the site and behave the exact same way.