Excerpts from the link:
Fake internet points are finally worth something!
Now redditors can earn real money for their contributions to the Reddit community, based on the karma and gold they've been given.
How it works:
- Redditors give gold to posts, comments, or other contributions they think are really worth something.
- Eligible contributors that earn enough karma and gold can cash out their earnings for real money.
- Contributors apply to the program to see if they're eligible.
- Top contributors make top dollar. The more karma and gold contributors earn, the more money they can receive.
Not just anyone can be a contributor. To join and stay in the program, contributors need to meet a few requirements:\
- Be over 18 and live in the U.S.
- Only Safe for Work contributions qualify
- Earn xx gold and karma each month
- Provide verification information. You must have at least 10 gold and 100 karma to begin verification.
- NSFW accounts aren't eligible for the Contributors Program
Here's my take on this. Since this is from the latest version of Reddit's ~~broken browser for a single site~~ "official app", it's likely a recent development, triggered by recent changes in the platform. Reddit Inc. is likely worried about contributors leaving due to the app-pocalypse, and is trying to counter it by throwing them some spare cash.
And I'm going to be honest: holy fuck this sounds like a Bad Idea®. For three reasons.
The first one is demographics; since 47% of the users are Americans, and 21% of them are 10-19yo, it's safe to say that ~60% of the users are ineligible, and thus will only contribute for free.
Will they? People often don't mind contributing for free, as long as the others are in the same page. The picture changes once you get at least someone making money out of it - odds are that those 60% will disengage further.
The second reason is that Reddit Inc. is disregarding the fluff principle. If the money threshold is the number of upvotes and awards that someone gets per period of time, why would the person bother with high quality content? Or even quality content at all - it's easy to make up for lack of quality with quantity. For example, setting up a simple bot to scrape the top posts and repost them. (Is Reddit expecting the mods to delete those reposts? OH WAIT)
The third and final reason is who you expect to give awards to those people, before they feel pissed and discouraged and leave the program, breaking even further their trust in the platform. Who would even buy Reddit gold on first place? The Reddit community has been outright mocking Reddit gold for years, and the suckers actually buying it were the ones who were the most engaged and emotionally attached to the platform, to the point that they're willing to "help" it. (As if corporations need help, but whatever.) It would be a shame if Reddit happened to piss off exactly that demographic... like it did.
Everyone should make a concerted effort to abandon reddit. I, and many others, left digg.com back whenever that whole shitfest imploded and many other sites have been abandoned over the years when they went to shit due to bad leaders/service became shit.
Use lemmy or whatever else that isn’t reddit. Let it die. The biggest thing on reddit is the nerdy shit like network, linux, windows, android, etc. troubleshooting and help from actual people of various backgrounds, some very skilled, to normie users and everyone else.
If you absolutely “must” use reddit for some reason, and overall I don’t see a must-use use there except aforementioned troubleshooting help, then use adblocked desktop version or if you’re a normal person who doesn’t view reddit on non-mobile (lol) then use a custom api app. Apollo has one, and on android the revanced team (behind the superior YouTube app alternative to the google one) has implemented custom api patches for all the popular reddit apps like sync and such. They all block ads and generally deny Steve what he wanted. Use those instead of the official. Never use the official app!
Ironically the official app sucks so much that even using mobile safari and Google searching for reddit posts works better so you don't even really need to convince people to do this
True. There’s a safari extension called like sink it for reddit that removes that annoying “DOWNLOAD OUR APP” popup which they keep trying to make unblockable. I really probably can’t and shouldn’t type what I’m THINKING should happen to that piece of shit spez. It’s nothing good for him or his physical body.
I have the same experience. Lemmy is pretty much accepted as the replacement of reddit, there are good conversations here, and I’m typing this comment on my phone with the Memmy application which is like Apollo.
As a fellow Apollo refugee who was in denial until the very end (I’m sure it’s healthy) there’s also wefwef that’s pretty much a carbon copy of Apollo but honestly I like Memmy more. Feels much more like it’s taking heavy inspiration from Apollo while still adding a few elements to make it it’s own
Same. I just plopped the app in the position of the Apollo one on my home screen and tossed a modded Apollo in a folder somewhere with the other shit like Twitter. I’ll use it from time to time, but overall, muscle memory and the apps looking close enough and websites functioning similarly on a user level makes it like nothing happened