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.
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
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
“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.
Anyone remember Klout, I think it was this but before blockchain.
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.
Is it … solar powered?
Solar FREAKIN Crypto!
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
heh.
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