Fuck reddit but a broken clock is right twice a day. Advertisers pay reddit because there are eyeballs on their site. Eyeballs are on their site because of the things people post. Shouldn’t the people making those posts be getting a chunk of that advertising money? Maybe some payment to mods for all their hard work? Do all the negative commenters prefer that reddit just… keep all the money for themselves and their shareholders?
wHaT abOut thE BotS? Yes, the bots are a problem, they are a problem because reddit actively decides to let them run rampant. There are many tried and true solutions to this problem and with an incentive system they actually become easier to control. It’s easier to control people with economic incentives. You can’t stop every bot but you can stop most bots and you can make botting harder and more expensive to the point that it’s not worth it for most would-be bot users.
All of the last 20 years of social media engagement on the internet has been companies falling for the Pepsi Challenge.
The Pepsi Challenge was an ad campaign by Pepsi to get people to blind taste Coca Cola and Pepsi side by side and decide which one they liked better. Pepsi won a majority of the time, which led to a disastrous reformulation of New Coke (before customer complaints caused a reversal back to Coca Cola “Classic”). Now the consensus is that the Pepsi challenge was given in the wrong quantity to measure: people preferred a sip of Pepsi over a sip of Coke, but the preferences shifted back the other way when asked to drink an entire can.
Modern internet feedback loops reward users for very short term bursts of preference, leading to an engagement loop where each step seems like the best step for happiness and engagement, but where the overall loop leaves people feeling shallow and disengaged. Clickbait works at getting clicks but people don’t actually like or respect the sites that do it. Same with influencer accounts working the recommendation algorithm rather than user satisfaction.
Providing a monetary reward will speed up that disconnect, and I think places where influence is rewarded with actual money will bring out a downward spiral.
It sounds good in theory but look at how people behave just for the fake internet points. Every top comment in any reasonably large subreddit reads like a bot trying to input all the right words to make the hive mind reward them. It’s why subreddit simulator is so creepy.
I guess you could say that’s pretty much how all communication works but at such a large scale, it starts to get very homogenized and the site starts feeling like one person interacting with themselves. There’s no room for actual discussion because anyone deviating from the hive mind gets buried and attacked. I’m not even talking about politics, go to a guitar subreddit and imply that wood makes a difference in guitar tone. You will get downvoted and all the responses will be over the top indignant which shuts down all discussion.
If you can turn your pandering in to cash, this only gets worse.
Fuck reddit but a broken clock is right twice a day. Advertisers pay reddit because there are eyeballs on their site. Eyeballs are on their site because of the things people post. Shouldn’t the people making those posts be getting a chunk of that advertising money? Maybe some payment to mods for all their hard work? Do all the negative commenters prefer that reddit just… keep all the money for themselves and their shareholders?
wHaT abOut thE BotS? Yes, the bots are a problem, they are a problem because reddit actively decides to let them run rampant. There are many tried and true solutions to this problem and with an incentive system they actually become easier to control. It’s easier to control people with economic incentives. You can’t stop every bot but you can stop most bots and you can make botting harder and more expensive to the point that it’s not worth it for most would-be bot users.
All of the last 20 years of social media engagement on the internet has been companies falling for the Pepsi Challenge.
The Pepsi Challenge was an ad campaign by Pepsi to get people to blind taste Coca Cola and Pepsi side by side and decide which one they liked better. Pepsi won a majority of the time, which led to a disastrous reformulation of New Coke (before customer complaints caused a reversal back to Coca Cola “Classic”). Now the consensus is that the Pepsi challenge was given in the wrong quantity to measure: people preferred a sip of Pepsi over a sip of Coke, but the preferences shifted back the other way when asked to drink an entire can.
Modern internet feedback loops reward users for very short term bursts of preference, leading to an engagement loop where each step seems like the best step for happiness and engagement, but where the overall loop leaves people feeling shallow and disengaged. Clickbait works at getting clicks but people don’t actually like or respect the sites that do it. Same with influencer accounts working the recommendation algorithm rather than user satisfaction.
Providing a monetary reward will speed up that disconnect, and I think places where influence is rewarded with actual money will bring out a downward spiral.
If the posts are somebody else’s work with the watermark cropped off… probably not?
It sounds good in theory but look at how people behave just for the fake internet points. Every top comment in any reasonably large subreddit reads like a bot trying to input all the right words to make the hive mind reward them. It’s why subreddit simulator is so creepy.
I guess you could say that’s pretty much how all communication works but at such a large scale, it starts to get very homogenized and the site starts feeling like one person interacting with themselves. There’s no room for actual discussion because anyone deviating from the hive mind gets buried and attacked. I’m not even talking about politics, go to a guitar subreddit and imply that wood makes a difference in guitar tone. You will get downvoted and all the responses will be over the top indignant which shuts down all discussion.
If you can turn your pandering in to cash, this only gets worse.