I could see cryptobros and the “investing” subs spending a lot on this. They were already buying tons of awards to hype themselves up.
Any unironic circlejerk cult will by buying these and pinning them on each other’s chest, same as the dumbass awards.
I think reddit knows their target audience pretty well; Rubes. That’s why they let all the toxic “stock”, crypto-scam and political extremist subs stay open until the media starts writing stories about them. Gullible idiots spend a lot of money trying to make their opinions look smart and popular.
This will make Reddit a lot of money in the short-term, but probably push more legitimate/casual users away as these “premium upvotes” will surely effect the algorithm and push more nonsense into people’s feeds.
Now that i think about it, this will probably help advertisers and political groups astroturf all of reddit.
this will probably help advertisers and political groups astroturf all of reddit.
So it’ll work as intended then.
Yup. That $50 option is going to be 75% business/political co, and 25% real users.
Even if the former’s 99%, Reddit does not give a shit as long as they collect the revenue.
This is basically Citizens United for Reddit, but substantially worse because at least with CU, they’re required to disclose donors. Reddit allows these awards to be bought anonymously, so you’re rarely able to understand who is doing the manipulation.
The reddit crash in userbase and content quality actually began earlier indeed, with the wsb explosion into big media and the gamestock madness and the influx of a large flock of dumb people hoping to get rich quick.
I think a lot of the quality did move away from there to here. Lemmy should grow, but not too much or too fast. There’s no rush, there aren’t lemmy investors waiting for their double digit ROI by the end of the month.
