If that ends up being true it very well may pull me back to Reddit, but only to write comments that I think people will upvote. When Reddit gave out auto-generated avatars in the past, it gave me one that said it was for writing funny comments that get lots of upvotes, so they must have some logic assessing how the community responds to individual commenters.
I’d still be pissed off about how they rolled out their recent changes, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they actually had a halfway decent plan here but bungled it all by rolling it out too slowly without making it clear how one dot (keeping users in an ecosystem to make sure they see ads) connects to another (creating a community that can support a model to pay contributors).
YouTube pays contributors who attract audiences. Why shouldn’t Reddit? That’s the best possible thing commercial social media can do for its users.
It would change the Reddit community, though. I wouldn’t be there to hang out, I’d be there to work and create content tailored to… what Reddit likes.
But I can’t deny that it would attract my interest.
If that ends up being true it very well may pull me back to Reddit, but only to write comments that I think people will upvote.
I feel very safe in saying that even if you’re able to generate enough positive response to be a part of this program, it will not be in any way worth your time to do this for the money. I’d be incredibly surprised if you managed to pull in even a reasonable fraction of minimum wage, and if you’re doing it for money and not because you enjoy the participation, it’ll be worse than just putting in extra time at your job in all likelihood.
That said, you do you.
Yeah, I don’t see how anyone other than repost bots, serial reposters and karma farmers will benefit in any meaningful amount.
The question for me is, how are they going to stop the grains of rice?
Not to mention the psychology study that showed kids paid to draw were less likely to draw spontaneously.
“Supplementing” an intrinsic motivation with extrinsic reward destroys the intrinsic motivation.
Of course the knobs that run reddit probably don’t understand what intrinsic motivation is or how anyone could make choices based on anything other getting paid to do something.
It’s an absolutely terrible idea for a thriving community of creators working for free, to start paying them. Like the science says “this kills the platform”.
I like writing stupid Reddit comments. If they want to pay me to do it, now matter how much or little, that’s more than I’m getting paid to shoot the shit in my downtime anywhere else.
But “residuals” are where it’s at. Old comments that never die because people keep gilding or replying. Views on that content can be (and we’re dealing with Reddit, so they very well could screw it up) turned into ad dollars. Companies are turning more of their tv ad dollars to social media.
Idk. I don’t disagree, but I think the cynicism may prove wrong here. But the cost of participating is zero if it turns out I get residuals on a comment I wrote 9 years ago.
I like writing stupid Reddit comments.
The quickest way to take something you enjoy and turn it into something you don’t is by making it a job.
Based on their early description of the feature, you can’t just rely on residuals to make money. You have to be getting a critical mass of upvotes and gold (which is an interesting inclusion given they’re pulling awards - they either didn’t think it through all the way and redesigned it already, or they have some other method for how that’ll work) each month to even qualify in the first place.
Because it will be done unorganically. I can just shove ChatGPT to make articles and post them weekly around content.
You can’t, at least not now, AI your way out with a YouTube video.
Also, while it looks good for content creators, there are better places to create written content and be paid for it. Medium rings my bell, and surely there are others too.
If people start churning out upvote-worthy AI-generated content and posting it on Reddit, then Reddit will be happy with all the extra views coming from Google. They won’t mind.
The upvotes are bots too though. A decent sized server farm could churn absolute garbage out and game the upvote algorithm and bingo, a front-page full of complete gibberish. Faking YouTube views is harder since YouTube knows how long you’ve actually watched the video and toss out any errant signals. Upvotes are too basic any bot farm can do it for cheap.
“Create content”? Just use a repost bot. Scrape the top 100 posts of each subreddit, check which hasn’t been posted in the last X days, repost it.
Already noticed that in one of the last three subreddits i still go into. reposts which some diligent redditors pulled out the original posts of as proof and maybe-ai-rewriten-posts that they also pulled out very similar older posts of. Now it’s down into two subs, both an ask community a niche topic i skimmed through daily.
Could I train a LLM off of your comments and the source posts then use a few bots to make passive income from this policy?