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Reddit is shutting down Community Points — a blockchain-based “Internet Points” program designed to reward creators and developers — in favor of prioritizing rewards programs that are less difficult to scale.
Tim Rathschmidt, Reddit’s director of consumer and product communications, told TechCrunch, “While we saw some future opportunities for Community Points, unfortunately the resources required were so high that it couldn’t be justified.” “The regulatory environment has since added to that effort. However, the moderators and community that support Community Points have been incredible partners – as it has evolved, the product is no longer as widely established.
Community Points, which will be phased out in early November, were promoted as an opportunity for Redditors to “own” a part of their community. First launched in 2020, Community Points were awarded to users who were positively engaged in select subreddits to encourage better content and conversation. These points were essentially exchangeable Ethereum tokens stored in Reddit’s Vault, which operated as a cryptocurrency wallet.
Once awarded, neither Reddit nor moderators can take back community points from another user. These points can be used on special features, such as memberships that unlock unique badges and animated emojis. Once spent, points were “burned”.
As a measure of “reputation”, community points were displayed next to usernames in participating subreddits to mark the largest contributors to the community. Since the points were on the blockchain, the program was intended to allow users to display their “reputation” anywhere online, and could be embedded into other sites or apps.
But increasing Community Points proved to be a major challenge for Reddit. The pilot program originally used Ethereum, which had high transaction fees and limited bandwidth.
“For example, it would be impossible and prohibitively expensive to put all Reddit users on the main Ethereum network,” the Community Point page states. “Therefore, we have conducted extensive research on solutions that are decentralized, secure, and yet highly scalable.”
Reddit moved Community Points to Arbitrum Nova in 2022, which is built “on top” of Ethereum.
“This enables it to implement scaling technologies that enable ultra-low-cost transactions, very high energy efficiency, and strong security guarantees,” the FAQ says.
But even that was impractical for Reddit. In the years since launching Community Points, Reddit has introduced several community incentives such as the Moderator Rewards Program and the Contributor Program, which reward real money by allowing eligible users to convert their Reddit gold and karma into cash. Under the Contributor Program, Redditors who earn at least 10 gold within a 30-day period are eligible for monthly withdrawals. Reddit users who have more than 5,000 karma (total upvotes) can earn $1 per gold.
“We are still working on ways to improve community governance and empower communities and contributions,” Rathschmidt said. “One of the reasons why we’re moving forward with this product is because we’ve already launched, or are actively investing in, several products that align with what the Community Points program was trying to achieve. , accomplish that, while being easy to adopt and understand.”
He said the special features that community points can purchase, such as gifs, should be available to any community. Once the program completely ends, beta participants will no longer be able to see their points in their Vault, and will no longer earn points in their communities. Although Rathschmidt said he could not give an exact count of the number of subreddits affected by the cut, he acknowledged that “you could count them on one hand and have one or two fingers left.”
This isn’t the only rewards program that Reddit has kicked off this year. Earlier this year, Reddit announced the end of its coin system, which allowed users to buy gold and other currency to give rewards to other users. The announcement came after sitewide protests against Reddit’s API changes, which culminated in a 48-hour blackout of over 8,000 subreddits, and was extremely unpopular among Reddit’s already fed-up users. Under the previous rewards program, rewards and existing coins were available until mid-September. Reddit announced the contributor program later that month.
Rathschmidt noted that the company is not phasing out Community Points to make way for the Contributor Program, but is instead prioritizing programs that can “scale up and benefit more users” like the Contributor Program. “Established for”.
“This is an example. Now, we’re able to scale many of the products that the Community Points program was trying to complement – like Subreddit Karma and GIFs,” he continued. “Many of the benefits of Community Points are already incorporated into the platform.”
