this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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It's indisputable they failed to think this through, but did Reddit make any money off the attempt alone?
Is this entire switch to blockchain and then abruptly stopping it a net loss, or a minor, short-term net gain?
Serious question, because while I have a general understanding of what blockchain is, the whole who benefits/who loses and how that happens thing has become far too complex for me to really follow, so I'm hoping someone here can tell me.
Also, they didn't shut it ALL down, apparently there are still some rubes to be fleeced via blockchain:
So. Net loss? Net gain? Neutral? What's your best guess, and why?
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.
You're probably right on all counts, but thank you for your response. Anymore when people start talking about the never ending shell game of crypto my eyes just glaze over, lol. "We’ll likely never know" seems to be the final line of every crypto story these days, when it comes right down to it.
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.
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:
Crypto also hopefully seems to be on the decline, and it's possible Reddit did not want to appear to be behind the times.