Reddit is actually quite incredible. It's like forums of old, except with SSO across all of them. It's actually quite fascinating how all these communities are formed and maintained by people, all of whom do it for free. But perhaps that's the thing with it: it's all free. The moment there is monetary reward, things get optimized by other people. I should know. When we were kids, some twenty years ago (hello, statute of limitations) the way we made money on the Internet is through running a clickfraud ring.
Monetization[edit]
Still, I idly think of the various ways in which someone could reasonably incentivize moderation etc. (besides that sense of satisfaction that seems to drive these people to do it already). Should someone get ground rent, essentially, for people participating in the sub? Should participation be rewarded?
I suppose the trick that Reddit tried, and then dismissed, is the award system.
The typical option would be, of course, a governance token. Spam votes, etc. would require use of the governance token to take effect, and landing on the winning side of the vote would result in those on the losing side forfeiting some voting tokens. And perhaps vote-generating units would be disbursed over time to top moderators (i.e. those with the highest agreement). And individual votes could push up or down content. In time, if the subreddit is well-moderated the tokens have value since you can use this to vote what you want in front of people. And the incentives are aligned if screwing the whole thing up loses you the community.
That's the theory, anyway. Does that read to actually stable systems? And if there is some set of parameters that would lead to these stable systems, what are they? I don't yet know the answer to either.
Preservation[edit]
The problem is that data on Reddit disappears over time. Access is constrained, understandably, and older posts are often broken (either by the users or by the system). That's part of the reason I started this wiki. One day, perhaps archive.org will discover this place and archive it. And hopefully I haven't set it up so that it is prevented from doing so.
Many things on Reddit have made me think up all sorts of stuff: sometimes stories, sometimes funny comments, and sometimes just a conceptualization of something that I hadn't seen before. It'll be a pity when it's no longer accessible. News that Reddit is selling access to an AI company actually brings me some amount of joy! All that information explored and discovered by human minds will now be remembered in some sense!
Favourite Subs[edit]
Some of my favourite subs are:
- /r/homelab (and therefore /r/homelabsales)
- /r/tipofmytongue (now obsoleted, I suppose, by ChatGPT-4)
- /r/soccer (and therefore /r/footballhighlights)
