So far, the Reddit contributor program is limited to users in the United States (to start, at least) who are over the age of 18 and can verify their identity via Persona and Stripe.

Guys, here's the real reason. So they can positively identify you. Evidently this is how much that knowledge is worth. They can probably then start selling your posted data to other companies that have also "verified" you via Persona and Stripe. Once those datasets start getting linked together, well I will let your imagination run with that.

"But there are concerns that programs like this can incentivize spammy posting, or 'engagement bait.' "

The cryptocurrency subreddit started this a while back with their Moons and it completely changed how the whole subreddit worked. The monetary incentive seems to ruin any sort of natural engagement.

If you thought karma farming on reddit was bad before...

It will make Reddit even more toxic a community.

I don't feel bad for deleting my account with 120,000+ karma.

So... how long before groups of accounts start colluding to upvote each other and generate revenue? like, less than minute? What will prevent bot accounts from upvoting to generate karma?

This can't possibly last more than month before it gets seriously exploited, at which point the company will have to refuse to pay out.

No they won't. You need to be getting 10 gold every 30 days. The only people who may get anything of value from this are people who own large subreddits that can set posts by approval only any time news is about to drop.

To withdraw money, redditors need to earn at least 10 gold within a 30-day period — if they don’t reach the threshold, the balance rolls over.

Weak.

Sadly we're not together anymore. We tried to work it out, but I needed to move on and put that behind me.

Article title is misleading vs the text.

Everything I read suggests that Reddit will pay you out for Reddit Gold your account earned, not karma.

They should have just given the money to good moderators that clean up their shitty platform

Super unpopular opinion but, I do think there will have to be some middle ground. All of us in Lemmy can see the issues with something beautiful and free thing like this. It exists only thanks to highly skilled people putting in ridiculous hours and the donations of a few folks but shuts down, has trouble scaling up etc.

If we want Lemmy to get big enough that the niche communities thrive, we'll probably need to figure out a way to pay the devs, probably moderators and if we want truly engaging content, the posters.

I don't know what that looks like but the flip side of the "there are only low effort memes and few good in depth discussions" is that we gwt what we pay for. If we don't want ads, some form of direct albeit minimal payment seems like an eventual solution.

Nah, I'm good on that.

but don't worry they'll still ban you for complete bullshit reasons

You could already sell your high karma accounts for real money on the black market.

I don’t care who Reddit sends I’m not logging in.

Oh no. What will happen if I run a bot farm of 10,000 accounts that upvote my sock puppet account?

Ha ha! The Asian bot / spam accounts will be going MENTAL.

Those guys you see with 20 phones will need a bigger rack for 100.

Can I just cash out my karma? I need money lol

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Reddit announced a contributor program on Monday, which awards users actual, real money for their fake internet points.

Now, eligible users will be able to convert their Reddit gold and karma into fiat currency (no, not crypto), which is disbursed once per month.

So far, the Reddit contributor program is limited to users in the United States (to start, at least) who are over the age of 18 and can verify their identity via Persona and Stripe.

This feature was leaked about two months ago in Android Authority, when a reverse engineer found data about the program in an APK teardown.

To withdraw money, redditors need to earn at least 10 gold within a 30-day period — if they don’t reach the threshold, the balance rolls over.

Popular third-party apps like Apollo, Reddit is Fun, ReddPlanet and Sync have shut down after these changes.

The original article contains 412 words, the summary contains 144 words. Saved 65%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Could be making serious hay paraphrasing quotes from “The Meditations” and making witty remarks and saying absolutely nothing of value

Please don't leave

Ha ha! The Asian bot / spam accounts will be going MENTAL.

Those guys you see with 20 phones will need a bigger rack for 100.

Ha ha! The Asian bot / spam accounts will be going MENTAL.

Those guys you see with 20 phones will need a bigger rack for 100.