Reddit is known as one of the leading social networking platforms in the world at the moment and they are also one of the leaders in applying Blockchain to their platform when launching Community Points. However, after 3 years of implementation, Reddit recently announced to discontinue the Community Points program on its platform. Let’s learn about the reason why Reddit stopped Community Points and whether applying Blockchain to Social Web2 at this time is appropriate in this article.
What is Reddit?
Reddit is a social news forum website where people can dive deeper into their interests and passions through forum groups. Reddit includes hundreds of sub-communities called Subreddits. Each subreddit has a specific topic such as technology, politics or music. In it, Reddit’s homepage includes the most popular posts from each default subreddits.
Each member on Reddit is called a redditor, they can submit content to the Reddit platform and then get voted on by other members. Content is voted on through upvotes and downvotes: arrows that users click on to the left of the post. The more upvotes a post receives, the more popular it becomes and the higher it appears on the corresponding subreddit or on Reddit’s homepage itself.
Reddit was founded in 2005 and is currently headquartered in San Francisco in the United States. Reddit has gradually asserted its value by continuously reaching the top 10 most visited platforms in the world and is the 6th most visited website in the United States.
Reddit Discontinues Community Points After 3 Years of Implementation
Community Points is a program that rewards members based on their contributions in Reddit’s small communities. In particular, the MOON token is used to reward subreddits r/CryptoCurrency, the BRICK token is used to reward subreddits r/Fortnite, and the DONUT token is used to reward subreddits r/ethtrader.
Reddit introduced Community Points in 2020 as an additional feature to the platform, not as a replacement for their existing Karma system. Community Points are awarded to users who contribute engaging posts and popular comments in three cryptocurrency-related subreddits (r/Cryptocurrency, r/Fortnite, r/ethtrader). With 3 tokens MOON, BRICK and DONUT will be sent directly to the user’s Reddit Vault – the platform’s native cryptocurrency wallet. Community Points was initially released on the Ethereum platform but was later migrated to Arbitrum Nova – an Ethereum-based Layer 2 platform in 2022.
Reddit’s Community Points program
The reason given by Reddit is that the decision to remove Community Points mainly comes from the unclear cryptocurrency regulatory context in the United States. While this program will no longer exist on Reddit, Reddit remains committed to other Web3 integrations including: cryptocurrency wallet and NFT collection.
What Caused Reddit to Stop Community Points
Reddit is known as one of the top 10 social networking sites in the world today and they also soon realized the potential of Blockchain and applied it to their products such as payments and rewards in cryptocurrency. In 2013, Reddit had the distinction of being the first major social media platform to accept BTC to pay users tips and posts on Reddit.
Despite Reddit’s great faith in Web3 technology, their decision to discontinue the Community Points system is not a change in their stance on Web3. Instead, it may reflect that the traditional Web2-based Karma rewards system is still the most efficient method for distributing rewards to Reddit’s 430 million monthly active users.
Even though Community Points is founded on an optimistic Ethereum rollup called Arbitrum Nova, the costs associated with daily distribution are still quite high ($0.05 per Transaction) and for such a large user base. potentially causing this feature to do more harm to Reddit than good.
Reddit’s decision to rely on the traditional Web2 architecture to create a key feature for their platform highlights the realization that not everything needs blockchain. Although Blockchains bring benefits such as decentralization and transparency, global Web3 integration is currently still far away.
SocialFi platforms like Friend.tech prove that blockchain rewards work well with smaller user bases (Friend.tech has 130k users). However, for Reddit, with 430 million monthly users, a cryptocurrency-based reward system may not be practical with Blockchain technology at the present time. However, Reddit has been a long-time supporter of cryptocurrency and will likely continue to serve as a pro-Crypto platform with other features they will integrate into their platform in the future. .
summary
Reddit stopping Community Points is truly a pity, but we should also acknowledge that the application of Blockchain at the present time is still not suitable for a global platform and this needs more time to develop. technological improvements. Above is all the information that I want to introduce to everyone in this article. I hope everyone has received useful knowledge.
