Reddit’s Community Points Program a ‘Measure of Reputation’

Reddit chooses Arbitrum’s layer-2 for its community points Eth-based tokens

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Decentralized Points System

Reddit, the eight most popular site on Alexa introduces its platform’s Community Points system to allow for decentralized and community owned custom tokens for subreddits. 

Reddit is broken up into more than a million communities known as ‘subreddits’ covering different topics and areas of interests.

“Community Points are the first step towards a better future for online communities. In order to be truly independent from platforms like Reddit, communities need to be owned by their members in ways that platforms cannot take away.” Reddit wrote on its introduction to its Community Points system. 

This points system leverages on Arbitrum’s layer-2 scaling solution that makes smart contracts scalable, cost efficient, fast and private.

This program allows for each subreddit to create its own Community Points token, with a custom name and symbol. 

“As blockchain tokens that are owned and controlled by communities themselves — not by any app or platform — Community Points represent a way for Redditors to own a piece of their favorite communities. They are earned by making contributions to the community, like creating content and moderating.” Reddit recognises that the community should own a part of what they have actively created and build.

Community Owned

The custom token will represent ownership and reputation within the community. 

These tokens will be used for community governance, moderation and unlocking of premium features. 

It is a flexible tool that each community can use to shape its needs. 

“Every community has its own needs and we expect each to use Points differently and in novel ways that help take them to the next level.” Reddit recognizes that each community has its own needs and should have the liberty to decide its path. 

Presently, there is a waitlist and users can sign-up using this form that was created by the Reddit team. 

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Greater Control and Independence

The idea of giving control to the community is welcomed by some communities. 

In an open discussion of the Community Points system, some Redditors are rather sceptical.

One of the Redditors said in the HipHopHead community on Reddit, “No no no its like an upside down funnel, but anyone can rise up the spiral if they just get more karma from posting more, and yea the mods will get the most karma and therefore the most amount of tokens, and yea they could control the price by choosing how many tokens get released each distribution, but its not a scam.”  

New ideas will test new grounds, the concept of Community Points is to grant control and independence to each community. 

This novel concept will be refined over time but there will be more ownership of community based projects, not just limited to content creation. 

The Future

Reddit’s effort in granting autonomy is just the tip of the iceberg.

This Community Points system has wider utility to any community based projects. 

It is a self governance model and could be shaped to the wants of the community. 

Badly managed community will not grow, not as a result of a flawed system but as a result of bad governance. The converse is also true. 

Source : bsc.news