Reddit is planning six tiers of early access based on each "participant's contributions to Reddit," the company said in its updated SEC filing. Those tiers are based on a user's "karma" score, ostensibly an aggregate total of up/down votes on posts and comments.
The first tier of users will be those "who have meaningfully contributed to Reddit community programs," though what that means isn't explained more clearly. After that come tier 2 users, who must hold at least 200,000 karma points or have taken at least 5,000 moderator actions. Tier three includes users and moderators who hold at least 100,000 karma points and have taken 2,500 moderator actions. Tiers 4 and 5 are each half of the previous tier's total, and tier 6 includes everyone else, with a waitlist available if the total number of shares purchased exceeds the original 1.76 million.
Basically people who karma farm with low effort posts. This will only encourage low quality posts.
Looking at what reddit was and what Reddit is now, I genuinely can't imagine why anybody goes there anymore. The odd time I do some nice doomscrolling, I find that >99% of the content is re-heated and re-served. Nothing there informs me anymore. Nothing there inspires me. Nothing makes me think in a new way.
Every day the same thing ad nausea. Fascism bad. Sexism bad. Phobia bad. Musk bad. Orange man bad. Inflation bad. Boomers bad. Cats good. Name my rescue dog. Celebrity good. Celebrity dead.
It’s just hilarious to me how they have moderators on their platform doing all the work for them FOR FREE and they just sit there and try to get money for it.
There needs to be more of a movement away from Reddit towards things like Lemmy.
But reddit, like twitter, has demonstrated it is a brand/service (just service in the case of xitter) that people are addicted to and will not quit. And stuff like AMAs and astroturfing demonstrate it has a lot of marketability.
Combine that with it being a treasure trove for LLM training and I could easily see it pulling 2-4 billion. More if the FOMO model works out for them and they have /r/wallstreetbets do another "the greatest act of democracy in all of human history" or whatever the tagline for rich people to convince idiots to help them manipulate stock prices.
So it would be less about buying a product to keep for a long time and more about something to exploit for a few years and throw it away.