On October 17, Reddit officially announced that it will soon cease its blockchain-based rewards service called “Community Points”. This decision follows scalability issues. Community Points offers interesting opportunities for the future. However, it is not yet possible to deploy them on a large scale across the entire site. This feature will therefore be deactivated on November 8.
A project launched in May 2020 to encourage quality content
Community Points had been launched in May 2020 to reward users who positively engaged with certain subsections (“subreddits”). The aim was to encourage the creation of higher-quality content. The points were actually Ethereum-based ERC-20 tokens. They were stored in a kind of internal wallet on the platform called “Reddit Vault”. Initially launched on the Ethereum network, the service was later migrated to the Arbitrum Layer 2 solution to facilitate further scalability.
Each subreddit had its own token
Under this system, each subreddit had its own virtual currency: “Moons” for r/cryptocurrency and “Bricks” for r/FortNiteBR. Following this announcement, the moderators of the r/cryptocurrency section expressed their disappointment. They explained that they had only just heard the news. They also clarified that, as the transfer functionality within the smart contract had not been deactivated, Reddit was simply withdrawing its control over it.
A decision that caused the value of the MOON and BRICK tokens to plummet
This deletion led to a significant drop in the value of the MOON and BRICK tokens. Reddit users and cryptocurrency enthusiasts were disappointed and angry at the decision. Trader Byzantine General went so far as to say that Reddit had ruined its own community. The latter equated Community Points with mere digital artifacts of no real use.
What does the future hold for monetizing user-generated content?
The discontinuation of this blockchain-based rewards system raises questions. There are doubts about the future of monetizing user-generated content on Reddit. The very operation of the system relies heavily on the commitment and active participation of the community. Indeed, this decision is likely to have a major impact on many digital publishers.
Prospects and challenges for blockchain-based rewards in the digital world
Reward mechanisms such as Community Points are raising debate about the technical, financial and legal challenges of using blockchains. So far, some platforms and projects continue to rely on this technology to create novel reward and funding systems. However, we need to keep a close eye on how blockchain evolves within Web 3.0. The same applies to the many factors that could hinder or encourage its expansion.
Conclusion
The demise of Community Points is testimony to the difficulties encountered by this type of project. This does not mean, however, that the idea has been completely buried. The Reddit team has made it clear that they will be looking at other ways of exploiting this technology in the future. Other reward services may well emerge.
