Karma Farming galore!
Reddit announced that it will pay top contributors, basically those who had gained an award from posts, as well as those with high karma, amidst an on-going protest against API changes within the platform.
Users who awards “Gold” to certain posts will now be awarded to an equivalent of USD 1.99 (or about PHP 113) to USD 49 (about PHP 2.8K). Users will be receiving as much as half of that amount.
Gold is a virtual award that has been around ever since the platform was founded. A “subreddit” is a type of community where anyone with an account can join. Creating an account on Reddit is free, so is joining a subreddit. Users who join a subreddit and have a Reddit account are called basement dwellers Redditors.
There are three types of basic awards: Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Users can purchase these virtual awards, which hold no real value, and reward them to certain posts. However, they do activate a user’s dopamine and also affect their standing on the platform. On one occasion, users who got a “Gold” award received a week of ad-free Reddit while those who got “Platinum” got an entire month of Reddit without ads.
The reception of the award system has been mixed, with a top-rated comment on r/technology stating This site is about to get substantially worse. Since there is no limit to how much awards you can give a user, the awards can easily be abused. These are called Karma Farmers. This can also lead to low-effort or even misleading posts to be seen on the front page of Reddit. For anonymous users and those who don’t have an account, these top posts from different subreddits are compiled into r/all.
Source: r/technology, BBC
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