This seems incredibly strange. Personally, I don't see how it's going to add value to Reddit and help build the community. Mixing money into the site is going to complicate things, bring forward a lot of challenges, and it's going to be a large time sink.
I think Reddit has more important things to focus on, and I don't find this to be a good use of resources. Reddit is also slow to roll out changes, so if this has a negative impact, it'll take them a long time to pivot back on track.
Perhaps it's going to be a minor feature that the majority of users never know exists, and things will continue as they do now. If it's a major feature, I think it'll be a flop, and open up room for competition.
Edit: To expand a little more, what's the best case scenario they're hoping for here? They think the community is going to grow and more people will flock to the site because of this change? Reddit is anti-corporate, the community likes to feel small, even though it's one of the largest communities on the internet. When they associate money with the site, people will look at it as more of a business, and I think that'll drive more people away than it brings in.
Why doesn't Reddit just launch an image hosting platform? Why do they send all this traffic to imgur and gfycat, when they could roll out their own solution for the community? They can spin it off into a separate service to attract non-Redditors, and with all the incoming visitors from other sources, they can refer more people back to Reddit. To me, this seems like a no-brainer, since a large portion of their site revolves around images, and they're giving that traffic and monetization away to third parties at the moment.
Not to mention it sort of defeats one of the main value propositions of cryptocurrencies - their decentralized nature. If reddit created such a currency you would need to trust reddit to trust its value. And if it's backed by reddit shares, then it seems like a proxy for allowing public trading of the shares of a private company. I wonder what the SEC would think of that.
Perhaps they're hoping the cryptocurrency would become widely adopted
It certainly has a large enough audience in the right demographics to pull something like this off
I think Reddit has more important things to focus on, and I don't find this to be a good use of resources. Reddit is also slow to roll out changes, so if this has a negative impact, it'll take them a long time to pivot back on track.
Perhaps it's going to be a minor feature that the majority of users never know exists, and things will continue as they do now. If it's a major feature, I think it'll be a flop, and open up room for competition.
Edit: To expand a little more, what's the best case scenario they're hoping for here? They think the community is going to grow and more people will flock to the site because of this change? Reddit is anti-corporate, the community likes to feel small, even though it's one of the largest communities on the internet. When they associate money with the site, people will look at it as more of a business, and I think that'll drive more people away than it brings in.
Why doesn't Reddit just launch an image hosting platform? Why do they send all this traffic to imgur and gfycat, when they could roll out their own solution for the community? They can spin it off into a separate service to attract non-Redditors, and with all the incoming visitors from other sources, they can refer more people back to Reddit. To me, this seems like a no-brainer, since a large portion of their site revolves around images, and they're giving that traffic and monetization away to third parties at the moment.