Reddit launches a pilot for its Ethereum based community points

Reddit, a renowned content aggregator platform has officially rolled out trials for its Ethereum based community points for two subreddits. The platform unveiled this news through a slide presentation on March 13, noting that the community points would be distributed as a reward for users that contribute to their favorite channels.

Explaining what community points are, Reddit said,

“Community Points are a way for Redditors to own a piece of their favorite communities. As a unit of ownership, Points capture some of the value of their community. They can be spent on premium features and are used as a measure of reputation in the community.”

Per Reddit, these rewards will incentivize the creation of quality posts and comments. Reportedly, each subreddit community will decide on how many points a user receives. Apart from being a representation of a user’s reputation, the community points are tradable. As such, Redditors can use them to acquire premium features like badges, custom emojis, and GIFs on comments.

Adopting the digital economy

Per Reddit’s Spokesperson,

“We continuously run experiments to explore features that engage our users and communities. With Community Points, we’re working exclusively with two communities to test this feature and gather feedback from our users,”

While the spokesperson did not openly disclose the names of the two communities, a picture in the announcement suggests that they are r/Cryptocurrency and r/FortNiteBR. As at the time of writing, the r/Cryptocurrency community has more than 1 million members and r/FortNiteBR has over 1.3 million community members.

To spice things up, Reddit noted that each community can give a curated name to these community points.

A 250 million cap

According to Reddit, it will release the points over time. At the start, the platform will disburse 50 million points. It will then continue distributing another 50 million points over the first year. The production of the community points is capped at a maximum of 250 million. On top of the regular distribution, half of each month’s burned coins will be reintroduced in the following month’s distribution. Per Reddit, this practice will help ensure there are new points to distribute even after reaching the maximum cap.

Reddit will distribute the points based on Karma that community members have earned. The platform noted that it would not influence the points that users have earned. This is because like bitcoin (BTC), the points will exist on the blockchain. As such, Reddit will have no control over what community members decide to do with their points. To begin receiving community points, Redditors have to open an account with Vault, Reddit’s proprietary blockchain wallet.

Do you think the introduction of Ethereum-based community points will attract community members in non-crypto subreddits to the crypto space? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.