By
Tolu Ajiboye
March 22nd, 2024
Starting from early November, Community Points will no longer be available. It means that beta participants will no longer see their points in their Vaults, and will no longer earn points in their communities.
American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion platform Reddit has announced its decision to discontinue Community Points – a blockchain-based reward system. The company explained its decision by scalability challenges and regulatory concerns.
Starting from early November, Community Points will no longer be available. It means that beta participants will no longer see their points in their Vaults, and will no longer earn points in their communities.
Reddit’s director of consumer and product communications Tim Rathschmidt explained:
“Though we saw some future opportunities for Community Points, the resourcing needed was unfortunately too high to justify. The regulatory environment has since added to that effort. Though the moderators and communities that supported Community Points have been incredible partners – as it’s evolved, the product is no longer set up to scale.”
Further, Tim Rathschmidt added that the company would prioritize its focus on programs that are “more set up to scale and benefit more users.”
“We’re still working on ways to improve community governance and empower communities and contributions. Part of why we’re moving past this product is that we’ve already launched, or are actively investing in, several products that accomplish what the Community Points program was trying to accomplish, while being easier to adopt and understand,” added he.
Launched in 2020, the Community Points system allows users to earn ERC-20 token-based reward points by contributing to the community, for example by submitting quality posts and comments. In other words, users can earn them based on their contributions to a subreddit. Each subreddit, or a specific online community and the posts associated with it, has its own uniquely named and designed community points. Examples are r/CryptoCurrency with its own moons” crypto token, r/FortniteBR with its own “bricks” token, and r/EthTrader with its own “donuts” token.
Reddit has another reward program – Contributor Program that encourages eligible users to contribute quality content on Reddit and enables them to earn real money on these contributions. The program was launched last month. Along with the Contributor Program, Reddit has announced an update to Reddit Gold – a paid feature that allows users to personalize their Reddit profiles and make the Reddit experience better. Until July 2023, Reddit Gold provided a means for users to award their favorite creators in the app. But in July, Reddit removed the feature, promising to come up with a substitution. Now, this substitution is the Contributor Program.
It seems that the Community Points are also being removed in order to give way to the Contributor Program. However, Tim Rathschmidt is trying to convince the opposite:
“It’s one example. Now, we’re able to scale several products that accomplish what the Community Points program was trying to accomplish – like subreddit karma and gifs. Many of the benefits of Community Points have already been built into the platform.”
Reddit has already pulled its website about Community Points, but you can still see an archive of the page from September.