Reddit decided to sunset its Community Points program yesterday. The program was first started in 2020. It was used as a governance and reward system. Tokens for the program were migrated to Arbitrum Nova in 2022.
What were community points?
As stated above, it was a governance and reward system based on blockchain. Reddittors would get rewarded according to their earned karma in participating subreddits in the subreddit's tokens.
Probably, the most well-known of these tokens is MOONs which was the token of r/CryptoCurrency subreddit. Many people earned and traded MOONs, and the subreddit had created some good use cases for its token. For example, they rented their subreddit banner for MOONs.
Centralization Strikes Again
Tools that allowed for this system to function were provided by Reddit and now that Reddit decided to sunset the system, MOONs have lost almost 87% of their value.
Graph from CoinMarketCap
Reddit claims that the system for Community Points was not scalable and their new reward system would be a better way to reward content creators. While they claim this, their new reward system is only available to U.S. citizens. An inferior system given that anyone around the world could've earned Community Points.
This should be a stark reminder for us to not trust centralized systems and entities.
An Opportunity for Hive
We can use this fiasco to promote HIVE in r/CryptoCurrency and bring new users and content creators to our chain. My promotion and information posts were not well received earlier when I tried to accomplish this. Because MOONs were flourishing, and no one in the sub had a doubt about its future.
The time is now.
Thanks for reading, and see you on another post in a few months probably.