The End of Reddit’s Crypto-Based 'Community Points'

TL;DR

Bad news: Reddit is winding down its Community Points program, as of November 8th.
Good news: This is a whole separate thing to Reddit’s collectible NFT avatar program, which will continue to be supported.
Here’s where Reddit could’ve done better: It appears that the only thing you can do with Community Points tokens now, is sell them – which has led to multiple community tokens crashing in price.
With that in mind…Reddit took a risk when (as a mainstream Web2 platform) it embraced blockchain technology – a risk that only increased as the company continued to build throughout the bear market.

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Bad news: Reddit is winding down its Community Points program, as of November 8th.

(Community Points are crypto tokens you could earn and use to redeem special perks, like memberships, unique badges, or animated emojis).

Good news: This is a whole separate thing to Reddit’s collectible NFT avatar program, which will continue to be supported.

So why did Community Points go ‘kaput’?

There were 2.5 main reasons…

1. The total costs were too high to justify

2. The regulatory environment in the US isn’t exactly ‘crypto token friendly’ rn

2.5. We don’t know this for sure, but a littly birdy told us that Reddit is planning to go public soon. It makes sense to do anything to help with their public image (and in a bear market, crypto doesn’t really help that).

So Reddit decided to pivot and put its energy into projects that do what the Community Points program aimed for, but in a more user-friendly / less crypto-centric way.

And we get it; sometimes, simplicity is the name of the game.

That said, here’s where Reddit could’ve done better:

It appears that the only thing you can do with Community Points tokens now, is sell them – which has led to multiple community tokens crashing in price.

Reddit has a non-crypto user-rating system called ‘Karma.’

(Basically, if you reply frequently/get upvoted consistently/generally contribute positively to the platform, you’ll get Karma points in return).

It would’ve been nice to see Reddit allow Community Points holders swap their Points for Karma.

With all that in mind…

Reddit still took a risk when (as a mainstream Web2 platform) it embraced blockchain technology – a risk that only increased as the company continued to build throughout the bear market.

So, we still love them for that.