I've been sharing Hive links on Reddit a bit more often lately, in hopes of trying to get others to do the same, altho even I face some issues there with links often being deleted so I understand that it's a completely different ballpark from Twitter. That said if you learn to do it right and in the right places it may have a much bigger impact than the limited outreach Twitter allows unless you somehow make it to trending or get retweeted by real influencers with a real following. Either way, this post isn't about that so I'm not going to get more into it.
r/cryptocurrency basically launched their own token on Reddit a year or so ago, an airdrop occurred where users who've earned karma in the subreddit in the past, either through submitting posts or from their comments being upvoted, received a Moon airdrop. The airdrop was maybe 50-100M tokens and since then there's been monthly "payouts". With this post, I don't just wanna compare the differences between their distribution and platform to Hive, but maybe even dive into how I'd build up another token for a Hive community to give Moon a different approach.
The good
The great thing about this is that it's introducing millions of new users to crypto, with Moons now being tradable on mainnet and some decently sized exchanges listing it, it also allows people to trade it off for "real money" or other crypto. All you need is the Reddit mobile app to generate your vault and then it's just about being active and earning karma.
Aside from this Reddit have also been introducing waves of NFT's to be sold through their website, even though a majority of internet and Reddit users still see NFT as BAD/SCAM/etc, there's some decent activity on the markets and people slowly but surely swaying their opinions on it. Especially on the crypto related subreddits you don't see as much hate as in the rest of subreddits so in my opinion it's just a matter of time until things start to flow over and people potentially seeing the real value and innovation with true ownership and immutability of assets.
The not so great
I would call Reddit's tokens maybe web2.5 at best, while once you earn them and receive them they are yours and web3, the way there is quite messy and full of obstacles.
The worst part about all this is of course that Reddit as a platform is closed sourced, while it allows (now with extra costs) developers to build on top of it, you can't always know what exactly is going on behind the scenes, this is something I reckon effects subreddits such as r/cryptocurrency a lot more than others and over time with the Moon token gaining more traction and a higher value there will be a lot more hidden activity that'll affect its distribution.
Here's a quick example, let's say you post something about a project from a tweet that just went out. You know this is something that interests many, has a substantial effect on the markets possibly but more importantly being the first to share this with other readers may get you engagement and karma that may lead to you earning Moons at the end of the month. You post and check the tab filtering all new posts and you see someone else posted it at the same time as you albeit a few seconds later. Suddenly your post gets downvoted from 1 to 0 and the other post gets a few upvotes instead. This feels unfair, you think to yourself, you posted it first, why is he getting more upvotes which in turn leads to the post getting into the "rising" filter, after into the "hot" filter and then possibly trending allowing that user to earn a few Moon tokens worth a few $.
What may or may not have happened is that the other user also noticed he wasn't as quick to share it, so instead he went and downvoted your post and used a few alt accounts to upvote his own post, who knows, maybe even paid a small fee for a service to "naturally looking" give his post a kickstart in upvotes and engagement.
Point being, you can't know what happened either way and as far as I know, not even mods can track voting activity logs, only an admin,i.e. employee of Reddit could. It's not like they're going to spend time looking through these things, though, especially not given a majority of people are still very much against crypto and nft's.
This leaves things open for a lot of manipulation and shadiness, the worst part is that this is only going to get worse now that real direct money is involved in the form of crypto earnings. There may always have been money involved, I've talked in the past about "promoters" who play around with Reddit, get followers, etc, being able to get paid for marketing things while it looking like genuine shares. There's even been people manipulating the Reddit upvote system for their own ego for worthless karma points in the past, so how do you think this will get any better if there's now real money to be earned and anyone can earn it. People are going to try and tricks they possibly can.
This brings me to my next point; bans.
If this shady activity and manipulation is too obvious, it will naturally get you banned from the subreddit. There could be a number of reasons for this to happen and the mods may or may not let you know of the reason but we've seen the downfalls of web2 in the past with youtube, twitter and facebook often not even giving bans a manual overview but letting reports and automation take care of it and as long as you're too small to make some noise about it, which let's be honest, the majority are, then you're just going to be yelling into a void and that void may have banned you as well. What does this mean for subreddits with active token earnings? Well, it's not nice. While they won't be able to take your past earnings, they're definitely going to make sure you can't earn any more in the future. This is definitely something that sucks, especially if you've been targeted or banned wrongfully and when there's money and competition on the line this sure can happen for a myriad of reasons as well.
Okay, wow, I was going to post about how I'd implement a version of Moons on a Hive community but this post already got longer than I anticipated and I know many of my readers don't like long posts so I'll just leave that for another time.
The main difference compared to the Reddit platform and Hive is; transparency and accountability.
I'm not even going to get into downvotes here but speak strictly about muting/blocking accounts from posting in certain communities. If these occur, the banned user and everyone else will be able to check the chain for who committed the ban and then be able to follow up on the reasons to decide if they think the ban was rightful or not. There's no leeway to abuse it here because then you'd have other stakeholders having a say in various ways and it may bring down the whole community altogether if you keep abusing your moderation rights.
Accountability here is important as well cause it gives you a history of past bans and other activity to determine what kind of bans you've committed and if you suddenly were to strive away from it due to personal reasons or outside influence such as bribery or being strong-armed by a higher power into committing to the ban.
Let's say for instance I pasted a picture of my cat Mew into the Pet lovers community, if on that picture in the background there's my girlfriend naked I hadn't somehow noticed, it would make sense for the community to ban it cause they don't want NSFW content on there, but if the moderators banned the post cause they're just really sick of seeing me post my cat every day on there or one of the mods hates me cause I downvoted his farming alt account in another community the other day, it would start to question the reasons to the ban and others would be made aware of it. Weird example but yeah.
On Reddit you'd have no idea first of all which one of the moderators banned you, what their reason is, what the reason they told the other mods is if they even cared to find out, and worst of all, you can't even voice your concern in the community cause you'd be banned, trying to make a new account to circumvent that ban gets you banned as well and the following "personal wall" thing on Reddit is barely used so no one would see you pledging over getting a second opinion on the ban. Even those who'd be curious to what constituted the ban wouldn't be any wiser cause there'd be too much missing information to get anywhere trying to figure out what exactly happened. With there now being real money, investment and sweat equity on the line, I really wouldn't wanna put too much of my future's earning potential in the hands of a team of moderators behind closed curtains who can on a whim decide to ban people for unknown reasons from continuous earnings.
While I know our downvote solution here isn't the best neither, we can at least complain about it if we find it unfair and allow others to voice their opinion on the matter as well. As for muting and banning from commuinities, I think that part works a lot better cause I haven't seen much "abuse" there myself from moderators or owners of the community in that regard.
Lastly, I found out that the way token earnings work there is quite weird as well. They basically place a multiplier on your account where if you've withdrawn more than 25% of your earnings, you'll earn less in future payouts and then even less if you sell off more tokens. Kind of weird. Can you imagine if Hive would automatically only give you 50% of the post rewards just because you had to sell some of the stake you've earned in the past? Yeah... not a fan of that.
Either way, think I'll stop it here for now and get back to it at a later time. I think a stake-based Moons token could be quite interesting to try out on Hive and give it its own community and front-end. Let's talk about that at a later time.
Thanks for reading!
