I think it has been around 4 years now since Reddit launched community points on Testnet. Yesterday community points finally saw their mainnet debut with an FTX partnership, the price of /r/cryptocurrency Moons skyrocketed but something still doesn't feel right on the front page of the internet.

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What Are Community Points?

In short, community points are trying to solve what Hive already solved, to reward contributors for their efforts and the quality that they bring to the platform, and the community itself. It all made sense until Moons became tradable and people started gaming the system.

The initial token distribution was basically a retroactive airdrop. /r/cryptocurrency contributors got their share of the initial drop based on the number of karma points they accumulated during the years before the token launched. As expected, the mods got a lot more than ordinary users which wasn't a problem initially but it became a huge issue down the road.

Reddit Moons distribution chart

From that point on the idea was simple - there is a set number of tokens that are distributed every month. Combine all of the karma points accumulated during that time period by all subreddit users, divide them by the number of available tokens, and distribute them evenly among all users. The system worked fine until it became profitable to pay for upvotes and turn a profit at the end of the month because one upvote was worth more in Reddit Moons than in market value. One thing lead to another and while trying to solve this problem the "whales" lost their way.

How To Destroy a Community With Rewards

Instead of bringing positive change to /r/cryptocurrency Moons became a toxic element for most of the last bull run. People were pissed that so many Moon farmers are showing up every day farming the sentiment away with no solution in sight.

I'm no super-contributor but I do try and bring value to every platform I use for my own benefit and Reddit was no different. I was making posts there way before I even knew free money is on the way and during that time I collected a lot of fake internet points.

/r/cryptocurrency was the first thing I would check in the morning. It was a place where I would share all of the knowledge I collected while exploring DeFi and crypto in general but as soon as the whales started making proposals things went south.

In a bad attempt to prevent farming they implemented a set of rules that ended up hurting the actual community but the final nail in the coffin was a proposal that was so dumb you have to ask yourself who voted for it. It states that anyone that sells the Moons they earn will get fewer rewards next month. And this is not based on your monthly contributions, this is based on the total number of Moons you EVER HAD.

To know how much of an impact it made here are some simple numbers:

I got about 20K Moons from the first airdrop. The token reached $0.1 with very low liquidity at one point so naturally, I sold some. The price went up and down but I kept selling my points because it's my money, I earned it no matter where it came from. I didn't steal it.

On average I would have roughly 3-4K Karma points at the end of every month. Most of the time the Moons/Karma ratio was about 0.3 so about 700 Moons should land in my wallet every month if I keep doing what I am doing. With this new change for the same number of Karma points, I can get 10 Moons because I did the unthinkable - I sold my Moons...

In theory, I would now have to invest ~$3K to get back the Moons that I sold just so I can get the same reward distribution ratio as the person that had no idea how to sell or couldn't sell because they are a mod in the community and they can't set a bad example.

If we recap the situation, Reddit moons did absolutely nothing good for Reddit and for the /r/cryptocurrency community. If we use my example alone the community lost a contributor while also losing money to my Moon selling. What was once a crowded place now looks like a ghost town because everyone with half a brain left for better alternatives. I had no problem posting helpful stuff for free back in the day when Moons weren't a thing but now it would be an insult to your common sense.

Imagine spending hours on writing a useful post and getting 10X fewer rewards than someone that shared a news article link. It just makes no sense.

The Superiority Of Hive

Distribution models are hard to get right. Rewarding everyone fairly is almost impossible but after years of research, I have yet to find a better model than what we have here on Hive. The irony here is that Reddit is trying to reinvent the wheel with community points while Hive already has everything figured out.

On the other end, we have the crypto community on Reddit that seemingly strives for decentralization and fairness while at the same time failing to see the negative impact this poorly executed idea is having on the whole community.

Everyone could have saved years of time just by creating a Hive account and creating an /r/cryptocurrency community here, on a blockchain that already knows how to treat everyone as fairly as possible.

And this also validates the fact that a Hive account is not free to create. Some will call it gatekeeping but I will call it a prevention mechanism. Moon farmers can create endless Reddit accounts with no repercussions but once you put a price tag on an account the math doesn't add up.

At the end of the day, if you aren't willing to put down ~$5 for an account you probably don't care about the platform that much and thus you have no business on it anyway.

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