Recently, the social news platform Reddit made an important announcement: they will be discontinuing their Community Points and Special Membership programs starting in November. The decision was based on their development team’s realization that there was no viable path to expand these features within the platform, as well as legal challenges that hindered the project’s progress.
Currently, Reddit is shifting its focus towards investing in products tailored to user demographics, recognizing that demographics are essential for successful marketing campaigns. However, Reddit assures that they won’t completely abandon the core concept of community involvement. Instead, they plan to redirect resources to explore better ways to empower and engage the community. This includes the development of products aligned with the original goals of the Community Points program.
Notably, a few months ago, the cryptocurrency community saw the emergence of two digital tokens, MOON and BRICK, which were spun off from Reddit’s Community Points system. MOON was associated with the /r/Cryptocurrency subreddit, while BRICK was linked to /r/FortniteBR.
Introduced in May 2020, Reddit’s Community Points served as a reputation metric within communities or subreddits, allowing users to own a portion of their favorite community. These points could be used for premium features and acted as a measure of reputation within the community. Reddit’s Community Points were based on the Ethereum scaling solution called Arbitrum.
However, the Community Points program wasn’t Reddit’s first venture into Web3. Reddit, a popular website in the United States, has been involved in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry for several years. They gained recognition partly for enabling users to pay for premium memberships using Bitcoin, although this feature was temporarily discontinued in 2018.
Reddit’s co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, has actively embraced cryptocurrency by launching a $100 million Web3 investment fund in 2021. He later introduced another $200 million social media and Web3 fund in collaboration with the Ethereum scaling solution, Polygon.