Positive spin take: will encourage higher quality content and comments. Will incentivise spending more time posting and commenting and greater care put into both.
Likely reality: Rush to lowest-common-denominator posts. Sensational titles to grab attention. Comments are less likely to write things the hive-mind doesn’t want to hear, so less variety in comments. White-knighting increases. More porn by professional posters.
Almost-certain to happen: change in content. It’s a gamble that the new content will be as popular as the old content. Reddit had a platform up until June this year. No matter what happens, they abandoned that platform to re-shape it into something else. Which seems like it would be a hard sell to investors. “You know our core product and user base that you’re interested in? Well, what if we told you that we were creating something to gather an unknown amount of new users! And all we have to do is alienate our current user base!”
Positive spin take: will encourage higher quality content and comments. Will incentivise spending more time posting and commenting and greater care put into both.
Likely reality: Rush to lowest-common-denominator posts. Sensational titles to grab attention. Comments are less likely to write things the hive-mind doesn’t want to hear, so less variety in comments. White-knighting increases. More porn by professional posters.
Almost-certain to happen: change in content. It’s a gamble that the new content will be as popular as the old content. Reddit had a platform up until June this year. No matter what happens, they abandoned that platform to re-shape it into something else. Which seems like it would be a hard sell to investors. “You know our core product and user base that you’re interested in? Well, what if we told you that we were creating something to gather an unknown amount of new users! And all we have to do is alienate our current user base!”