We asked, you told us: You think Reddit's contributor program is a bad idea

We recently uncovered evidence that Reddit was working on a contributor program, allowing users to earn cash for their content. This news also comes after the platform made poorly received API changes, effectively killing most third-party clients.

In any event, we wanted to know what you thought of Reddit’s contributor program. We posted a poll inside our news story, and here’s what you told us.

Do you think Reddit’s contributor program is a good idea?

Results

Just over 900 votes were counted in this poll as of writing, and a massive 80.1% of respondents thought Reddit’s contributor program was a bad idea. A couple of comments noted that Reddit already had issues with spam and/or bots, hinting that this program would exacerbate the issue.

A distant second place with 14.3% of the vote was “maybe, depends on the execution.” Finally, only 5.6% of polled readers felt that this was indeed a good idea.

That means just under 20% of respondents think Reddit’s contributor program has potential at the very least. This obviously still leaves the vast majority of surveyed readers who think this is a bad idea waiting to happen.

Comments

• Peter: As if bots posting the same crap over and over again weren’t a problem already, Reddit decides to make it even worse. They’re killing their own platform with every decision they make.
• Wes: This is what we call desperation on reddit’s behalf. They have had their traffic severely cut down since July 1st. They must be getting really nervous about everyone leaving for the fediverse to apps like Lemmy.
• Peter Smith: Given how reddit exists and their userbase and much bot spam, this is a completely ridiculous idea