Now Reddit sell NFT-like stuff

hahattpro@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.world – 481 points –

I just install Reddit official app to see watch they offer. And holy cow. They are selling NFT-like stuff.

Instead make a better app, they give use this.

86

I never knew about this and, as others said, they may have been doing this for a while, but I'd say OP still has a point when they said:

Instead make a better app, they give use this.

This is the sort of thing they work on instead of their shit app. They've had years to improve that app. Longer than NFTs.

They bought a perfectly good app, Alien Blue, and threw it in the trash.

I'm still amazed at how they somehow seemed to make it actively worse.

They want everyone to use their shitty app so yours forced to see the avatars of other posters, thus subliminally making you want an avatar to "fit in"

When I used infinity all you saw was the username of who made a post or comment, and the content they posted itself. You don't need avatars for reddit, its an anonymous website(for now)

And also ads. They also really want people to see unavoidable ads

They didn't even give app developers the option of showing Reddit's ads.

Well yeah, like I said, they (read: spez and tencent) are pursuing quarterly rapid growth over viable long term solutions. But instead they are burning their business

And copying and idolizing another guy who doesn't know what he's doing at the former birdsite.

At least Zuck knows when to shut up.

In the few months before the end I kept seeing people inexplicably complimenting other people's avatars. I wasn't sure what that was about until this, and now I wonder if they had people intentionally doing so to make others jealous or something.

So many companies do this. Attempting to get quick sales boosts quarter by quarter while avoiding doing anything sustainable because it doesn’t generate instant profit. It’s one of the worst effects of the investor-first way of doing business

they did this already for a longer while, yes. that's why most people stayed away from the offical "app"

Didn't they already long sell NFT avatars?

Yeah they made a page for them at https://nft.reddit.com/ back in 2021.

Jesus christ, having such an avatar would make me delete my account in shame. Especially if it also told people that i was into nfts at the same time.

Kinda don't see what the big deal is. Probably best use for "unique" goods. Dunno if they use blockchain because as I've understood it that's just a resource hog.

But selling users unique avatars? Don't see the appeal and they are fugly and seem dumb but like that's so inoffensive nothing burger.

The avatars also have a visual effect to them next to comments.

I think people don't like this at all not just because NFTs bad, but also because it changes reddit more and more from the website it used to be for commenting on articles & images into crypto social media.

I can’t confirm the visual effect, never saw that on the website. But all NFTs have a hexagonal form, whereas normal avatars have a circle.

2 more...

Weren't nft avatars being sold for like months now? I remember them being cyberbullied and banned on mass from 196 (which is extremely funny if you ask me)

They already did such thing with the avatars ( they were buyable and "Marked" as nfts )

If you don't think of it in the context of Reddit's bullshit, the idea of having special avatars that you have to pay for as a form of monetization isn't the worst thing imo. As long as it doesn't negatively affect users and isn't on top of other predatory forms of monetization.

The only way I can see to do it is either stripping long-standing free functionality from other users, or making it completely pointless.

The speculative tone is interesting since they did do it, and it opened a revenue stream for both the company and contributing artists. It isn't saving the company but it was undoubtedly successful and proves that there are people that value and invest in their online brand outside of the crypto Twitter bubble.

Reddit had a few events where they gave away free NFT avatars. Some people even managed to sell them.

True, a nice horse armor is not that bad if at a decent price, but it's after that you have to be careful to not exaggerate and drift off in waay worst, although I couldn't pay for something like that personally

Not news. They already did since nfts exploded in popularity. Also they did give away free avatar nfts since then for some events.

It's like they are trying to get rid of users. I had seen the nft on the browser version ages ago but all of this is the reason why we preferred 3rd party browsing experience. Instead of fixing reddit they took that away

Yeah I looked at this screenshot and thought, I don't know who their target market is, but it's clearly not me.

Makes sense they would actively try to drive us away, so all their bandwidth is going to whoever the hell would give them money for these ugly pictures.

This is like their 4th collection, selling them for a while. Crypto Twitter doesn't care about them.

They've been doing it a while. They even gave some free ones away to encourage people to buy more. I actually have some of the free ones because why not. I would never pay for them though

My theory is Musk is trying to bankrupt Twitter quickly so he can minimise his losses, after his impulsive ego finally had some consequences. I think Huffman thinks Musk is a genius and is trying to emulate him by pivoting into crypto, to create his own PayPal style pay day.

I also don't think he's going to be able to create the perpetual motion money machine he's expecting, but it's not like he's going to go personally bankrupt trying. Graphic artists are a cheap labor business expense compared to the potential gain, and at worst you get your own marketplace out of it.

It would be easy enough to launder cash through such a system that he'll probably make more money than most will ever own in their lifetime. Even if 99% of it is only ever traded for less than a dollar.

The question I have is whether he's competent to keep enough users for a long enough time to buy a personal fortified island or just a personal apocalypse fort.

Graphic artists are a cheap labor business expense compared to the potential gain, and at worst you get your own marketplace out of it.

And I wonder if they are even using graphic artists or if they’re using AI generated images.

There's probably 1 or 2 for quality control over the entire collection, and maybe a little retouching, but I assume it's largely AI too.

Wrong social media company that's imploding itself through terrible business decisions in a race to try to become profitable

They're both making terrible business decisions, that's the point.

I thought they discontinued this?

How do I crosspost this to !fucknfts?

-sent via Thunder for Lemmy

opens trenchcoat hey, I got some of those copy & pasted nft pics for cheap. you in?

Hello fellow Vietnamese. Great to see you here.

How do you know he's Vietnamese?

Currency in the image

Well spotted. I'm curious if there are some Lemmy Vietnamese communities now

Not quite the same thing, but the desktop version of the Fediverse Observer site (which you can also see on mobile, if you ask your browser for the desktop version of the page) lets you filter by language and by country.

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

One lemmy server is registered as using Vietnamese language (in Germany).

https://keylog.zip/?dataType=Post&listingType=Local&page=1&sort=Active

That has only two comments, neither of which seem to be Vietnamese.

One lemmy server is registered as being in Vietnam.

https://voltage.vn/?dataType=Post&listingType=Local&page=1&sort=Active

It does explicitly say in the description say that it is hosted in Vietnam, and people are clearly talking about Vietnamese stuff (in English), but is low traffic and has only two communities (with tens of subscribers).

There are no kbin servers presently registered as using Vietnamese language or as being in Vietnam.

https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list

I didn't know about this either. I still cant believe people fall for that nonsense.

I guess I did buy a bunch of skins in rocket league, is that any different than an nft? I just really like how the cars look lol

It’s quite different, and your purchase seems more sensible to me.

When you buy a skin, you’re buying an asset that you’ll see and use in your game. Sure, it’s just cosmetics, but it’s kinda usable cosmetics. If the game goes down, your skin is probably lost as well, but at least you had some fun with it.

When you buy an nft, you buy your rights to a link to an image. It’s way more “protected” than simply buying a skin, in a similar way to how owning crypto works. Your right to that link is saved on a blockchain and you become the sole “owner” of that link. You could technically resell it (not sure if it’s allowed on Reddit though), but if a server hosting that image goes down, you’re left owning a broken link.

And while there’s no other way to get an asset into a game other than to buy it (or mod the game), you could just save an image you like and use it as an avatar anyway, so you’re not even required to buy nfts to use those as an avatar/banner. It’s more of a trading service.

That technology seems great for proving your rights to some documents or IDs, but it’s still weird to me that people decided to use NFTs for selling link rights to generated jpgs. You don’t even get the licence or usage rights to an image itself, it could be copyright-protected and owned by someone else.

The thing I don't get is that, afaik, there's no real limitation on the size of the nft. To my knowledge there's nothing stopping you from making a Blockchain that supports full images in each nft. However, instead they decided to sell receipts.

Blockchain is very limited when it comes to storage. Bitcoin for example, is limited to grow by 1MB every 10th minute. That’s 1MB for all users globally. Other blockchains allows for plenty more, but still enough to store entire images.

The reason why there are limits is because it’s supposed to be possible for anyone to download the entire blockchain to their computer and verify. This is not practical if the blockchain becomes 100TB or so.

Mostly because hosting an image within the blockchain would require so much computational power and excess energy usage, that it wouldn’t be profitable even for the most successful scams.

And I’m not sure whether calculating proof of work for a blockchain that holds images within is even possible using the current algorithms. But I’ve looked at it a while ago, could be that some updated system already exists. But it’s still very much not free, and quite damaging environmentally.

Fun fact, you don't even buy the rights to the link. You can make an infinite amount of NFTs that go to the same link. It is a common scam tactic to try and sell duplicated NFTs.