Over the last couple of days (month really, ever since a reddit engineer accidentally revealed too much on his first day on the job), you've probably seen a massive influx of articles and questions on community points, ever since reddit updated their community points page. So, I'll do my best to answer your burning questions on community points, primarily their impacts on the 3 subs that they're already a part of ( r/ethtrader, r/cryptocurrency, and r/fortnitebr), and how community points could potentially look like in the future, and what subs they're expected to roll out in (and what subs they're highly unlikely to show up in).

So lets start with what community points are, and what they're supposed to do. Reddit says

"Community Points are a way for Redditors to own a piece of their favorite communities. As a unit of ownership, Points capture some of the value of their community. They can be spent on premium features and are used as a measure of reputation in the community.”

So far, there are 3 subs with community points, (there were more subs in the past that either voted against it, or where community points kind of died off). r/ethtrader was the first subreddit to receive the option to have community points back in 2018, and 2 other subreddits (r/cryptocurrency and r/fortnitebr) in 2019. Similar to the current roll out, all of the subreddits were hand picked by the admin team, and the moderators of each sub expressed an interest in participating in the program. In the beginning, all of these community points were stored on the rinkeby testnet, and they were unique in many ways. r/ethtrader, being the first subreddit to receive community points, opted to receive their community point with no hard cap, while r/CryptoCurrency and r/FortNiteBR decided to receive their points WITH a hard cap of 250,000,000. 75,000,000 was initially distributed based on previous karma earned, and the rest would be dispersed on a decreasing quadratic model (as more time passed, the amount of points being dispersed decreased).

Eventually, r/ethtrader decided to take their community point called donuts to the Ethereum main net (this was back in the good ol days where gas was seldom in the triple digits, or even the high double digits), and added the option to claim donuts on the xdai sidechain, in 2021, which is a Layer 2 solution on Ethereum with less than a fraction of a fraction of a cent in transaction fees per transaction. Also in July of 2021, Reddit announced it would be looking to implement a scaling solution, so that community points can move to main net soon, and choose the Arbitrium network. At the moment, Reddit is building on the Arbitrum test net, so they haven't launched on main net, but the community points have value nonetheless.

Speaking of value, they've got a pretty sizeable ecosystem built around them, in the mere months of existence. The way community points are priced, is primarily based on their honeyswap price (Honeyswap is the XDAI version of Uniswap). Here's where it gets a bit weird, because Donuts are natively on Ethereum, and can be bridged natively to Honeyswap, as you can with any Erc-20 token, but that isn't really the case with moons and bricks. Moons and bricks were bridged as a test net token to Honeyswap, and when Reddit migrated to the new L2 network, the new arbitrum tokens are unable to be bridged over too, so the bricks and moons that are on L1 are the only ones that can exist on Honeyswap, thus making the price action of moons and bricks quite odd. Since you can no longer sell moons and bricks directly to Honeyswap, there comes a need for centralized exchanges to swap them on (Reddit is a bit iffy about the topic of trading community points from what I hear, so I'll just leave it at that). r/ethtrader's Donuts (Currently going for 0.006 per) are listed on Uniswap, and Honeyswap, and have a market cap of almost $1,000,000, r/cryptocurrency's moons $0.12 and r/fortnitebr's bricks $0.06 (overinflated cuz low liquidity as well).

Now lets talk about the good and the bad that community points have brought upon the subreddits that they've been introduced in.

The Bad:

- Vote Manipulation and Brigading

This is probably the worst part about community points, and every community with them has had to deal with this problem so far. I'm primarily involved in r/ethtrader, which had to deal with multiple suspected upvote parties, but the one that I personally tracked down was involved in squandering over a couple hundred thousand to million donuts (Around a couple ten thousand). There's also been the infamous HAME BIHHHHHH case in r/cryptocurrency, where some dude decided to make a dozen alts and use a VPN to upvote all of his previous comments to farm a finger lickin 50k+ moons over the period of a couple months. The sub also had to deal with brigading from the loopring sub, as well as constant targeting from dog shitcoin groups, and r/ethtrader a lot of NFT spam recently. r/fortnitebr apparently had a massive brick farmer problem and decided to give anyone who got hella brick farmers the boot just to play things safe. As we speak, there's probably massive upvote groups and vote manipulators, busy upvoting their pals, and downvoting the rest.

- Quality Content

If you've been in r/cryptocurrency or r/fortnitebr, you've especially seen this happening. There's hundreds, if not thousands of low quality posts and reposts being put out, solely to farm community points. r/ethtrader is especially notorious of this, with people looking up #ethereum #benjamincohen #ethbull or some random shit like that and yanking the first tweet they see on top and reposting it on r/ethtrader to farm some donuts. r/cryptocurrency is similarly notorious for 1 paragraph shitposts at times, so community points really took quality to shit.

- Echo Chamber and Tribalism

This is particularly a problem with r/CryptoCurrency, but people really shit on coins they don't like, and there's a lot of the same sentiment type of posts upvoted, like fuck robinhood, banks sux, tax bad, etc. In general, when there wasn't money involved, people could express their opinions more freely, because karma = nothing, but now, most people are scared they'll loose their community point allotment if they say something against the majority of the subreddit.

- Centralization and Single Point of Failure

The community point program claims to "push communities to independence " but in reality, the mods control the system completely. Mods can ban any user they want, with nearly 0 retribution. Now, if they start banning everyone, the community points system fails, but in theory, they can randomly ban a user, and no matter what the user says, the chance the admins remove the mod and let them back is very low. Additionally, Moderators receive a lot of community points for moderating, and its somewhat good that they're being rewarded for the work they do, but they get a pretty hefty share per person, and can in theory crash the price of a community point if they want to cash out.

- Governance isn't all Rainbows and Unicorns

Mods have a majority of governance weight in all of the subs, and r/fortnitebr has had less than one handful of governance polls put out in all of its existence, primarily because of its extremely stringent requirements to submit gov polls. Cryptocurrency, and ethtrader have had more governance polls, but in r/ethtrader, only mainnet vote weight counts, and previously caught vote manipulators still have hundreds of thousands of donuts worth of vote weight, plus in cryptocurrency and ethtrader, without multiple mods voting, the polls are literally impossible to pass. On top of this, mods can choose what governance polls they want to go into voting (part of it is they need to check in with admins, but occasionally, they don't let posts they don't approve of go into voting)

- Trading is Convoluted

Reddit has been going back and forth a lot on trading community points, and banned users in the past for promoting community point exchanges, and then stepped back their stance to an extent, so the fact that they can be traded is in theory up to the community, plus there's a lot of liquidity constraints due to the fact that it's hard to sell/buy a large amount without getting ass fucked by slippage.

- You get Hella Hooked

I personally have gotten way more hooked to reddit and I'm willing to bet reddit made a crazy amount of ad revenue in the subreddits where community points are in (which is probably why they decided to pursue the program)

The Good:

-They help reward good content via tipping and content curation

For example in r/ethtrader, you can tip posts, which helps the posts show up in hot/top, and stay up longer, but the system is often abused because tipping is incentivized. In addition, you can also tip people in r/cryptocurrency and r/fortnitebr if you liked their post by heading over to your vault and sending community points to their username.

- The Mods are Really Resilient, and Committed to The Success of the Sub

Paying the mods is a double sided sword, because most mods don't put in a lot of time because they aren't getting compensated, but from what I've seen in the crypto and ethtrader sub is that the mods are extremely committed to the success of the sub, and are often on top of spam, vote manipulation, etc. even if there is the occasional false positive or problem with them.

- The Community Steps Forward

In the case of r/CryptoCurrency, multiple community members came forward to create moon and brick exchanges, a subreddit and moon analysis site, and a community point earned in a distribution tracker. The mods are also pretty supportive of this for the most part, and tip/help these individuals in whatever way they can

- Whenever a Problem Arises, Governance Helps to Solve Them

For example, when people were spam commenting in r/cryptocurrency, someone made a governance poll to limit comments, and in r/ethtrader redistribute comment karma so that manipulators would have to try harder to get more donuts. Mods are mostly limited on the changes they can make to the subs, so the community has more input

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- You Can swap them for coins, buy a big ass banner on r/ethtrader, and get a subreddit membership

I'm kinda mixed on this one, since these are use cases, but they're pretty limited. You can swap moons and bricks for reddit coins to spend in the subreddit you got them from (not a really good deal since you can sell them, and then buy 20-25x the amount of coins instead of using the in app swap feature), but it is an option. r/ethtrader also has a banner on top of the sub which is pretty cool for projects looking to market, given they'll have to burn donuts every passing day they hold the banner, and finally you can buy a subreddit membership and post stupid ass gifs cuz why the fuck not (once again, easier to pay with paypal, since its overpriced using your community points).

- Governance has to be EARNED

Even though you can buy community points, you can't buy vote weight, so this is a good thing, because you can't buy people's votes

- YOU GET PAID TO SHITPOST!!!

This was honestly the reason I showed up to reddit. One of my friends told me abt how you can shitpost on some subs and earn crypto in the process. I personally became addicted to it initially, and started caring more about the communities I was a part of. I've suggested multiple governance ideas in the past, reported hundreds, if not thousands of scams and rule breaking content by tagging moderators or using the report function, and when one of my recent posts about scams took off, helped dozens of people in my DMs try to recover their money (my DMs are always open btw, I'm still a bit behind but I'll help ya out if you have any questions at all).

Reddit also seems to be willing to add them to subs *only* if a moderator wants them there. In the past, they were introduced to r/Libertarian, r/montainbiking and r/stellar. r/stellar had photons, and r/mountainbiking had communitypoints, and they were distributed for a couple of months before they died out, and r/libertarian straight up decided against accepting them. So I'll leave it up to you to decide if community points are good or not, but they're definitely going to be showing up to subreddits (r/hiphopheads is slated to getting one by the end of the year, and by the looks of it, r/nba and r/wallstreetbets as well). So that sums up my lengthy write up, I really hope you enjoyed reading it, and it answered all the questions you had about community points (if I'm missing anything please let me know and I can try to include it)