Love letter to Community Points

Three years ago Reddit started a revolutionary experiment. They gave us the opportunity to monetize our communities in a way that has never happened before. Yes, CP had some setbacks, mainly bots and "low quality" posts. But the upvote/downvote system was designed precisely to filter those low quality posts and it was entirely in the hands of the community to vote what's right and what's wrong.

That money wasn't "free", as many people think. You needed to invest your time, and you needed to be smart, and provide good, quality content so people liked your posts. I'm pretty sure that this year a lot of people were considering making Moons a living (or at least an important part of their monthly income). You needed to provide content to the community, and the community rewarded you with Moons, which incentivized you to provide more content to the community. It was all about the community. The value of Moons was the community itself. The growth of the token was correlated to the growth of the community, in all senses. That's were the value came from.

I remember all those posts like "thanks to moons I've been able to do/buy stuff, pay some debts, or helped my family". Those were people that probably for the first time felt they could make money from providing valuable content to a community, and the community rewarded them back. Community Points worked!

Remember that Community Points have NOT failed. It's actually the opposite. Precisely, Reddit killed them because they had become too big, which means regulatory and legal problems. We can only speculate how far they could have gone, but I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple years people in first world countries could have made this a living. The experiment was actually a success, but the monster had to be put down.