Reddit is planning six tiers of early access based on each “participant’s contributions to Reddit,” the company said in its updated SEC filing. Those tiers are based on a user’s “karma” score, ostensibly an aggregate total of up/down votes on posts and comments.

The first tier of users will be those “who have meaningfully contributed to Reddit community programs,” though what that means isn’t explained more clearly. After that come tier 2 users, who must hold at least 200,000 karma points or have taken at least 5,000 moderator actions. Tier three includes users and moderators who hold at least 100,000 karma points and have taken 2,500 moderator actions. Tiers 4 and 5 are each half of the previous tier’s total, and tier 6 includes everyone else, with a waitlist available if the total number of shares purchased exceeds the original 1.76 million.

Basically people who karma farm with low effort posts. This will only encourage low quality posts.

The best part is that this whole thing is about having the “opportunity” to purchase reddit stock at its IPO price. This user generated content farm wouldn’t dare give away equity for free to users responsible for the site having any past, present, or future value.

I’m not a finance person, but the only gambling I’d do on this company is hope that Wall Street pumps the price post-IPO so I can short it.

My understanding is that the value of each reddit user is priced roughly at $2. A Facebook user is priced at roughly $40. Their only options to maybe be profitable are more enshittification, more users, or both. Or, you know, not paying hundreds of millions of dollars to the execs of an RSS feed with voting and comments.