All of the last 20 years of social media engagement on the internet has been companies falling for the Pepsi Challenge.

The Pepsi Challenge was an ad campaign by Pepsi to get people to blind taste Coca Cola and Pepsi side by side and decide which one they liked better. Pepsi won a majority of the time, which led to a disastrous reformulation of New Coke (before customer complaints caused a reversal back to Coca Cola "Classic"). Now the consensus is that the Pepsi challenge was given in the wrong quantity to measure: people preferred a sip of Pepsi over a sip of Coke, but the preferences shifted back the other way when asked to drink an entire can.

Modern internet feedback loops reward users for very short term bursts of preference, leading to an engagement loop where each step seems like the best step for happiness and engagement, but where the overall loop leaves people feeling shallow and disengaged. Clickbait works at getting clicks but people don't actually like or respect the sites that do it. Same with influencer accounts working the recommendation algorithm rather than user satisfaction.

Providing a monetary reward will speed up that disconnect, and I think places where influence is rewarded with actual money will bring out a downward spiral.

If the posts are somebody else's work with the watermark cropped off... probably not?

It sounds good in theory but look at how people behave just for the fake internet points. Every top comment in any reasonably large subreddit reads like a bot trying to input all the right words to make the hive mind reward them. It’s why subreddit simulator is so creepy.

I guess you could say that’s pretty much how all communication works but at such a large scale, it starts to get very homogenized and the site starts feeling like one person interacting with themselves. There’s no room for actual discussion because anyone deviating from the hive mind gets buried and attacked. I’m not even talking about politics, go to a guitar subreddit and imply that wood makes a difference in guitar tone. You will get downvoted and all the responses will be over the top indignant which shuts down all discussion.

If you can turn your pandering in to cash, this only gets worse.

Like others said, it sounds good in theory to let users profit as well as the site itself, though ultimately, I think the whole idea of profit in this context is antithetical to online discussion.

In my opinion, an ideal forum or discussion board isn't about farming karma, awards, or real currency. It's about speaking your mind about subjects or topics you are passionate about or have something you want to chime in on. Adding an additional monetary incentive only corrupts those involved, which includes Reddit as we've seen. But I also think this extends to the users as well. If people are compelled monetarily to post opinions that will gain awards or upvotes, discussion will become even more inorganic, for lack of a better term. In my opinion, the site will have lost sight of generating meaningful discussion, even more than it already has.

It's why I like how Lemmy doesn't have universal karma or awards. The incentive of using the site rests solely on the content of the discussions you have, save for the exception of moderators who want to coalesce power. I think monetization is just bloat and only serves to make social media more addictive than it already is.

While I'm not saying Reddit should go the donation-only approach, as I think it is too late for that, I do think keeping monetization to a minimum is in the best interest of any forum.