[Short #79] Going Onchain with Reddit
Plus: Doodle 🪣 Auction 2.0 with Webaverse
The internet’s favorite and largest online forum is moving onto the blockchain.
Yesterday, Reddit announced Community Points.
Great tagline by the way: “Own a piece of your community”.
Wait a sec, what is Reddit anyway? This is a fun one because I am not a Reddit user. It’s been helpful over the years when I am looking for some more info about a particular topic, but it’s not a social platform that I spend consistent time on.
So…if I’m misrepresenting anything, let me know Reddit pros.
From Statista:
Just so we hammer home how big of a deal Reddit is:
Alright let’s go back to their big announcement. What can Reddit’s communities, also known as Subreddits, do with the Community Points? BTW there are ~3.4 million subreddits, and ~138,000 of them are active.
This is a lot, especially for someone that’s less familiar with Reddit like myself. Let’s have a TPan Crude Diagram™ explain what I think is going on here:
Dude you just replaced one word
Lol, yes. But let’s get the trusty dictionary out:
The way I see it, ecosystems are communities, but not all communities are ecosystems.
Community: I have this group text thread with two of my close friends, "DID YOU MEDITATE”. It’s a way for us to keep each other accountable to make sure we meditate every day. Several months in, it’s literally just me sending GIFs of meditating whenever I finish meditating. At least it keeps ME accountable? 🤷♂️
Ecosystem: A wellness company like Calm. They have their mobile and web app, Calm for Business, has programs with Lebron James and Harry Styles, a presence on all social platforms, the list goes on.
Holy crap Harry Styles. Now that’s an ecosystem.
Great, so Reddit is building a network of ‘ecosystems’ (communities does roll off the tongue better), but what’s so special about that?
This:
As a non-user, I don’t have any good examples of how Community Points might be best utilized, but from a business standpoint what if
You own a fitness apparel brand and you wanted to get more customers. You could accept r/fitness (10 million members) points. When they redeem 100 r/fitness points, they get 50% off their purchase.
You are creating a skincare product and want quality feedback. You could create a special feedback group with perks where only r/beauty (523k members) participants with 1000+ r/beauty points can join.
You are launching a new NFT project and are providing anyone in r/NFT (481k members) with 10,000+ r/NFT points are automatically eligible for a free mint.
Now, I’m not sure if those scenarios are possible, but I imagine they would be over time? I literally made those examples up as I was typing them 😂
Oftentimes when we see a big announcement from a company, mainstream sometimes scratches their head wondering WHY? This thing already works great!
The beauty of unlocking the potential and capabilities will now lie in the hands of not only Reddit, but also the communities. Will some of them become ecosystems? Will some of them refuse to adopt Community Points? I’m sure we’ll see both scenarios.
Your move Discord 😉
Webaverse’s take on the Doodle’s 🪣 Auction
Last month I wrote about Doodle’s new auction mechanic and how it might inspire additional auction mechanics that reduced gas fees, fairness in pricing, and broader holder distribution.
A project called Webaverse seemed to take that as inspiration and create their own version of this auction. I won’t go deep on Webaverse, but TLDR is they are building an open source metaverse.
Earlier this morning, Webaverse concluded their auction of the remaining 7,870 Genesis pass NFTs (total supply was 20,000 which were allocated to the team and partners and sold at a flat 0.2 ETH).
Let’s do a quick comparison of the Doodles and Webaverse auctions.
Pretty interesting as it seems that Webaverse took the core mechanics of the Doodles auction but added some guardrails.
The most interesting piece IMO was the end time. To prevent any last minute bid sniping, Webaverse added a random end timer in the last two hours of the 24 hour auction.
I’m looking forward to seeing more modifications of these minting and auction mechanics. Bravo Webaverse team, especially in a bear market!
See you tomorrow folks 👋