Reddit will continue to put the user first even as investors become apart of the plan. Reddit’s previous CEO, Yishan Wong, announced a $50 million in funding. Reddit has since changed CEO’s, and the investors are willing to “give 10% of their shares back to the community.”
Reddit will give out “Reddit Notes” via a lottery to those users who were active on the site prior to the funding announcement in September, it said. The company will only be giving out 950,000 of the notes a fraction of the 175 million monthly active users it had.
“There aren’t as many Reddit notes as there are accounts, so if you get one, lucky you!” the company said in a blog post. “Eligible recipients of Reddit notes will be determined based on activities before 9/30/14 (when we first announced this project), and we plan to give them away in the fall of 2015.”
While these aren’t shares or money in a sense, its all still vague and confusing for everyone. These Notes could maye be used in the marketplace or on the crowdfunding platform, or Reddit may find another use for these notes. All in all Reddit is putting the users forward and making sure the user experience first. Reddit doesn’t want to go down the same road as Digg did when it made choices to follow the investors and marketers instead of placing the user first.
While I don’t understand these Notes, Reddit make them sound like money. While it is illegal to give shares of a private company to million, it wants to give this funding back to users in some way.
“For legal reasons, it is unlikely we will make the cryptocurrency exchangeable for actual shares, since we are not a public company, and therefore it would be illegal to give shares to millions of people,” Ryan Charles, a cryptocurrency engineer at Reddit, wrote in a comment thread following the announcement. “Howevever [sic], we are working on a legal strategy and I’m sure the cryptocurrency will be exchangeable for something of value. Also, we used the word ‘cryptocurrency’ originally, but a better term is ‘digital asset,’ since in many ways notes will not be like a currency at all.”
Tell us in the comments what you think of these Reddit Notes, and if you think you’ll get one in the comments below.