Reddit has been trying to avoid making a big fuss about its new NFT, but does that mask the more dangerous parts of the cryptocurrency market?
Reddit recently launched its own set of NFT, available for purchase, and tried to avoid using the word“NFT” in its original announcement. The company later admitted that the new avatars were indeed uncounterfeitable tokens, which explains why the company chose to do so and whether users were adequately prepared for what they were given here, opened a whole can of questions.
Reddit is trying to make its set of NFT collectible avatars as“Simple” as possible, and also make its“MetaMask” wallet sign-up and user accounts easy to connect to. The NFT avatar, linked to the Polygon scaling network tied to the Ethernet blockchain, is available for sale in the OpenSea NFT Marketplace, which the forum company calls“One of the top NFT auction platforms around”. Reddit, of course, takes a 5% commission on every sale.
Earlier this month, Reddit launched a new promotion that seeks to get its users to create a cryptocurrency wallet by giving NFT away to the platform’s roughly 50,000 prolific users. The company eventually hopes to distribute free avatars to 10m users. It’s hard to gauge the overall views of hundreds of millions of active users, but Redditors isn’t organizing its response in the same way as other communities, such as video players or desktop role-players.
Perhaps some of this is due to Reddit messaging. In an interview with The Verge, Reddit co-founder and chief executive Steve Huffman said he was even opposed to using cryptocurrency terms in any of these announcements. “It just confuses people,” he says. Blockchain technology is opaque at best. It combines financial and technical jargon, two industries that are known for their language complexity.
According to the interview, Huffman is well aware of the problems in the cryptocurrency area. He called much of the cryptocurrency stuff“Extremely repugnant and counterproductive… parasitic and delusional”. He added that Reddit’s business model was not“Let’s sell NFT to cryptocurrency people and make a bunch of money”, but“Put our identities and reputations in third-party databases”.
In response to Gizmodo’s comment on What Resources Reddit provides to let users know about this blockchain push, “We have been very open and open to the project and have explained the technology and our plans here and here,” the company said. We have been communicating transparently with users [ here ] about hosting and security issues.
However, these avatars are not even called NFTs in these promotional articles. They do mention that these avatars are“On the blockchain,” which requires a wallet. “Having collectible avatars on the blockchain gives you-the purchaser-ownership of your avatars wherever you want to take them, on or off Reddit,” the company said, this interpretation does not reveal the true, complex nature of NFTs-related ownership. These non-counterfeiting tokens are more like a digital receipt than ownership of the document itself. Complex trademark and copyright issues related to NFTS are still being explored.
Avoiding precise language to eliminate confusion, or perhaps because Huffman acknowledges the NFTs stigma, could eventually backfire, because users end up buying avatars without knowing what they’re getting or how to securely maintain a cryptocurrency wallet.
A third of active Reddit users have created their own avatars after the company launched an avatar-making tool for the platform, the chief executive said. The company has promoted other avatars with the popular IP, but the CEO says the emphasis on user-generated content-the new focus on NFTs-is more in line with its vision for the forum. This focus on identity, says Huffman, allows users to “Reveal your hobbies without revealing your race… and reveal some of your style without revealing your age or gender.”
So why are NFTs and blockchain technologies necessary for this? Well, Huffman likes the idea of artists, especially active Reddit users, selling their avatars so they can make money from other users. He said NFTs is“Closer to actual ownership” than other digital goods because they are not subject to any one company. Please note that such non-counterfeiting tokens are largely subject to the blockchain platform itself and to centralized websites listing such tokens.
This may turn out to be a problem with Huffman’s utopia. The former OpenSea employee has been accused of insider trading and the platform has been grappling with what is in effect NFT plagiarism and fraud. Not to mention that there have been major phishing attacks on OpenSea that have resulted in hackers taking $1.7 million in digital goods.
At the same time, the Polygon blockchain ecosystem has become a major source of diverse applications across De-Fi scenarios and centralized blockchain enterprises. It claims to be less harmful to the environment than other blockchains, although there are many holes in this argument. As Digiconomist wrote back in February, Polygon’s contracts on the ether web do increase the blockchain’s overall carbon footprint.
According to interviews, Huffman is picky about how blockchain technology has been used so far and does not want to publicly claim to be reinventing the wheel.
Reddit isn’t the only social platform to squeeze NFT avatars into their existing systems. Twitter and Instagram allow NFT avatars, which, of course, cost a little extra to display. Snapchat is considering letting users turn NFT into a filter. Esther Crawford, Twitter’s head of product, told the Wall Street Journal earlier this year: “We want to support the growing interest of creators in using decentralized applications to manage virtual goods and currencies.” That’s a lot of jargon and nonsense, of course.
Compared to other social platforms, Reddit is trying to emphasize the user side, with a focus on artists active on its forums. However, the problem with not emphasizing jargon in order to improve bility is that it has the potential to mask problems with systems like OpenSea that facilitate these transactions. It is very difficult to explain the blockchain technology in any concise and comprehensive way, but introducing the technology to users without its specific details may not be the answer.
