This seems like a bad idea. Any kind of monetary reward for using a community site shifts the incentives of the people that post there, and encourages low quali

This seems like a bad idea. Any kind of monetary reward for using a community site shifts the incentives of the people that post there, and encourages low quality posts on the off chance they'll get rich from them. Is it as bad as it could be? Depending on how it's implemented no; a system that just rewards points like this automatically is far worse than one that can be used to tip people for good work. But the incentive shifts it brings are similar, and can be very, very bad for the future of a community or social network. Just ask DigitalPoint. Ages ago they used to allow people to earn money from the ads displayed in topics they'd posted in via an adsense revenue sharing scheme. The end result? The site's post quality took a serious nosedive, as people from low income countries signed up en masse to try and earn what they saw as 'easy' money. People used meaningless one liners in every topic on the off chance they'd get ad revenue there, or posted new topics with thin content for the same reason. The site's reputation pretty much collapsed due to this, and even now it's not exactly seen as a place where meaningful discussions take place. Same sort of goes for Quora too. We all know they pay people for posting questions, so now we get a ton of pointless questions that no one actually cares about because there's money involved. So I'm not exactly thrilled by this announcement, nor about the effects it could have on Reddit as a whole if implemented site wide.