The Rise and Fall of Reddit Moon Farming
I have only been using Reddit for two years. I’m not sure what sparked my interest at first but once I started to become a daily user, I wondered why I hadn’t gotten on the site earlier. During March of 2021 I bought my first cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, because my friends had said Elon Musk, the worlds richest man, was tweeting about it and making the price of it zoom up and down. I didn’t know anything about cryptos, and I thought why not throw a few hundred dollars at this funny ‘memecoin’ for a laugh. The day after I made that purchase Elon tweeted about it, my investment shot up by over $100, I sold it, and that started me down a very very long journey of researching cryptocurrency and becoming an amateur expert.
I then joined Reddit's r/cryptocurrency (r/cc) and began posting on the subreddit. They have a limit of three posts per day but no limit on commenting. I soon discovered the ‘Reddit Vault’ where every 4 weeks r/cc would reward contributors ‘community points’ called ‘Moons’ which ‘represent ownership in the subreddit, are tokens on the Ethereum blockchain controlled entirely by you, and can be freely transferred, tipped, and spent in r/cc’. Moons are distributed monthly based on individual contributions (comments, posts, etc.) that users make in r/cc. Reddit karma provides a basis for measuring people’s contribution, but the final decision is “up to the community.” In the initial roll out they stated “As blockchain tokens, Moons are independent of Reddit - once you’ve earned them, neither Reddit nor moderators can take your Moons away or decide what you do with them - They’re all yours.”
Reddit had first dabbled in crypto token rewards in December 2019 when it launched Ethereum-based token rewards called “Donuts” for the r/Ethtrader subreddit. They then expanded the reward program in May 2020 to r/cc with “Moons” and r/FortniteBR with “Bricks” on an Ethereum testnet.
This is amazing, I thought, I can monetize my engagement online! No more doom scrolling pointlessly on social media at the expense of my mental health, now the more I learn about crypto and the more I create meaningful, educational, enlightening, and popular posts, the more upvotes I get and the more Moons I get each month, which translate to actual money! In October of 2021 I was distributed my first batch of moons, 4.3221 to be exact, which were valued according to CoinGecko at $0.1836 cents each, netting me $0.793. It doesn’t sound like much but I was elated. I found my new hobby; I don’t play video games so this became my video game. I then ramped up my engagement on the subreddit and come the next month’s distribution I was given 920 moons, trading at $0.177, that came to $162.84, IN ONE MONTH, WOW! I ramped up my engagement again, and the next month I was given 1652 moons, trading at $0.1117, that was worth $184.52.
Now, let’s get deep into the tricky lucrative logistics. Technically, selling, exchanging, or trading the community points is against the site’s rules. The rewards program was introduced to be used in “weighted polls” that gives a larger voice to users who have more Moons/are more active contributors in r/cc. They explained in the introduction that “Community Points are a measure of reputation in your community. In the subreddit, they are displayed next to usernames, so the biggest contributors stand out from the crowd.” One could also freely convert Moons into Reddit Coins (to be used to award other posts) that are exclusive to the community meaning the coins one converts from Moons can only be used in r/cc.
Wait, so, I’m not allowed to sell them, I guess? But, wait, who is going to stop me? Why do they then even have a value on various crypto exchanges? They said that once I’ve earned them “neither Reddit nor moderators can take my Moons away or decide what I do with them. They’re all mine”. Okay, so how do I sell them anyway if they are only on a ‘testnet’? After another month or two of creating popular posts and being distributed a few thousand more moons, I found out how to sell them. Third party sites started to pop up like celesti.trade, moonsdust, moonswap, and moon.nano.trade. Wait a minute - I thought - before I go and use these sites, should I worry that the r/cc moderators would be ‘upset’ or ‘discouraging’ towards the use of them? Well, NO! These Moon exchanges are actually advertised on a website https://ccmoons.com [specifically https://ccmoons.com/exchanges] that was created by one of the offical r/cc moderators [u/ominous_anenome]
Okay, so the use of theses third party exchanges ARE actually semi-okayed because an official moderator of the r/cc subreddit is blatantly advertising many of them on his ccmoons website which is pretty much a blockchain explorer for r/cc Moons. Cool! Many of these exchanges have a sell limit of 5000 Moons so I sold my first 5000 in January of 2022 and then swapped them into BTC and put those Satoshis into my long term hodl wallet. I still participated in the r/cc voting polls and often tipped many other users Moons just to have fun and engage with the whole thing, but mainly my goal was to earn Moons and convert them every month into BTC. So I did so.
Mainly because the Moon price was falling. CoinGecko/Moons, CoinMarketCap/Moons, Binance/Moons, and Coinbase/Moons all showed the price peaked in August of 2021 at $0.353 a few months after launch and since has been on a steady decline, now trading in April 2022 at $0.045. The Moon exchanges themselves often price them a little below exchange price anyway, and also take a 4% swap fee. Add that to the fee that it takes to swap them into BTC and the BTC-to-my-hodl-wallet transfer fee, I was facing a 10%ish fee each month to finalize this swap. It makes no sense in my mind to hodl onto these community points, waiting for mainnet, in some HOPE that they would return to all time highs, when I can easily convert them into BTC, one of my favorite cryptocurrencies!
And so went on what was deemed “Moon Farming”. Obviously when a subreddit initiates monthly distributions of community points that are worth real money there will be a flood of engagement, and not of the good type. It will be quantity over quality. Alt accounts will be made to try and boost one’s own posts, and it will be filled with more spam and useless engagement then actual quality content. This is exactly how it progressed. Articles were written that Reddit users discovered they can farm memes for ERC-20 tokens and earn returns comparable to minimum wages in Sub-Saharan Africa. I wasn’t the only degenerate to understand the financial utility in this system. Soon people learned how to systematize moon farming;
Only post about certain topics: Complain about bank transfers, rant about r/cc giving bad advice, praise Ethereum, talk about the Squid-Game rug pull, compare r/cc to drunken gamblers, complain that Solana’s dev team lied about a hidden wallet, throw shade at Elon, post a rags to riches story, talk about a rich snob getting put in their place, post trending news article before others do, talk crap about a celebrity using crypto, post a personal rug pull story, or post about Moon distributions.
Use certain/popular words: Users even assembled a list of key words and phrases to include in one’s titles to help get more Moon's; Elon, Moons, GME, LRC, Matic, ALGO, Algorand, memecoin, Rug Pull, unpopular opinion (which got banned from titles eventually), HODL, DCA, Vitalik, El Salvador, NFT dumb, Government bad, I Hate Taxes.
Learn what the community hates: Reposts/reposting; users are extremely annoyed by this, every time a major news story comes out every news website creates an article about it and every unique link gets posted. Spamming; no one likes spamming or unrelated comments or overused comments particularly the comically overused phrase “Just DCA and HODL!”. Metaposting; posts that talk about other posts, like how everyone hates Moon Farming, are a no go.
Post at certain times: The majority of people who use Reddit are based in America, so figure American time zones into your calculations. Four best times periods are when people are on their phones the most so Early Morning Commuting (6am-8:30am), Lunch Time (11am-1pm), Just After Work (5pm -7pm), and Lazy on The Couch (9pm-Midnight). One can also see when more people are online denoted at the top of the r/cc page, which I saw fluctuate from 3000-13000 people depending on the time of day and if Bitcoin was having a large green candle day or not.
The moderators caught on and soon began implementing changes to the monthly Moon distribution rules.
Post type, such as link vs text vs image vs video (e.g., "link posts should get 50% of karma of other posts")
Post flair (e.g., "reduce karma from COMEDY flairs to 10%")
Posts vs comments (e.g., "double comment karma")
Per post or per comment (e.g., "limit max karma from a single post to 1k karma")
Posts or comments per day (e.g., "only count the first 20 comments a users makes per day")
Post or comment body length (e.g., "comments over 240 characters should get 2x karma")
A specific post (e.g., "don't count karma from the daily discussion")
Making a post or comment (e.g., "making a post reduces karma by 25")
Membership (e.g., "users with a membership get 25% bonus to karma they earned")
They implemented these changes through Weighted Governance Polls, where those who have earned more Moons were able to have a larger say in the direction that the community took. That is to say, whales decide how future Moon distributions will work. Almost obviously, they voted YES to all polls that would make it harder for those with fewer Moons to ever catch up to those with the most. Because the distribution of Moons each month, like the BTC halving, decreases each cycle (which started at a large amount but has reduced by 2.5% each month/cycle), those that contributed early and racked up tens if not hundreds of thousands of Moons have the largest say in these polls. Importantly, r/cc Moderators receive a large portion of Moons (and have from the get go) that they can distribute to the rest of the moderator team, only furthering the uneven distribution of Moons to those with the most.
These governance polls are deemed CCIPs (r/cc Improvement Proposals) and largely worked as highlighted in bold above, to adjust the Moon distribution depending on content, like how comments have double points or how comedy posts now have reduced karma due to them being deemed less informative/educational. All of these proposals, up to the most recent one, worked to affect the future distribution of Moons based on future engagement; e.g., your next Moon distribution will change based on your next month of engagement. These changes were all proactive, your past comedy posts got 100% karma but any future comedy posts will now only get 10%. That’s fine, rules change, farmers learned to work around it and changed their farming strategies.
Then came the most recent proposal, CCIP-030 deemed the Retention Rate Modifier, that stated there was a problem that “many users have complained of a large influx of "moon-farmers" who primarily contribute (often low quality content) to the subreddit in order to gain and immediately sell Moons. - We need a stronger incentive to hold moons so they can be used for governance as intended. Many of the most active users sell large percentages of their Moons and don't contribute to governance, which goes against the premise of Reddit Community Points. - This proposal introduces a Karma Multiplier based on Moon Retention to rewards users for holding and penalize those who don't.”
It’s poorly worded, because it doesn’t just penalize those who DON’T, it also penalizes those who DIDN’T. If any user had EVER sold or tipped more than 25% of the total Moons they had ever earned they will not receive the same amount of Moons next round. So me, for example, who had sold moons in the past, my multiplier is now set at 0.10, meaning I will earn 90% LESS moons than I have in past distributions. Just like centralized crypto exchanges like BlockFi and Coinbase lowering their APY rates after biting off more than they can chew - so too are the moderators trying to claw back control and retain their whale statuses. Now it is nearly impossible for anyone to catch up to them or to dig themselves out of their now deemed ‘previous mistakes.’ I can see how selling Moons should lead to a ratio penalty, but having donated/tipped them to other Redditors in the past is also now punished.
This type of new rule, unlike all the previous rules, is an ex post facto law that retroactively changes the consequences/status of actions that were committed before the enactment of the rule. Before this rule change, it was semi-acceptable to move and sell and tip any number of Moons that one wanted, but now all of a sudden people are being punished for doing something that was deemed fine at the time. It makes no sense, in how it’s unfair, that the new calculation includes Moons earned before this proposal was enacted. Had this proposal been in place prior I would have thought twice about selling each month. The most ironic thing is that the CCIP-030 was authored by ominous_anenome, the one who made the ccmoons site that advertised the third-party exchanges. He promoted this site on r/cc all the time; selling Moons via that site was as easy as a few clicks off it. It seems like he knew his website tempted too many people/introduced the idea to farm and sell and thus needed to do something about it.
I complained to the community, but of course I really had no grounds to do so. I received money in exchange for my moons, so I already benefited from them. People who didn't sell didn't get any money, so in the r/cc theory they receive more governance weight instead. Moons weren't designed for people to cash out upon, they were designed as a governance tool, and as I said before it was kinda against the rules to sell them, so I can't REALLY complain. The mods did warn people about selling them at one’s own risk. But of course, I’m just mad that I cannot make decent $ every month off Reddit anymore. Real governance is decided by the community I guess, and the community decided on this new rule.
I could always get my Moons back, along with my governance poll weighting, by buying the Moons back off the exchanges I used to sell them, and I’m told it would be ‘easier’ because as I said before the price of Moons has been steadily dropping since August of last year, but for me that would involve swapping my favorite crypto (BTC) into a testnet crypto that is steadily dropping in value back into Reddit just to be able to earn more Moons to ‘vote’ in polls that mainly benefit the whales. I don’t see the financial logic in doing that. It took hours every day of commenting and posting quality content to earn all those Moons each month - I think this is the end of that road. I cannot wait to see how dramatically different next month’s distribution will be compared to previous ones, where me and a few other top contributors were always in the top 50 karma/Moon earners.
My mistake was using r/cc the way I should have been using read.cash, as a platform where one can publish content and earn cryptocurrency for doing so. Moving forward I will dedicate my time and effort on this platform that was designed just for such a purpose. Better yet, this platform only rewards meaningful/educational/worthwhile content and doesn’t reward spam like r/cc does, which will help me better tailor my content to be more enjoyable and likeable! In all honesty, I see this as a net positive for everyone. Read.cash will now receive my highest quality work while Reddit’s new rule change will limit it’s crappy content.
Thank you all for reading. I’m really looking forward to engaging with this community more.