Reddit introduces ‘community awards’ to encourage healthier conversation

If you’ve spent any time lately on r/DunderMifflin, the subreddit dedicated to fans of The Office, you might have noticed something new: a series of new “awards” peppering the group’s most popular posts.

These new virtual gifts — a gold “Dundie Award” statuette, a green stack of “Schrute Bucks” — are part inside joke, part badge of honor for the group, which has more than 1 million subscribers. It’s also Reddit’s latest effort to make its communities healthier (and, perhaps, bring in some additional revenue in the process). 

These are Reddit’s “community awards,” a new type of in-app gift Reddit is officially launching today, after a few months of testing. Community awards are an extension of Reddit’s more well-known virtual kudos, like the coveted “Reddit Gold” that Redditors are known to hand out to noteworthy posts (there are also silver and platinum markers).

Community awards are a bit like Reddit Gold, in that you buy them with Reddit Coins (the service’s in-app currency, which you pay for with real money) and you can give them out on any post that catches your eye. But, unlike gold, the themed community awards are specific to individual subreddits. 

Moderators control what they look like (though Reddit encourages mods to make it a collaborative process) and how much they cost (community awards can range from 500 to 40,000 coins, which is currently the equivalent of $100). Each award is unique to its own subreddit, and though users who get an award don’t get any special features, 20 percent of the coins used to buy an award automatically goes back to the corresponding subreddit, so moderators can re-invest the coins into their community.

“It provides a wider range of recognition that’s a representation of the community’s culture and norms,” says product manager Vin Sathyamoorthy. “It’s really a co-definition with moderators and users coming up with something that’s representative of their communities.”

Though community awards have only been available to a handful of subreddits up until now, Sathyamoorthy says the early response has been positive. He points to a recent post on r/DunderMifflin, which earned more than 200 community awards. 

Success like that could also be good for Reddit’s bottom line, bringing in extra revenue that isn’t dependent on ad dollars. But Sathyamoorthy notes that community awards also serve another important purpose: making Reddit feel like a healthier place.

“What we’re most excited about with this feature set is the potential of elevating the conversation and making it healthier, and strengthening the relationships between users and mods,” he says.

Reddit is just the latest platform to explore new ways to make conversations “healthier.” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has touted “conversational health,” and Facebook has introduced updates meant to make users happier.

But Reddit is, of course, very different from Facebook or Twitter. Its users are mostly anonymous, and the site isn’t exactly known for placing a ton of limits on what its users can or can’t say. (Before you ask, Reddit is requiring that all community awards are SFW, and isn’t making them available to subreddits that are NSFW, or those that have been quarantined.)

The hope then, according to Sathyamoorthy, is that by giving people a new way to show appreciation, it will encourage more positive behavior overall.

“It provides a healthy community community engagement above and beyond upvoting and downvoting comments.”