Back in the days, one of the proposed demands of the Free Culture Forum in Barcelona, was for proprietary platforms to re-invest 15% of profit back into the community of contributors, but without turning the contributions into commodities, to avoid a return to pure production for money.

Remarkably, the Reddit management is thinking in the same direction, though of course, it is very unlikely that there will be any co-governance:

Excerpt from Kim-Mai Cutler :

“this is a historic landmark of sorts:

“When Wong served as an early director at Facebook for five years, crypto-currencies were around, but they weren’t as widely accepted or understood as they are today. He and Y Combinator head Sam Altman, who just personally led a $50 million round in the company announced today, want to use them as a tool to distribute shares in the company back to the millions of Reddit users, or Redditors, that log in every day. They’ve set aside 10 percent of the round announced today for that purpose.

“Everybody who has ever run the company has always wanted to give some ownership back to the community somehow,” Wong said.

He went on, “We have a crazy plan and what we’re going to do is create a crypto-currency that is backed by those shares. Then we’re going to distribute the currency to the community through some reasonably fair way that reflects the contributions of community. That is one of the more complex subproblems we have to figure out.”

Distributing crypto-currency backed shares will not be solely tied to Reddit karma, or the reputation scoring system that measures how Redditors contribute back to the community.

“You can game ‘karma’ and we don’t actually want to create an incentive for that,” he said. “That’s why there’s no financial aspect tied to karma and that’s why it’s a crypto-currency kind of thing.”