Coin Inquiries Round: Moons Pro-Arguments — November

[u/CointestAdmin]

Welcome to the r/CryptoCurrency Cointest. For this thread, the category is Coin Inquiries and the topic is Moons Pro-Arguments. It will end three months from when it was submitted. Here are the rules and guidelines.

SUGGESTIONS:

• Use the Cointest Archive for the following suggestions.
• Read through prior threads about Moons to help refine your arguments.
• Preempt counter-points in opposing threads (pro or con) to help make your arguments more complete.
• Read through these Moons search listings sorted by relevance or top. Find posts with a large number of upvotes and sort the comments by controversial first. You might find some supportive or critical comments worth borrowing.
• 1st place doesn't take all, so don't be discouraged! Both 2nd and 3rd places give you two more chances to win moons.
  

Submit your Pro-Arguments below. Good luck and have fun

[u/Flying_Koeksister]

I shall be re-using my original debate. Posted on 04 October 2021. Original Post. TO my knowledge, this is first re-use.

Advantages of Moons

1. Increases user engagement and traffic.

Moons & Karma incentivizes users to be more active on r/Cryptocurrency. This increases exposure of cryptocurrencies as whole and secondly increasing subscribers to the sub.

1.1. Moon Use cases

Moon earnings are based on karma earned for each cycle. This would effectively make moons a spendable form of Karma (source).

This is useful to improve user engagement. Currently users can do the following:

• Tip each other
• Purchase a special membership of
• Voting on governance polls (the more moons owned the higher the voting power).
• Redeem for Reddit coins

1.2. Incentives for Mods

Moderators earns a sizable amount of moons too – about 10% of each distribution. This potentially incentivizes mods to work hard and possibly retain mods (source) . This incentive furthermore ensures this sub is unlikely to have a shortage of potential mods /recruits (source).

1.3. Noticeable improvement in user activity

r/cryptocurrency experienced a 25 fold increase in activity between September 2021 and September 2020 (source). In the broader context, decentralized tokens such as moons could be useful in potentially increasing the user base of Reddit itself. Currently Reddit boasts 430 million monthly active subscribers, which ranks it as the 14th most active social media platform (source).

1.4. External Community engagement (beneficial to r/CC**)**

There has been indirect engagement via community generated related subs and websites . Two prime examples are mentioned below: The r/Lazymoons sub and the CC Moons website.

Within the Lazy moons sub, users have banded together to eliminate abuse of the Moon system by identifying alt account abusers, vote syndicators and more. (source:) (Second source)

The CC Moons website however, focusses more on Moon stats. This site was created by u/ominous_anenome and tracks moon activity, identify moon whales and much more (source).

2. Working governance.

Moon governance polls are-weighted according to the moon holdings of each users. Users will be able to provide inputs on how the community governs itself and how moons are distributed. In practice, this has been largely successful with tangible results. These polls have a direct impact on user interaction with the sub. Some successful polls passed includes:

• Bonus karma for people that keep MOONs in vault – 20% bonus for users that does not move their moons from their vault.
• Double Comment Karma . Comment Karma earns 2x the amount of post Karma.
• 15,000 karma cap on Moon Distribution - Limits maximum Karma that can be considered for moon distributions,
• Implement Moon Week- A week that shows the moon snapshot and has all governance polls posted in one place.
• Allow users to tip up to 100 moons per round without loss of 20% karma bonus - Users can tip up to 100 moons per round without affecting their karma bonus.
• Disincentivize Extreme Moon Farming Spam - After 49 contributions, users Users will see a gradual reduction in Moon rewards for that day.

More polls can be found on the moon wiki page. The Wiki page also has links the polls mentioned above (source).

The success of these polls demonstrates how the community has taken charge, and collectively governed the sub in order to improve the sub, reduce spam, reduce abuse of the moon system among other benefits.

3. Active Development

Moons are actively being development, tested an improved. The latest improvement was the launch of a scaling network based on Arbitrum technology. There is also a clear intention to eventually migrate moons to the etherium main network (source). Reddit has further sought to recruit an additional backend engineer to further the cause of creating decentralized networks, smart contracts and infrastructure (Source).

​

4. Controlled risk management

Community points such as moons are actually still as an experiment for Reddit (source). Currently the experiment is running with two other subs. The big advantage of this reduces the risk for Reddit (should anything go wrong). It also allows Reddit to fine tune, make adjustments, and see the results in real time.

Taking into the points mentioned earlier, it is clear that Moons (among other community points) has been a highly successful experiment.

5. Tight integration into Reddit with adequate documentation.

5.1. Integration into Reddit.

Reddit moons are stored in a vault, which is part of the official Reddit App. Users do not have to do any complicated technical installations and the vault opening process is seamless. Users need only open their vault from within the reddit app, save their seed phrase and they are ready to earn moons (source).

This is in contrast to Donuts earned in the Ethtrader sub, which requires several additional steps (including the installation of an external wallet such as metamask) in order to be set up (source)

5.2. Documentation and assistance

Moons have a fairly comprehensive guide in the form of a wiki in order to help new users get familiar with the token, governance and more (source)

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6. Safety net and controls for Reddit Mods and Admin

6.1. Governance control ,

Moderators have final say over proposals by retaining the right to approve or deny polls for any reason. This acts as a counter balance and allows the mods to ensure that Moon governance stays within the Terms and conditions of Reddit itself. It also allows mods to veto proposals that may not be technically possible (source)

6.2. Development control

Reddit is solely responsible for the development of community points such as moons and hence have firm control of the future of moons. (Source)

6.3. Legal controls / Terms and conditions

Reddit has protected itself in its terms and conditions. The TOC gives Reddit to terminate the availability of moons at any time. Furthermore the TOC states that moons and all other community points has no monetary value nor is there any intention to create an official method of exchanging community points for monetary value (source)

The control mechanisms allow Reddit the following protections:

• Ability to terminate Community points if it breaches the TOC or the Law
• Protections against being investigated from the SEC (moon has no monetary value)
• Ability to ensure moon development is within the TOC
• Ability to terminate community point services to any individual user that goes against the TOC.

7. Conclusions

r/Cryptocurrency moons has successfully improved user engagement by incentivizing contributions to the sub. This has resulted in noticeable increase in user engagement with a highly effective governance system. The in-house crypto has also sparked external activity (both within and outside of reddit) which has proved beneficial for the r/cryptocurrency sub.

There are also sufficient in-built controls which would satisfy the ability for Reddit to intervene should any unsavory activity take place.

Disclaimer : I own 1.9k moons at the time of writing.