Greetings, r/Stellar!

👋 Admin here. I wanted to let you know about an experiment that we’re launching in r/Stellar today. As of now, you are the second community to help us test these features, and the mods have graciously agreed to help test them out!

Introducing... Community Points and Polls!

The magic of Reddit happens when users have the space and control to be creative. Reddit is a canvas they feel is their own, and it’s this sense of ownership that results in the explosion of creativity we see everyday. Polls and Community Points ^{or whatever you decide to name them} are new tools for creative control, allowing you all to have a voice in making important governance decisions in your community.

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https://preview.redd.it/wuftnnh0e5x11.png?width=1980&format=png&auto=webp&s=9ee4354dda9b96e8c19d33ae347e1a7f7de2904b

How will it work?

1. Users earn points for contributing to r/Stellar through posting, commenting, and moderating. Each week, you earn points for contributions you made in the previous week.
2. Everyone in r/Stellar now has the ability to create and vote on governance polls (yay!). This feature is primarily available on redesign. Old web and mobile apps users can still view and vote on polls.

What can you do with points?

Using polls and points, r/Stellar now has a tool to help make important community decisions. We hope that this will be helpful for things like deciding on rules, styling, or even the distribution of points.

Votes on polls will be weighted based on how many points you have. This is so that active contributors have a say in governance decisions proportional to their contributions to the subreddit. You don’t spend points for voting, and you can see both the weighted and unweighted results (i.e., the number of votes for each option) by changing the view here.

How are points distributed?

Today, 100M points are awarded based on contributions since the beginning of time. Each week, an additional 2M points will be distributed.

This is the breakdown for the initial distribution today:

• 80% of the points will go to contributors (split based on post and comment karma earned)
• 20% of the points will go to a community fund (for us & moderators to use for things like contests, new features, and the people who claim their points)

Users who have not been active on Reddit within the last 15 days will not receive points today. They will need to claim their points here. This is to reduce the amount of inactive points in the community. You can claim your points up until November 15th. On that note, everyone with points should receive a message later today.

After the initial distribution, the weekly breakdown (which you can change with polls) will be:

• 90% to contributors
• 5% to moderators
• 5% to the community fund

Who can create a Governance Poll?

Anyone can create a Governance Poll about changes they want to see in the community. To pass, these polls require a threshold of at least 5% of all total points in the community to vote for a single option. We will honor all governance polls that reach the decision threshold. The decision threshold will change dynamically based on participation every two weeks.

Also, it’s important to note that we will likely wipe all points at the end of this experiment. See the User Terms for participating in this experiment here.

Opting out

After the first week, we will publish the Distribution List (in a csv) to provide transparency about how points are awarded. The list will only include people who earned karma during the prior week, based on their contributions. Out of respect for your privacy, we want to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to opt out if they would like. You can opt out of appearing in this list and future distributions here. We will not publish the initial distribution since there will be many users who may not have the chance to see this announcement.

And with that…

Have some fun and let us know what you think!

Now, the power is in your hands to shape the community however you’d like.

/u/internetmallcop

TL;DR: Community Points are an experimental feature used for subreddit governance. It’s basically a weighted poll. You get points each week for commenting, posting, and/or moderating. Everyone in Stellar can create and vote on polls. You can opt out here.