Reddit is giving away 10% of the company to its users

Reddit today revealed just how it plans to give a 10 percent stake in the company back to its most active users, thus making good on its promise from September. The plan involves a new feature called “reddit notes,” which will be randomly passed out to a portion of the service’s active user base. The notes won’t be given to everyone, just users active on the site starting at the end of September when the plan was first announced. There are 950,000 notes available, and Reddit said it will begin a “random lottery” to pass them out in fall of 2015.

Back when Reddit — bastion of the internet’s weirdest conversations — raised another $50 million in venture funding, the investors involved agreed to give a combined 10 percent of their shares back to the site’s users. For almost three months, none of us knew exactly how that would happen, but now Reddit’s talking specifics… sort of. Next year, the company will distribute via lottery some 950,000 Reddit Notes, a kinda-sorta digital currency that’ll let users “tip, donate, or trade” with peers who also bacon at midnight. The key words in that previous sentence are “kinda-sorta.” In interview with Inc., Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian looks at Reddit Notes as something akin to, but not quite, a currency. Instead, he considers them more of a digital asset — they’ve got some sort of intrinsic value “like sugar or gold or bacon” and can be used to fuel transactions between people, but they don’t have any actual financial value.