Reddit's new betting feature puts your crystal ball to the test

Reddit wants your help in predicting the future.

The discussion platform announced Wednesday that it's rolling out Prediction Tournaments to all Reddit communities with 10,000 or more members. Similar to a prediction market, which lets players bet real money or cryptocurrency on real-world outcomes, Reddit's Predictions allows users to stake tokens on certain results in moderator-created tournaments.

With each successful prediction winners can gain more tokens, a company blogpost explains, and along with them "status." Participating Redditors are given 1,000 tokens to kick things off at the beginning of a tournament, and, crucially, the tokens are free.

The Predictions feature was tested in at least two popular subreddits, r/tennis and r/cryptocurrency, and as one might expect it involved wagers about bitcoin price movement and the outcomes of tennis matches.

Place your bets. Credit: screenshot: reddit

"When a user is correct in their prediction they gain more Tokens based on how much they put in," continues the blog post. "The better a user's predictions skills, the higher they climb on the community Predictions Tournament leaderboard."

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There are some restrictions, however. "Predictions can't be about elections or outcomes of elections," explains a moderator help page.

Game, set, match. Credit: Screenshot: reddit

Only moderators, or moderator-approved users, can create Prediction Tournaments.

Reddit is not the first platform to attempt a gamification of crowdsourcing, though others like PredictIt have upped the stakes by involving actual money instead of free tokens.

Reddit Prediction Tournaments, should they catch on, could allow for unique polls of interest-focused communities — hopefully providing some larger insight in the process. What do a bunch of lawyers, for example, think will be the outcome of a high-profile trial? Why not run a Prediction Tournament in r/legaladvice and find out?

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There is, of course, another slightly more annoying possibility. Prediction Tournaments might spawn the creation of an entirely new kind of internet personality: the poster who claims to always be right, and has the Prediction Tournament tokens to back them up.