Reddit to begin paying people for popular posts

The social media site will split revenue with people who are awarded "gold" by other users, who pay a fee.

Gold awards will range in price from $1.99 (£1.63) to $49 (£40), with users receiving as much as half of that.

It marks a turnaround for the company since a backlash in June, when much of Reddit became inaccessible in protest of its senior management.

Ultimately, the majority of groups on platform returned - although some notable absences remain, such as the end of a long-standing subreddit dedicated to transcribing images on Reddit to make them more accessible for visually impaired people.

A subreddit is a forum within the Reddit platform - effectively a community of people who gather to discuss a particular interest.

Reddit users - or Redditors - will typically join a variety of subreddits, rather than following individual users on other platforms, and see posts from these communities in their feed.

Gold has been a part of Reddit for a long time, and was originally intended as a sort of virtual reward for posts or comments that people particularly liked.

A Redditor could pay a nominal fee to give another user gold, but this would have no real-world value and the fee would go to the upkeep of the platform.

It did, however, have the benefit of affecting how a person used the site.

At one point, if a user was awarded gold they could browse Reddit for a week without seeing any adverts. Later, there was a more expensive platinum award that gave Redditors a full month without ads.