Pump.fun founder says reward model was adjusted after backlash over Callout Rewards

Pump.fun founder alon said on X that the platform has changed its Callout Rewards system after criticism over how the program worked in its first version. He said the initiative was launched two months ago with the goal of making Pump.fun the "most rewarding trading platform," but the original Callout Rewards V1 model unintentionally encouraged the wrong behavior. According to alon, that design led to a rise in low-quality spam content and weakened users' incentive to produce higher-quality posts. He said the team later updated the reward algorithm to favor quality over volume. Under the revised design, the marginal payout declines as a user posts more callouts in a single day. Alon also said rewards have already been distributed to accounts of different sizes, including large accounts and accounts with fewer than 10 followers, and argued there has been no special treatment. Looking ahead, he said the incentive logic will center on discovering quality tokens, building trader trust, and rewarding users based on trading volume, while adding that simply spamming callouts or using followers to dump tokens for arbitrage will not generate long-term returns.