If you're an active Reddit user, you may just get a little "money" from the company by this time next year.

After raising $50 million in funding in September, Reddit's then-CEO Yishan Wong announced that investors were willing to "give 10% of their shares back to the community." Reddit has since changed CEOs, but on Friday, the company said it would move forward with its plan to give a stake back to users.

Reddit will dole out "Reddit Notes" via a lottery to those users who were active on the site prior to the funding announcement in September, it said. The company will only be giving out 950,000 of the notes — far fewer than the 175 million monthly active users it had at last count.

"There aren't as many Reddit notes as there are accounts, so if you get one, lucky you!" the company said in a blog post. "Eligible recipients of Reddit notes will be determined based on activities before 9/30/14 (when we first announced this project), and we plan to give them away in the fall of 2015."

Some in the media initially framed the move as Reddit distributing equity to users, but company representatives have since tried to clarify that's not exactly the case.

"In our minds, it's not equity," Daniel Lim, project leader for Reddit Notes, told Inc magazine. "Think about how other companies reward their customers. Like McDonald's Monopoly game."

When Wong first announced the plan in September, he had suggested the shares might be returned to users in the form of cryptocurrency. However, the company is now framing it as more of a rewards program and less of a real currency.

"For legal reasons, it is unlikely we will make the cryptocurrency exchangeable for actual shares, since we are not a public company, and therefore it would be illegal to give shares to millions of people," Ryan Charles, a cryptocurrency engineer at Reddit, wrote in a comment thread following the announcement. "Howevever [sic], we are working on a legal strategy and I'm sure the cryptocurrency will be exchangeable for something of value. Also, we used the word 'cryptocurrency' originally, but a better term is 'digital asset,' since in many ways notes will not be like a currency at all."

While still vague, Reddit's decision to give back some funding to its community is likely intended to signal that the company continues to put its user base front and center, even while dealing with investors. That's in stark contrast to former archrival Digg, which was widely criticized for degrading the user experience in 2010 to cater to investors and marketers.

Reddit Notes may also add to the social-news site's growing transactional ecosystem, which already includes a gifts marketplace and recently launched crowdsourcing platform. Given the company's long-held mindset against ramping up advertising too much on the site, encouraging users to get comfortable exchanging money with the community may be its next best bet to boost revenue and reach profitability.