Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has hinted that in future some subreddits could be paywalled, as the company seeks to devise new sources of income.

He suggested that the company might experiment with paywalled subreddits as it looks to monetize new features. “I think the existing, altruistic, free version of Reddit will continue to exist and grow and thrive just the way it has,” Huffman said. “But now we will unlock the door for new use cases, new types of subreddits that can be built that may have exclusive content or private areas, things of that nature.”

This is another move likely to anger Redditors. While the platform is a commercial enterprise, its value derives almost entirely from freely offered user content. That means Redditors feel at least some sense of ownership in a community endeavour, so the company needs to tread carefully when it comes to monetization at user expense.

    • Erasmus
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      1933 months ago

      Taking lessons from Elon.

      Maybe they need to charge users a monthly fee and add blue check marks. Lol

    • @[email protected]
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      973 months ago

      It’s kind of indicative of how bad the web has gotten that twitter and reddit still have users. Digg completely imploded over much less than this. Just that back in 2010, there was somewhere else to go.

      inb4 Lemmy. I get it, but we’re not there yet.

      • @[email protected]
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        583 months ago

        I love Lemmy but I really, really miss the old web. Back when people would just create their own website and put it out there to share their niche interest with the world. People just organically linked their sites to each other to form web rings, an easy method of federation without any reliance on sophisticated server-side software.

          • @[email protected]
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            3 months ago

            Does anyone find your stuff? Search engines seem to be less and less capable of finding indie websites and show most results for shopping and/or image results (ie the paid ones), or else if it’s a question it goes Reddit/quora/stack exchange before any search results.

            I finally shut off my old self hosted Wordpress last year because traffic had dwindled to a couple hits a month or less. Besides the constant bot traffic trying to hijack the site.

            • Amanda
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              33 months ago

              No idea honesty, I don’t collect metrics.

        • @[email protected]
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          103 months ago

          The heyday of the forums. For about 2 years the combination of Tapatalk and forums was awesome. Centralized interface with no ads, all the discussion.

          Then they both gutted their functionality and spammed in the ads.

          • @[email protected]
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            13 months ago

            How do I find them though? I would love a search engine that only finds these sites and excludes all the commercial ones and all the ad spam.

              • @[email protected]
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                3 months ago

                I did a search for shoelaces and I got a bunch of stack overflow links as well as Wikipedia. I don’t consider WP to be commercial but SO definitely is. I did not get a result for Ian’s shoelace site, which is what I was hoping to find. Even searching for “Ian’s shoelace site” did not find it, whereas the same query on DDG brought it right up (top of the results).

                I do like the site though. Thanks for sharing. I’ll try some other queries on it.

      • @[email protected]
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        73 months ago

        The makeup of web users has changed a lot since 2010. The average web surfer was a lot less passive in attitude in decades past.

        • @[email protected]
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          23 months ago

          I hate listening to my younger brother talk about technology. He is just a sheep in an apple pen, and perfectly happy. I don’t get it.

      • @[email protected]
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        163 months ago

        What will likely happen is the worst assholes will be the ones paying for this stuff, much like Xitter, because it is a demonstration of being a part of the alt-right, ultra-capitalist in-group.

        • @[email protected]
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          23 months ago

          Huffman is a greedy bastard, but I don’t think he’s alt-right. He’s a bland neoliberal hypocrite. He is an advisor at the ADL and made a post saying that black lives matter, while not actually doing anything to help and actively profiting from what he said he was against.

        • skulblaka
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          253 months ago

          Lemmy’s largest userbase growth of all time, ever, happened during the reddit API fiasco.

            • @[email protected]
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              3 months ago

              Yes. More than a little. It was a huge event for lemmy. Did you think the entire reddit userbase was going to switch in one week? Reddit didn’t get their userbase in one week. It’s a process. Now there is a well known alternative to reddit. Everything in reddit looks shittier than it was before the exodus. It’s nearly impossible to become a ‘new user’ on reddit and with the rando-bans they keep giving out they are just going to keep shrinking.

                • @[email protected]
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                  23 months ago

                  If you’d like to post evidence that contradicts my source, please do. “Leaving” for a few days doesn’t count.

                  I was not discussing anything to do with “switching”, I was discussing users leaving Reddit.

                  Maybe they encountered so many charming people like you on Lemmy they had to go back to Reddit in case they turned nice?

                  Would that mean they switched and switched back? Or left and re-joined?

            • @[email protected]
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              73 months ago

              There’s also no correlation between creating a Lemmy account and completely quitting Reddit.

              • @[email protected]
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                13 months ago

                No, but it’s a reasonable assumption that individual will be spending less time on the platform, at the very minimum.

                Personally, I haven’t used Reddit on my phone since they killed third party apps, although I have used the desktop site for a few subreddits that don’t really exist here.

          • @[email protected]
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            23 months ago

            Reddit has over 1,000,000,000 active users per month. Lemmy has about 50,000. The API fiasco was a big deal for lemmy, but it was not a big deal for reddit. Lemmy is a rounding error to them.

            I would also bet that a lot of lemmy users still visit reddit for their niche communities. I know I do, even though I host a server for my own niche hobby, but I’m the only one who’s ever posted anything to it.

      • @[email protected]
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        13 months ago

        Meh, I deleted my account and moved on. Other than snarky comments I don’t really care what happens to it anymore.

    • @[email protected]
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      103 months ago

      The way I interpret what he is suggesting is that they are planning on going after Patreon type websites that provide a private paid for space for a creator’s supporters. It’s unlikely, but they could also pretty easily go after OF to keep that traffic on site.