- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
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.
You must log in or register to comment.
I think this comes down to what the intentions are
Paywall /r/videos? Fuck off.
But create a system like Patreon where a content creator can put their own content and interact with their own users and there’s a revenue share between reddit/creator that doesn’t sound terrible.
If they’re gonna do it on Patreon, why not try and lure them to reddit?
Okay now which one are we all expecting?
Honestly, they’ll probably paywall porn first
Rotating paywalls on any sub greater than 10,000 users.
I hope they do that. Another brick in the wall for reddit’s demise.
Starting with the second but eventually the first
Welcome to /r/PremierCatPics where only the best of the best cat pics are allowed to be posted, moderated only by yours truly, ME!
If you want to see the best of the best cat pics, that’ll be $9.99/month, you won’t find cat pics this good in one spot easier anywhere on the internet!
K I t t y I n s u b r e d d I t
That very very unlikely.
Totally. This could be reddits premium answer to a Patreon community with an exclusive Discord server.
So… a Reddit community with an exclusive Discord server?
I can’t tell of you’re just joking or not - so no, just straight up as a replacement for both, Patreon+Discord. You have a creator you like on YouTube let’s say, and so you sign up for their premium subreddit to support them. You get the community on reddit as a replacement for how creators use Discord, and then if they integrated Patreon-like features such as a host for members only videos or premium podcast feeds from the creator, and giving the creator a place to upload and share members only photos or polls. Meanwhile it operates just like any other subreddit operates for community discussions. No need for multiple services integrated, if reddit offers an all in one solution.
Reddit is not a great replacement for Discord and its live chat features IMO.
Well, they would presumably develop premium subreddit features to reach parity or develop an otherwise useful feature set. As it is now, you’re certainly right.
As others have pointed out, it’ll be more like OnlyFans most likely.
Just had some more thoughts on this as well.
If Reddit can lure Patreon users, they could also likely protect that content creators data from being shared on the platform. The creator uploads a commissioned drawing for it’s paid users, and then someone tries to copy it and show it in /r/pics. But since reddit has the source image, they could be scanning for identical images by hash, or matching images via AI and then prevent it from being posted outside the community.
It definitely isn’t THAT easy, but it opens up the potential, and being able to tell your potential customers you have tools to help prevent unauthorized sharing on a prolific platform probably has some merit.
Optimistic on reddit project management abilities considering their app and website is so fucking broken
Don’t make me dream…
tools to help prevent unauthorized sharing
Back in the day, we called them subreddit mods. /j
How is a mod from /r/pics going to know that some random picture happened to be from a private paid subreddit?
edit: I missed the /j
“I think the existing, altruistic, free version of Reddit will continue to exist and grow and thrive just the way it has,” Huffman said.
There’s nothing ‘altruistic’ about reddit
If anything, they’re the ones benefiting from altruistic users giving them free labor to profit off of.
Spare a thought for those that have bought Reddit Gold over the years, only to then discover just how much the CEO was paid, up against how much Reddit actually makes as a platform.
It’s not just free labour. They’re literally paying him.
Pretty much, when they removed search engines who wouldn’t pay them was the final straw and I went back to reddit (after not being there since the API debacle) 1 last time and replaced all my 26,000 karma worth of comments with “Comment removed in protest of Reddit blocking search engines.” Took me a while, but meh, if they want to hasten its enshitification, I don’t mind doing my part.
Some users have actually reported Reddit going back and restoring those very comments.
yeah, I had heard of that, I’m hoping that since it was a while ago and most of them were the ones done by automated systems and not going through it comment by comment editing them, but I’ll keep at it, if I have to sneak one edit through a day or something.
If it’s an automated system, wouldn’t it be written to just look at the original post date, and if the comment was changed (say a month or a year) later, then the script restores the original post? I mean you could get fancy and have the script check if a user is changing all of their comments to the same message, but that seems like overkill. On the other hand, I’ve been running into quite a few posts lately where it’s obvious a single person has simply deleted all of their comments, and I don’t think those are getting reverted?
Can confirm. At least, mass deleting via api no longer worked last I tried.
They have an edit history for every piece of content on the site. All you’ve done is post a giant flagpole on all your content stating “this account was previously owned by a real live human” and increased the value of those comments for AI scraping. Unfortunately your protest has done nothing but help them.
The best way to stick it to reddit these days is to not interact with it at all. Don’t add to their data store, don’t give them traffic, don’t click on them in search results. Don’t protest-edit your content because you’re just helping them separate wheat from chaff.
Don’t protest-edit your content because you’re just helping them separate wheat from chaff.
How about just replace some of your content with this stuff from time to time.
Might help just to subtly edit your comment in a way that make any advice or content you’ve given shittier. Like if you have some sort of tech support comment, just edit it in a way so that the piece of tech support you’ve offered is some standard answer for the problem that doesn’t fix anything. And while you’re at it, move the comment which offers the fix or piece of advice to Lemmy.
deleted by creator
The users used to be altruistic, helping other people just because they wanted to be friendly. Because the site used to feel like a real community. But, now that the site is so clearly for-profit I think a lot of users are going to be much less helpful to strangers.
It’s hard to quit the site because it gets so much traffic, which means so much stuff gets posted there. On the other hand, I think the high-quality comments from someone trying to help out are less common.
I guess reddit was feeding me all those ads out of the kindness of their hearts and took no money for hosting them. “Altruistic”, lol.
The altruistic, free version of Reddit is Lemmy.
Free*
*Except for very real server costs.
Free*
*as in Freedom, but you’re absolutely right
Not saying you meant it that way, but people often forget that the Fediverse costs money to run; unlike companies like Reddit, though, the admins are usually not trying to also turn a profit at the same time.
This is a terrible idea for a site that relies solely on user-generated content and even user-moderation. It’s not like Twitter hasn’t tried this before - didn’t work out so well, I’d say. But hey, this concept probably works for the upper management. I guess it doesn’t matter to them if all that’s left is scorched earth, as long as they can cash out.
But they’re going to split the profits with
content generatorsusers, right? Right?Sure, 1$ for 5.000 high quality posts - but only if it is content that you would otherwise only find in scientific journals; no AI stuff, of course.
A whole dollar?? You’ll bankrupt spez at that rate!! How ever will he catch up to Jeff and the Muskrat if he’s out here giving these “users” the money he wants to keep?
Reddit: what are users for but to extract money from?
A new challenger joins the battle in the Elon / Cloudstrike “ruin an established company any % speed run” challenge?
The dumbass does not have an original idea or vision in his body. After turning his users into consumer goods, now he’s just thinking about reddit r/lounge 2.0 and combining it with reddit awards 2.0 and reddit talk 2.0.
First of all, that only works if moderators get payed or you get some extremely gullible and power hungry ones, which for the first I doubt his money scrounging self could allow and for the second, that’s the problem.
It will also open up a whole can of worms that reddit certainly has deserved for some time now, people suing if they are banned from these communities, specially if it was due to personal fickle prerogative of one of the mods. But considering what reddit has gotten away with, this last point is not really that likely.
Lol glad to move to lemmy
It’s pretty crazy to watch enshittification play out in real time.
Just joined because of it
Hey! I just read this on Reddit before I made this account! 🥲
“How DARE you take your subreddit private? Then Google can’t index it and people can’t access it! I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN DO THAT!” - spez
Why not all?
What’s going to stop people from creating a new community and migrating the second reddit pay walls it.
Oh pics is now paywalled, looks like everyone is using pics_free
deleted by creator
The obvious reaction to anything typically free getting paywalled is vehemence, of course - and that’s my thought given Reddit’s track record.
Still, if it weren’t them, I’m thinking about how this could be done in a classy way. Most people are not willing to engage on topics like politics because there will always be an unending army of trolls arguing in bad faith about them or needlessly engaging in flame wars. If there’s some form of friction behind entry, that CAN at least get people to think twice about insulting each other.
Price tags as a form of friction are problematic, of course, in that they “only allow access to the rich”. As such, I’d also be open to other ways of making it “difficult” to enter in a way that people could still do with no money. The silliest idea that comes to mind is that people must mail a physical postcard requesting entry (which could then loop back to price tags, since that uses a stamp)
nice. This won’t backfire
