Reddit is planning to introduce a paywall this year, CEO Steve Huffman said during a videotaped Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Thursday.
Huffman previously showed interest in potentially introducing a new type of subreddit with “exclusive content or private areas” that Reddit users would pay to access.
When asked this week about plans for some Redditors to create “content that only paid members can see,” Huffman said:
It’s a work in progress right now, so that one’s coming… We’re working on it as we speak.
When asked about “new, key features that you plan to roll out for Reddit in 2025,” Huffman responded, in part: “Paid subreddits, yes.”
Reddit’s paywall would ostensibly only apply to certain new subreddit types, not any subreddits currently available.
Reddit executives also discussed how they might introduce more ads into the social media platform. The push for ads follows changes to Reddit’s API policy that, in part, led to the closing of most third-party apps used for accessing Reddit. Reddit makes most of its revenue from ads and can only show ads on its native apps and website.
Reddit started testing ads in comments last year, with COO Jen Wong saying during an AMA that such ads are in “about 3 percent of inventory.” The executive hinted at that percentage growing. Wong also shared hopes that contextual advertising, or ads being shown based on the content surrounding them, will be a “bigger part of” Reddit’s business by 2026.
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Reddit has gotten so bad that it’s funny. I love reading about whatever awkward, bumbling cash grab they’re trying next.
What’s a good word for constant, ongoing enshittification? Diarrheafication?
Funny and sad at the same time, to be honest… That douche busted up a lot of awesome communities with wonderful people, and he’s on the right track to ruin things completely…
In the name of profits.
Don’t be mistaken, he and his board will make tons of money from this. Everyone is rooting for the demise of the site, but the bad guys will win. So what everyone liked will be gone and dead, and those parasites will be even richer.
By far one of the easiest decisions was jumping on over here - and I barely understand it half the time.
Second best was ditching Facebook like it was cancer.
Its never been a better time to ignore reddit
I feel like this is gonna be a cash cow for reddit, just not in a way spez can just openly talk about.
A huge portion of reddit is OnlyFans promos. Reddit is making zero off of all this, because traditional advertising doesn’t want to associate themselves with porn. A bunch of these “paid subreddits” will basically be a reddit’s attempt to compete with OnlyFans.
I honestly think it’ll work. There’s a lot of money in porn.n
You’re gonna pay the mods then, right?
Right?
no
Most likely it’s going to be some sort of onlyfans system where people can pay to get access to specific content and the content creator gets to keep a share of it
Get fuuuuuuucked, Reddit
Can I reply to this next week when I stop laughing
Yes.
I haven’t had an account since the Apollo purge but fuck Spez.
The api shit they pulled is why i left and never went back
Same. I left when it was announced.
i switched to lemmy after seeing the crackdown after the blackouts where they just repo’ed subreddits that didn’t stand down - it was clear then that internal forces would not be able to change a thing over there. i couldn’t support a site that was doing shit like this. (It’s the reason i keep pestering my wife to leave facebook and instagram after zucks kneefall for trump, and switch to pixelfed and bluesky instead; lemmy wouldn’t be a good place for her, but i can see her enjoying pixelfed a lot)
Fuck Spez
Thank you spez for killing reddit, please digg faster
Is there anywhere I can find a complete scrape of Reddit threads and comments from before the 3rd party app apocalypse? There was a lot of useful info shared on there, but I don’t want anything to do with what that site has become. I’m happy just to CTRL+F a big dataset. It’ll probably still work better than either Reddit or Google does nowadays. Without media I imagine I could fit it somewhere.
Also, Spez is a greedy little pig boy.
We really need efforts made to bulk upload historical posts of value to lemmy. If done right, we could significantly expand the amount of subs and content, even if they are ghost towns initially with just the old posts from reddit. Build it and they will migrate.
are you going to use it to train your deepseek?
Not everyone is perverted like you.
I never understood the desire to search in conversational language via AI. It’s gone to far for my taste. I just want to be able to scour a huge volume of info for my exact search terms, maybe with a few synonyms or misspellings included. Google and AI keep trying to assume they know what I’m looking for, but they’re always wrong (intentionally wrong based on their own motives).
The reason the dataset interests me is that search has gotten so bad that I can’t get any non-corporate information from search engines anymore, just more pig swill, chumbucket ads, and misinformation slop. Anything I search for would probably give better results if I just searched old reddit, Wikipedia, and a few other datasets locally in a simple way. Not sure what software is best to use for something like that, but I’d like to collect a few mostly pre-AI datasets now to get the ball rolling before you can’t find those online anymore either.
Yes, there’s a torrent somewhere…
https://academictorrents.com/details/c398a571976c78d346c325bd75c47b82edf6124e
This is what I could find with a quick search, but I know there’s a larger database backup.
Sigh unzips pants and fuck u/spez
Good news for Lemmynites.
Bad news is that we’re still not setup for Reddit-level user counts. Lemmy needs much better moderation tools to allow communities to stay on top of reports.
Hopefully a lot of new users will also produce new people contributing to Lemmy. Or, maybe some people will form some sort of nonprofit that allows dedicated designers and engineers to continually work on Lemmy. When people contribute as a side gig, most give up after a few months. Most of the Lemmy clients that were build during the Reddit APIocalypse are no longer alive.
We have plenty of clients tho, arctic, mlem, voyager, my favorite thunder, are all available on ios and there are more, they all get updates
For desktop phtn and tesseract are solid.
Lemmings?
Lemlords?
I’m more of a LemSerf
Lemmyburghers
Lemmards
Lumbergh…
Lemmites?
Not a great decision from Reddit.
Reddit: Here’s another reason not to use our site.
Users: Ok bye.
Man I kinda thought they had already hit enshittification bottom. And then they bring out the backhoe and dynamite.
