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.
Aaron Schwartz didn’t die for this.
That dude is really trying to kill his own platform, isn’t he?
Taking lessons from Elon.
Maybe they need to charge users a monthly fee and add blue check marks. Lol
Taking lessons from Elon.
Wasn’t Huffman singing Elon’s praises after the Twitter purchase?
Huffman is a full on Musketeer.
The enshittification must go on!
He’s trying to make money, he doesn’t care about the platform or its future. The Boeing’s CEO during the two 737 MAX crashes had to resign… with $62.2 million in his pockets. These people live in a different world.
https://www.ft.com/content/522fab9c-34f2-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3cba4
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.
i mean, this is the site that blocked nsfw content from hitting the front page
Quarterly reports demand that line go up.
The line must always go up.
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.
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.
Lot of wishful thinking in here. Fact is, Reddit isn’t going anywhere.
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.
It was wishful thinking when people revolted for 3 days against the API going away. What happened? Nothing. People were back to Reddit as normal a week later. Reddit’s userbase has only grown since then. People will complain to the ends of the Earth but there’s no amount of abuse you can levy at the them that will convince them to make the minor inconvenience of moving to a different platform. See: Twitter.
How many of them are real users vs bots though? It’s easy to inflate numbers
lol I saw this on reddit and was like fuck it, and made a lemmy account.
The enshitification will continue until all value is extracted.
Businesses really are just artificial mines, aren’t they?
I kinda love to see it. These companies can’t help themselves.
I kinda love to eat, but I’m paying more for less of a worse version.
Care to explain how Reddit shitting the bed impacts your ability to eat?
I was referring to the enshittification of all things, which has impacted my eating habits
I find this comment funny.
What’s next? Change the name of the platform to Y.com?
Now the IPO is done Reddit has to continually feed the investors at the expense of the quality of the thing that’s supposed to make money to feed the investors.
This is gonna be fun.
The truth is in the better days of Reddit I would’ve paid 2 or 3 dollars to access Reddit if that helped maintain it sustainable and if some of that money reverted to mods. Now? Reddit can burn
Yeah this feels like a move that would have worked a lot better before Reddit had burned a bunch of bridges with their most active users.
The pool of people with enough goodwill to pay now is likely small, and shrinking. The causal new users probably are that keen to pay up either.
That was the first sales pitch for Reddit gold. That they just needed a couple bucks a month to pay for the servers. Lots of power uses back then did just that, and felt pretty good about themselves. There were people also arguing even then that anybody who paid Reddit’s bills for them was an idiot, but lots of people did.
I mean I get their feelings. Netflix et Al started with reasonable prices and then the greedy fuck heads raised the prices, so I bet Reddit would do it as well.
“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.
…
Wouldn’t the contributors to those subs just make a new one that’s not paywalled?
Reddit is going to be asking users to pay to generate content on specific subs, but they’re forgetting again that the sub isn’t the important part, it’s the users.
This would just fracture the biggest subs and destroy the communities.
