- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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.
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Woo! Paywalled porn subreddits! Commodify everything!! :D
I mean, it’s not like it’s a new concept, is it?
I can’t even imagine the creators in those subreddits would be thrilled since so many of them seemingly use those subs as a free advertising spot for their onlyfans. More of them are trying to be creative with overtly sexual questions in askreddit and people just stumbling in to their profile.
Oh I promise someone will at least try.
Oh they already are. But if they start making porn subs like gonewild as paid services, those users are going to push the limits of whats allowed in other subs to try and just get people to stumble into their profile.
And the shit train goes on…
digital champagne room
From the article “helping users dive deeper into products, shows, games” - that right there is their focus. It’s spelled right out that it’s going to be primarily an advertising platform.
They already are. They put all nsfw content behind a privacy paywall (pay with email and browsing habits). Luckily it can still be subverted through old.reddit.com - but the question is for how long.
Luckily it can still be subverted through old.reddit.com
Wait, really? That’s hilariously stupid.
Proves yet another time that Aaron died for nothing
Why not all?
That dude is really trying to kill his own platform, isn’t he?
The enshittification must go on!
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
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.
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.
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.
Lemmy’s largest userbase growth of all time, ever, happened during the reddit API fiasco.
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.
Did some people leave? Sure. Any actual significant portion? No, not even a little.
There’s also no correlation between creating a Lemmy account and completely quitting Reddit.
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.
Yes. More than a little.
If you’d like to post evidence that contradicts my source, please do. “Leaving” for a few days doesn’t count.
Did you think the entire reddit userbase was going to switch in one week?
I was not discussing anything to do with “switching”, I was discussing users leaving Reddit.
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?
How many of them are real users vs bots though? It’s easy to inflate numbers
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.
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.
I still do this!
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.
No idea honesty, I don’t collect metrics.
They’re still around.
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.
Good news! https://search.marginalia.nu/
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.
Happy hunting. :)
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.
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.
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.
Short-term gains > *
Quarterly reports demand that line go up.
The line must always go up.
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?
I remember that too, but am not that sure…
Oh yeah, he did! https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-protest-private-ceo-elon-musk-huffman-rcna89700
Doing right as his role model!
He pointed at Twitter’s “success” after Elon took it over as reasons why he is enshittifying Reddit. That comment is why I left Reddit and haven’t looked back.
And after the Twitter api pricing
Huffman is a full on Musketeer.
How has this demonym only just now come to my attention?
It’s fantastic, thank you.
See also: Trumpet - people who start singing the same tune as Trump for their own political gain.
Ooh, I wonder if he’ll sue all the users that left Reddit to join Lemmy.
So Reddit gold?
I don’t miss the often-regurgitated response of “Gee, thanks stranger” that Redditers would say after receiving gold. It would always annoy me.
Thank you kind stranger!
edit: Wow, didn’t expect this to blow up!!!
Just doing my part with the updoots!
Oh god, I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. Thanks stranger. 🤮
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
Wow, fuck absolutely all of that
So OnlyFans for Reddit. More spam incoming.
Trying to stop scrapers, I would imagine.
If scrapers have anything to do with the decision, I’d guess its not so much “stop” as it is “make them pay to scrape”. However I’d guess this is just Huffman trying to squeeze more money out of Reddit.
If they grandfather existing subscribers in it might work for a few months or years, and what does the current Reddit leadership care if that community survives longer than they stay at the company. They also might make a few sales with paywalled celebrity IAmA threads. In any case I will watch from the sidelines and enjoy the spectacle 🍿.
The enshitification will continue until all value is extracted.
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.
Businesses really are just artificial mines, aren’t they?
I bet it’s for the porn. I bet you he’s going to paywall the porn.
It’s steve huffman so it’s definitely for jailbait porn.
Oh no! Where will I go to see OF spam bots now???
Who goes to Reddit for porn when so many other better options exist? I always thought that was weird. That’d be the last place I’d look for it.
Also, commenting about porn is creepy as hell to me. Like, I do not want to read some other person’s opinions/fantasies about a piece of media I’m jerkin’ it to. It’s like the people that try to make smalltalk at the urinal. Get in, do your business, get out, and keep that shit to yourself.
I use it only to get niche porn that can be a pain to find manually online.
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.
They don’t care as long as they can get in, make a few bucks, and get out. Long-term stability isn’t the priority anymore, just quick profits.
…
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.
Wouldn’t the contributors to those subs just make a new one that’s not paywalled?
My guess is that the paywalled subs are going to be a way of interacting with celebrities. Like, a House of the Dragon sub featuring AMAs with cast members, but behind a paywall. You could make a House of the Dragon non-paywalled sub, but the celebs wouldn’t post there because they have a side-deal where they get paid for posting in the paywalled subreddit.
I’ve seen some content creators having a discord channel that is pay to get into where the content creator participates in it as a way to generate additional money. I suspect Reddit wants to do something similar and take a cut of fee.
And I fully expect this to devolve into becoming a new OnlyFans.
The common thread I’ve seen online is this:
- Google’s search algorithm sucks. I always append reddit.com to get good forum results
- Reddit’s search algorithm sucks.
These two tools are quickly becoming coupled for Google-Fu expert users. The historical forum history that goes back 3-5 years on Reddit is their goldmine. You can’t just make a new subreddit overnight when a sub gets paywalled. All of that historical data will be lost and paywalled.
I think a paywall could be an effective money maker for Reddit because they’ve basically become their own Google - in that each subreddit acts like a unique website with real, human, responses. The only problem is that reddit has a god awful search algorithm that they refuse to improve. So people use Google to essentially search reddit. The “whales” so-to-speak are the only people they need to capture. People like myself (frugal people) aren’t in their peripherals. But the people that think “I’ll pay each month for NYT” or “it’s just a few dollars for the WSJ” are going to use the same logic for Reddit: “it’s a small amount of money to have access to high quality forums on X, Y, and Z”.
In addition, this might bolster Reddit’s content even further. Since paywalled subs will automatically reduce the amount of AI content spammed on them, they will inherently increase the legitimacy of each forum.
Lastly, this will give them a path towards monetization for moderators which doesn’t require them skimming off of their own pay checks to achieve it.
Do I like this? No. Is this fair? Also no. People contributed to Reddit under the impression that their data would be available and accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. That implicit guarantee is being violated. It’s an afront to the hard working individuals that have developed these communities brick by brick.
But does this “solution” make a lot of business sense? Possibly. As long as they survive the changeover in the short term, I think they’ll thrive from this choice for the reasons I stated above.
Again, it’s going to give them a pathway for:
- Monetization
- Reduce AI spam (a big fear of all forums)
- They could make even more money off the back of this
I’m pretty much over Reddit anyways. Lemmy has been my backup social media for a while now. The Internet is still free - for now. I just hope we can all find better search engines and forums in the future. Google has been degrading. Reddit has been locking things down. We obviously need to pivot to other platforms. Or maybe just go back to the old days where you find niche forums hosted by some dude in his basement. Nothing wrong with that.
Sure till they copystrike their own subs
