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.
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.
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.
