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.
lol I saw this on reddit and was like fuck it, and made a lemmy account.
The best thing is how many different servers people are from here. No single gatekeeper who can wreck it.
I’m honestly a bit worried because I’ve noticed that most users are from lemmy.world, and the whole point of Lemmy should be decentralisation.
Yes this is the biggest flaw of Lemmy. It happens because if you go to /c/books, the default view is not an alglomeration of all /c/books on all federated servers.
There are many bullshit reason why this has been refused. Some people try to push for a useless multi-reddit-like solution instead.
But there are fatal consequence for Lemmy not doing this. Largely it concentrates all the power into the hands of the “one big community” (inevitable under current conditions) in the one big instance.
The decentralization promise of Lemmy has been effectively defused by the Lemmy elite from the get go.
Hey nice to have ya!
Friendly reminder that the Fediverse is awesome, and you have the power to control the content in your feed not only by which subs you subscribe to or instances you make an account on, but also which you can block - including specific users if it comes to that. Of course, instance admins can do the same, and if that happens to content you want to see, you can always make a new account on a different instance and see everything.
It takes a little to understand the Fediverse structure, but imo it’s one of the best ways social media can be structured.