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.

327 points

That dude is really trying to kill his own platform, isn’t he?

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190 points

Taking lessons from Elon.

Maybe they need to charge users a monthly fee and add blue check marks. Lol

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64 points

Taking lessons from Elon.

Wasn’t Huffman singing Elon’s praises after the Twitter purchase?

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47 points

Huffman is a full on Musketeer.

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26 points

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!

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6 points

And after the Twitter api pricing

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42 points

So Reddit gold?

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18 points

I don’t miss the often-regurgitated response of “Gee, thanks stranger” that Redditers would say after receiving gold. It would always annoy me.

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11 points

Ooh, I wonder if he’ll sue all the users that left Reddit to join Lemmy.

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93 points

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.

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56 points

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.

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11 points

I still do this!

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10 points

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.

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2 points

They’re still around.

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7 points

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.

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2 points

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.

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40 points

Quarterly reports demand that line go up.

The line must always go up.

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33 points
*

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

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17 points

The enshittification must go on!

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12 points

Lot of wishful thinking in here. Fact is, Reddit isn’t going anywhere.

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16 points

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.

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2 points

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.

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12 points
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Deleted by creator
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24 points

Lemmy’s largest userbase growth of all time, ever, happened during the reddit API fiasco.

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15 points

How many of them are real users vs bots though? It’s easy to inflate numbers

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1 point

Meh, I deleted my account and moved on. Other than snarky comments I don’t really care what happens to it anymore.

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10 points

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.

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8 points

i mean, this is the site that blocked nsfw content from hitting the front page

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6 points

Short-term gains > *

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236 points

The enshitification will continue until all value is extracted.

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53 points

I kinda love to see it. These companies can’t help themselves.

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12 points

I kinda love to eat, but I’m paying more for less of a worse version.

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4 points

Care to explain how Reddit shitting the bed impacts your ability to eat?

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5 points

Businesses really are just artificial mines, aren’t they?

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184 points

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

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83 points

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.

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19 points

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.

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I definitely bought Reddit gold to support them. Then they got all greedy. Today I pay Sync for a nice app and donate to my Lemmy and Mastodon hosts.

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1 point

Yeah I immediately thought of the funding bar for gold back in the day.

It was honestly fine. Made sense. Showed if they had made enough revenue to cover costs and let you make a personal choice beyond that.

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0 points

I never directly paid for Reddit Gold (in the sense that I had a subscription to it), but I definitely gilded others’ comments a lot.

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22 points

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.

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1 point

Nonsense. The users who have left are an infinitesimal portion of users.

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5 points

I’d happily pay 29.99 to access /r/japancirclejerk2

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4 points
*

Fark still exists with that small monthly payment to support the site model. Drew, the owner, regularly meets up with folks, too. And if you’re a subscriber he must buy you a beer if you ask him per the “terms” of service.

A nice, relatively small, community. That’s what Reddit used to be. Your post really resonated with me.

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1 point

Find out where he lives, move there, stalk him everywhere you can get a drink, never pay for a drink again!

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154 points
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“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

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74 points

If anything, they’re the ones benefiting from altruistic users giving them free labor to profit off of.

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19 points
*

Pretty much, when they removed search engines who wouldn’t pay them was the final straw and I went back to reddit (after not being there since the API debacle) 1 last time and replaced all my 26,000 karma worth of comments with “Comment removed in protest of Reddit blocking search engines.” Took me a while, but meh, if they want to hasten its enshitification, I don’t mind doing my part.

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16 points

Some users have actually reported Reddit going back and restoring those very comments.

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7 points

They have an edit history for every piece of content on the site. All you’ve done is post a giant flagpole on all your content stating “this account was previously owned by a real live human” and increased the value of those comments for AI scraping. Unfortunately your protest has done nothing but help them.

The best way to stick it to reddit these days is to not interact with it at all. Don’t add to their data store, don’t give them traffic, don’t click on them in search results. Don’t protest-edit your content because you’re just helping them separate wheat from chaff.

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6 points
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Deleted by creator
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3 points

Spare a thought for those that have bought Reddit Gold over the years, only to then discover just how much the CEO was paid, up against how much Reddit actually makes as a platform.

It’s not just free labour. They’re literally paying him.

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29 points

I guess reddit was feeding me all those ads out of the kindness of their hearts and took no money for hosting them. “Altruistic”, lol.

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8 points

The altruistic, free version of Reddit is Lemmy.

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3 points

Free*

*Except for very real server costs.

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6 points

Free*

*as in Freedom, but you’re absolutely right

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3 points

The users used to be altruistic, helping other people just because they wanted to be friendly. Because the site used to feel like a real community. But, now that the site is so clearly for-profit I think a lot of users are going to be much less helpful to strangers.

It’s hard to quit the site because it gets so much traffic, which means so much stuff gets posted there. On the other hand, I think the high-quality comments from someone trying to help out are less common.

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138 points

I just made a Lenny account because of this. Fuck them

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69 points

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41 points
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Deleted by creator
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9 points

What did you do to that poor lemming, you creepy bastard!

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22 points

I’ve switched to using this as well but it has very little user interaction. I hope it grows and is able to compete with Reddit one day. It would be nice to be able to go to a basketball or political subreddit (what do we call them here?) and actually be able to have a nice conversation.

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18 points

they’re called lemmy communities, and there’s plenty of interaction! honestly it reminds me of the old days on Reddit before it ballooned into the monster it is today, I legitimately prefer it in every way other than lacking the niche communities (looking at you !2007scape@lemmy.world >.>)

you can find good political discussion in !politicalmemes@lemmy.world or !news@lemmy.world

dunno if there’s any good basketball communities tho, not my bag lol

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7 points

Thank you! And I like the interactions I’ve had so far. It’s just that I’m a huge NBA fan and that’s where I spent most of my time on Reddit. The nba Lemmy community isn’t very big yet but I’m trying to change that by being more active here. I really enjoy this and it feels like actual discussions can be had here unlike on Reddit.

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12 points

Where Reddit has “subreddits” Lemmy has “communities.” Which is a 4 syllable word with 9 or 11 letters depending on singular or plural and no convenient abbreviation so most of us especially the Reddit expats lapse back into calling them “subs.”

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8 points

Thank you for information! I’m happy to have joined this community. For the most part there’s actual discussions here and not just meme answers at the top of every post

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4 points

Comms and subcomms?

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11 points

“Sub” is a generic term from the BBS days, short for “subforum”, “subcommunity”, whatever, so I just use that. I don’t like to use “community” because it’s long and clunky.

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4 points

I wasn’t aware of that! Thank you for educating me on the term.

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5 points

It would be great to have people like you on https://fediverser.network. Follow the subreddits that you miss from there and use to promote the Lemmy alternatives.

And I hope to see you soon on !nba@nba.space. :)

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5 points
*

Try posting on asklemmy, it may not be big enough for individual communities but I think you could bring in a crowd on a post about a particular episode, game, or event if you posted there

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1 point

Is that its intended use? Actually not a bad idea

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4 points

My guy create a Lemmy community about whatever topic and I will post something weird and offputing there, high-five !

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7 points

Welcome!

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7 points

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