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.
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.
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.
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
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!!!
Oh god, I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. Thanks stranger. 🤮
Just doing my part with the updoots!
Ooh, I wonder if he’ll sue all the users that left Reddit to join Lemmy.
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.
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.
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 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.
Quarterly reports demand that line go up.
The line must always go up.
The enshittification must go on!
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.
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Lemmy’s largest userbase growth of all time, ever, happened during the reddit API fiasco.
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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.
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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?
There’s also no correlation between creating a Lemmy account and completely quitting Reddit.
No, but it’s a reasonable assumption that individual will be spending less time on the platform, at the very minimum.
Personally, I haven’t used Reddit on my phone since they killed third party apps, although I have used the desktop site for a few subreddits that don’t really exist here.
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.
How many of them are real users vs bots though? It’s easy to inflate numbers
Meh, I deleted my account and moved on. Other than snarky comments I don’t really care what happens to it anymore.
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
Short-term gains > *
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?
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Nonsense. The users who have left are an infinitesimal portion of users.
I’d happily pay 29.99 to access /r/japancirclejerk2
“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.
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.
Some users have actually reported Reddit going back and restoring those very comments.
yeah, I had heard of that, I’m hoping that since it was a while ago and most of them were the ones done by automated systems and not going through it comment by comment editing them, but I’ll keep at it, if I have to sneak one edit through a day or something.
If it’s an automated system, wouldn’t it be written to just look at the original post date, and if the comment was changed (say a month or a year) later, then the script restores the original post? I mean you could get fancy and have the script check if a user is changing all of their comments to the same message, but that seems like overkill. On the other hand, I’ve been running into quite a few posts lately where it’s obvious a single person has simply deleted all of their comments, and I don’t think those are getting reverted?
Can confirm. At least, mass deleting via api no longer worked last I tried.
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.
Might help just to subtly edit your comment in a way that make any advice or content you’ve given shittier. Like if you have some sort of tech support comment, just edit it in a way so that the piece of tech support you’ve offered is some standard answer for the problem that doesn’t fix anything. And while you’re at it, move the comment which offers the fix or piece of advice to Lemmy.
Don’t protest-edit your content because you’re just helping them separate wheat from chaff.
How about just replace some of your content with this stuff from time to time.
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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.
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.
The altruistic, free version of Reddit is Lemmy.
Free*
*Except for very real server costs.
Free*
*as in Freedom, but you’re absolutely right
Not saying you meant it that way, but people often forget that the Fediverse costs money to run; unlike companies like Reddit, though, the admins are usually not trying to also turn a profit at the same time.
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.
I just made a Lenny account because of this. Fuck them
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
What did you do to that poor lemming, you creepy bastard!
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.
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
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.
Lemmy is naturally more focused on technology, so sports communities will probably continue to be mostly on Reddit.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There are instances focused only on basketball, soccer, American Football, Tennis…
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.”
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
For the most part there’s actual discussions here and not just meme answers at the top of every post
Preach, no karma chasers here.
Comms and subcomms?
No such thing as a subcommunity AFAIK. There are instances (like lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works) and those instances have communities (like Technology or AskLemmy or…do we have a MallNinjaShit yet anywhere on the Fediverse?)
Lemmy.world is a community, /c/news is a subcommunity in that context.
It is whatever we collectively decide it is with enough traction at the end of the day, right?
I think I’m going with the terminology used in Lemmy’s documentation.
Cumms and subcumms
“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.
I wasn’t aware of that! Thank you for educating me on the term.
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
Is that its intended use? Actually not a bad idea
Maybe contact the mods, but I used it to identify a fledgling with great success when I couldn’t find an active birding community
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. :)
My guy create a Lemmy community about whatever topic and I will post something weird and offputing there, high-five !
Welcome!
What’s next? Change the name of the platform to Y.com?
Then following up by threatening to sue all the users who deleted the comments they made and left
I did that in June last year, after 13 years of reddit and thousands of comments, all “gone”
Go back and check again. They are actively restoring deleted comments. About once a month I log back on and delete another round. Usually another 10-15 “mysteriously” pop back up again.
Son of a bitch your right. All my posts got restored! I ran one of those scripts that went through and deleted them all… and sure as fuck I can find them if I search for my reddit account name.
I deleted 12 plus years worth and they are still gone.
I think they’re catching people who are mass deleting comments at once. I recall reading that people were having more success deleting comments in smaller batches during the whole API debacle.
They were a bit more tricky than that I believe. They capped the user page at 3 years of search. So when you delete everything using those scripts it deletes the newer stuff but misses all the older ones. Then after the script runs it shows - no comments.
Y not?
Nah spez_Fu*ker101.com
Wouldn’t be shocked if it cane out he had a burner/secondary on one of ViolentAcrez subreddits
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.
lol I saw this on reddit and was like fuck it, and made a lemmy account.
Welcome to Lemmy. Go fuck yourself /s
welcome here 👋
Altruistic? ALTRUISTIC?!
Just who in the fuck does he think he is?!
The only altruists on Reddit are the users who freely provided the content that this fucking parasite feeds off of.
I’m so glad I left that awful shithole of a site.
And the moderators
This got under my skin too.
That parasite constantly refers to user content and comments and as being the property or Reddit, and his schemes to generate profit off the back of that asset are almost always to the detriment of the user base who are keeping him in business.
Like all rich assholes, he’s got this expectation that everyone will deeply respect and admire his mission to enrich himself by exploiting whatever market he has access to.
Yeah that word choice is quite a bold strategy after all the bullshit they’ve put their revenue generators (the users and mods) through over the last couple years.
Aaron Schwartz didn’t die for this.
The sad thing is yeah, he did, and Alex Ohanian played Switzerland
The decent ones always either die or turn into a boomer parasite
“altruistic”… fuck off.
Didn’t feel altruistic when they told me I couldn’t put affiliate links in the sidebar for my subreddit.
Are they TRYING to kill the site or what?
Just joined because of it
Why do all of these companies decide they are so tired of existing?
I think this comes down to what the intentions are
Paywall /r/videos? Fuck off.
But create a system like Patreon where a content creator can put their own content and interact with their own users and there’s a revenue share between reddit/creator that doesn’t sound terrible.
If they’re gonna do it on Patreon, why not try and lure them to reddit?
Okay now which one are we all expecting?
Rotating paywalls on any sub greater than 10,000 users.
I hope they do that. Another brick in the wall for reddit’s demise.
Honestly, they’ll probably paywall porn first
Starting with the second but eventually the first
Welcome to /r/PremierCatPics where only the best of the best cat pics are allowed to be posted, moderated only by yours truly, ME!
If you want to see the best of the best cat pics, that’ll be $9.99/month, you won’t find cat pics this good in one spot easier anywhere on the internet!
K I t t y I n s u b r e d d I t
That very very unlikely.
Just had some more thoughts on this as well.
If Reddit can lure Patreon users, they could also likely protect that content creators data from being shared on the platform. The creator uploads a commissioned drawing for it’s paid users, and then someone tries to copy it and show it in /r/pics. But since reddit has the source image, they could be scanning for identical images by hash, or matching images via AI and then prevent it from being posted outside the community.
It definitely isn’t THAT easy, but it opens up the potential, and being able to tell your potential customers you have tools to help prevent unauthorized sharing on a prolific platform probably has some merit.
Optimistic on reddit project management abilities considering their app and website is so fucking broken
Don’t make me dream…
tools to help prevent unauthorized sharing
Back in the day, we called them subreddit mods. /j
How is a mod from /r/pics going to know that some random picture happened to be from a private paid subreddit?
edit: I missed the /j
As others have pointed out, it’ll be more like OnlyFans most likely.
Totally. This could be reddits premium answer to a Patreon community with an exclusive Discord server.
So… a Reddit community with an exclusive Discord server?
I can’t tell of you’re just joking or not - so no, just straight up as a replacement for both, Patreon+Discord. You have a creator you like on YouTube let’s say, and so you sign up for their premium subreddit to support them. You get the community on reddit as a replacement for how creators use Discord, and then if they integrated Patreon-like features such as a host for members only videos or premium podcast feeds from the creator, and giving the creator a place to upload and share members only photos or polls. Meanwhile it operates just like any other subreddit operates for community discussions. No need for multiple services integrated, if reddit offers an all in one solution.
Reddit is not a great replacement for Discord and its live chat features IMO.
Well, they would presumably develop premium subreddit features to reach parity or develop an otherwise useful feature set. As it is now, you’re certainly right.
