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.

  • DudeDudenson@lemmings.world
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    5 months ago

    I know the lemmy hivemind jumps at any opportunity to trash reddit, but if properly implemented (which to be honest they probably won’t ) this could be the same as paid forums back in the day. It just depends on how much of a cut they get and how do they manage revenue share. If you could have your own private forum for free and have people subscribe to it for 2 bucks a month and you get 75% revenue of every sub it would probably spring a lot of high value forums, I’m mostly thinking like car forums used to be but it’d probably be used as another only fans

  • i2ndshenanigans@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    So they want people to possibly pay to visit certain subreddits and the content of those subreddits is most definitely going to stay server submitted and curated. Getting people to pay to be able to submit their own content is going to go over well with the user base. They are probably going to do it with the NSFW subreddits.

    • jimrob4@midwest.social
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      5 months ago

      I’ve been here since they shut down third-party apps. It gets better each time they piss off more of the user base and ya’ll join the rest of us. Hahaha.

  • KhalBrogo1@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I want to switch aswell, but what is to stop bigger servers from doing the same on Lemmy?

    Also where can I find the best instance for each of the Reddit equivalent? For instance I want wall street bets, where is the most active instance of that?

    • x00z@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Hey! Welcome!

      I recently joined as well. It’s actually very nice here.

      Let’s make something nice _

  • PastryPaul@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    While I look forward to the continuing demise of Reddit, I’m not looking forward to the influx of even more Redditors.

  • 4lan@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    been telling everyone on the reddit post about this to ditch reddit for lemmy. this could be a really good thing for this platform

    I am going to try to revive some of the dead subs in here with posts and engagement.

  • Wispy2891@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I can already imagine how many scams this new feature can enable

    “Join our private subreddit to unlock the secret to become rich” and then inside all you find is something like “yolo on Intel” and so on

    • FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      They had that, you get enough gold you get access to the lounge where people with internet money just talk about how to spend their points in other people.

      Funny, you get enough virtual gold folks just want to share it. Real money, not so much