this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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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.

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[–] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (8 children)

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

[–] fluxion@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

Short-term gains > *

[–] iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It was wishful thinking when people revolted for 3 days against the API going away. What happened? Nothing. People were back to Reddit as normal a week later. Reddit's userbase has only grown since then. People will complain to the ends of the Earth but there's no amount of abuse you can levy at the them that will convince them to make the minor inconvenience of moving to a different platform. See: Twitter.

[–] j4yt33@feddit.org 0 points 2 months ago

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

[–] skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Did some people leave? Sure. Any actual significant portion? No, not even a little.

[–] cygnus@lemmy.ca 0 points 2 months ago

There's also no correlation between creating a Lemmy account and completely quitting Reddit.

[–] btaf45@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Yes. More than a little.

If you'd like to post evidence that contradicts my source, please do. "Leaving" for a few days doesn't count.

Did you think the entire reddit userbase was going to switch in one week?

I was not discussing anything to do with "switching", I was discussing users leaving Reddit.

[–] manualoverride@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ah yes, because we all know Reddit only has the nicest folks...

[–] manualoverride@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well it looks like they’re missing at least one 😉

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] manualoverride@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I don't get it. I belong on Reddit because I'm a nice person?

[–] manualoverride@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I was really tempted to continue playing along here but then I thought you may just be Autistic and unable to follow….

You appear to be a little aggressive with your messages, normal people don’t communicate in such a confrontational way. Just take a step back, take a deep breath, and try to have civil disagreements with people.

We’re all just here to read some stuff, learn some stuff and try to ignore our real lives for a bit… let’s try and have fun while we’re here.

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You call me autistic in one sentence and accuse me of being confrontational, then ask me to be civil in the next. I think maybe you need to work on your communication skills.

[–] Lotus@lemm.ee 0 points 2 months ago

This guy getsn't it

[–] IMongoose@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] rambling_lunatic@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

Quarterly reports demand that line go up.

The line must always go up.

[–] stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] JonnyJ@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

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

[–] Erasmus@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Taking lessons from Elon.

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

[–] Technofrood@feddit.uk 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] PopcornPrincess@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] tootoughtoremember@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Thank you kind stranger!

edit: Wow, didn't expect this to blow up!!!

[–] PopcornPrincess@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

Oh god, I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. Thanks stranger. 🤮

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[–] Sludgehammer@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Taking lessons from Elon.

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

[–] stonerboner@lemmynsfw.com 0 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] goferking0@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 2 months ago

And after the Twitter api pricing

[–] Thrife@feddit.org 0 points 2 months ago

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!

[–] NickwithaC@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Huffman is a full on Musketeer.

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[–] ch00f@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] The_v@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] amanda@aggregatet.org 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] amanda@aggregatet.org 0 points 2 months ago

No idea honesty, I don’t collect metrics.

[–] fossilesque@mander.xyz 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] fossilesque@mander.xyz 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] fossilesque@mander.xyz 0 points 2 months ago

Happy hunting. :)

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[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

The enshittification must go on!

[–] cheddar@programming.dev 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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