Reddit will lock some content behind a paywall this year, CEO says
arstechnica.com
How will Reddit generate content for paid-for subreddits?
  • Nougat@fedia.io
    228·
    9 days ago

    Some subreddits, like r/Watchexchange, where Redditors “buy, sell or trade watches,” according to the subreddit’s description, are centered on transactions. Huffman said the fact that users are already “transacting on Reddit kind of opens the door” for such monetization.

    “Hey! How dare you exchange things with each other without giving us a cut!”

    • [email protected]@sh.itjust.works
      98·
      9 days ago

      Whole lot of “Reddit, what are you going to do about the scammers now that we’re paying you?” posts are coming. The answer is nothing. They’ll do nothing.

      Actually, they’ll write their lack of culpability more explicitly into the ToS, and then do nothing.

      • finder@lemmy.world
        6·
        8 days ago

        Actually, they’ll write their lack of culpability more explicitly into the ToS, and then do nothing.

        Ugh, aCtUaLly the almighty Reddit Admins and janitors Moderators will act decisively to ban anyone who dares use the report button.

    • CluckN@lemmy.world
      40·
      9 days ago

      I’m wondering how they would charge people. Who would pay for a subreddit they’ve never been to? Could a non-paying user view the subreddit but be unable to post/comment?

      • pivot_root@lemmy.world
        36·
        9 days ago

        Could a non-paying user view the subreddit but be unable to post/comment?

        Doubtful. If I remember the statistic correctly, 95% of social media users are lurkers. Greedy Little Pigboy wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to milk the remaining 19/20 users.

      • Obelix@feddit.org
        16·
        9 days ago

        Let’s be honest - this will kill many subreddits. Of course some mods will start a paid subreddit next to an existing one and try to bring their users to subscribe. So expect those subs to become like those YouTubers who are constantly trying to push you to their Patreon.

        • Ledericas@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          8 days ago

          or they allowed subs, but with immense amount of ads: require to watch video, or watch this ad for a certain of time to use it for free. just basing it off how aggressively youtube, facebook does it.

      • Yppm@lemy.lolEnglish
        8·
        9 days ago

        Could easily see certain subreddits being like OF or Patreon. Pay for access to content. Pretty tried and true business model and it will probably work well enough to keep it around.

        Even YouTube has “memberships” to channels now where you get bonus content and stuff.

        The people that are interested will pay and those that aren’t won’t.

      • Ledericas@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        8 days ago

        could be something like a private sub, where only approved members can enter.

    • Ledericas@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      8 days ago

      thats why they have been aggressively going after OF subs/bots this month, they arnt getting a slice from the profit they are earning externally. from another forum,(where people flee after getting banned this way) alot of them lost tons of accts recently. yup one of my accts was temp ban for using the report button, how many is too much? it depends on the mod and the sub, if they dont like that you are reporting are reporting a person that should be reported, or the comment, you get banned for report abuse. these bans seems much severe than a subreddit ban.

  • bitjunkie@lemmy.world
    123·
    9 days ago

    Yes let’s put a site that consists pretty much entirely of user-created content behind a paywall, what could possibly go wrong?

      • vegantomato@lemmy.world
        18·
        9 days ago

        Don’t lie. When 70% of your search results are Quora, you are going to click, you are going to encounter the login banner, you are going to rage, and you are going to click away.

        • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
          14·
          9 days ago

          Nope, those “answers” didn’t help even once, so now they’re filtered out of search results, and DNS banned. Quora does not appear on my devices.

          • RobotsLeftHand@lemmy.world
            6·
            9 days ago

            I’ve had some help from Quora, but overall I feel it wastes my time a lot more than not. And I’ve never had an instance where only Quora had the answer.

        • LiveLM@lemmy.zipEnglish
          7·
          9 days ago

          Even when the login banner doesn’t appear, lately all the answers are “Hm, it appears that you are trying to do [question title]. To do [question title], [basic bitch advice]. Hope this helps!” Style AI slop.
          When it isn’t the built-in AI helper doing it, it’s the users blatantly copying from different chatbots

      • icmpecho@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        8 days ago

        was Quora ever good? I joined the internet in like 2019 and it’s always been garbage to me, did I miss its golden age?

        • d00ery@lemmy.world
          3·
          7 days ago

          Anecdotally, I remember using it for answers to things about probably business, government, and certain how-to’s. I also remember when the pop-over banner started covering up half the answers and that’s around the time I stopped.

          Here’s a post discussing quora from Dec 2018.

          all philosophical views aside, there are some really core issues that got me to stop using Quora and unfortunately the case to stop using it is made by the site itself:

          • The content quality has deteriorated significantly since the site’s inception. The content is far cheaper than before and far less interesting in very obvious ways.

          • Moderation systems have not done a good job of growing the site as a community. The site has lost the character that drew many people to it in the first place.

          • The machine learning models terribly over-fit to user signals, creating a frustrating experience.

          These 3 core issues with the site are what got me to gradually stop using it as someone who was initially an early adopter.

          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18644489

          • icmpecho@lemmy.mlEnglish
            2·
            7 days ago

            thank you for the explainer, this is very interesting. seems reddit is following along this path lol

        • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
          2·
          7 days ago

          Once upon a time, Quora was okay, before they started paying people to generate a bunch of yahoo answers questions / AI slop questions, and then fucked with the UI and made their site into a virtually unusable mess.

    • icmpecho@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      8 days ago

      i usually suck at homework but i think i might understand this assignment :3

  • Rogue@feddit.uk
    89·
    9 days ago

    It’ll be the porn they charge for.

    They know only wankers will give them money.

    • TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee
      48·
      9 days ago

      What’s funny about that is Reddit is mostly just an advertising front for onlyfans at this point

      • tempest@lemmy.ca
        19·
        9 days ago

        I mean yeah, and that’s the piece of the pie they want. It will start with letting content creators charge and probably end by some ban or disincentive on direct only fans links.

    • FunCube@feddit.orgDeutsch
      14·
      9 days ago

      First they came for the porn subreddits, but I didn’t say anything because I was not a porn subreddit.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
      12·
      9 days ago

      There isn’t really any porn left on reddit, it’s pretty much just OnlyFans ads now.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
    73·
    9 days ago

    Well, that’s the death of the free* forum. Went from BBS to newsgroups to phpBB to Reddit, each soft-killing its predecessor. But like WalMart killing Main Street, Reddit is going to kill the free forum.

    Thank goodness for Lemmy and other free* social network software.

    *free with the asterisk because we know it’s not free, we are enjoying the service that others volunteer to pay for.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      2410·
      9 days ago

      Lemmy will need ads to support individual servers, eventually, when they’re not attached to another org (like a server CNN would run for just outgoing news dissemination). The rest of them, with bills and needing to eat, may need to go to ads.

      I support proper ads that do not get priority placement and aren’t in-your-face.

      I support prioritization of profile migration so we can vote with our feet if a particular server’s ad volume and content offends our sensibilities.

      But I’m just saying I fully expect some ads are gonna happen, and I hope we can prevent full enshittification when that happens.

      • mutant_zz@lemmy.world
        292·
        9 days ago

        No, it will never have ads. If the devs put ads in, it will get forked. If server admins put in ads, they will be defederated. That’s nonnegotiable if you want a free (as in libre) fediverse.

        Mastodon is way bigger than Lemmy and it doesn’t need ads. Donations and subscriptions (for severs that choose that path) are enough.

        • Yppm@lemy.lolEnglish
          143·
          9 days ago

          I don’t want it to have ads either but bandwidth is not free and someone somewhere is paying for it.

          Is the donations don’t cover the bills there are few options.

          • Serinus@lemmy.world
            14·
            9 days ago

            I really enjoyed the Reddit gold model. I paid them $30/year for many years because I got so much out of the site that I felt they deserved it. Their monetization was pretty innocuous.

            Then the enshittification happened.

          • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukEnglish
            12·
            9 days ago

            Is the donations don’t cover the bills there are few options.

            They usually do. When we opened for donations, we pretty much hit our goals within days and our donations currently exceed our expenses without having to do donation drives. @[email protected] had a thread where Lemmy Admins discussed their costs and a lot are already fully funded.

          • mutant_zz@lemmy.world
            81·
            9 days ago

            It’s not free, but it’s pretty cheap. When you don’t have to have massive marketing departments, huge management bonuses, expensive office space, crappy proprietary software, and massively scaled highly available platforms it costs a lot less to run a social media platform. Donations can often cover it all.

            If one server gets too big, they can just cap registrations and people move to a different server.

            • Yppm@lemy.lolEnglish
              6·
              9 days ago

              Good point. Way less staff to keep this service running as long as growth is not a priority like it is with most companies.

          • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            7·
            8 days ago

            We run one of then largest lemmy server. We’re fully donation-funded. Lemmy.world is also the largest, also donation funded.

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
            61·
            9 days ago

            And there’s a scaling problem, right? Like, the bigger the federation is, the more traffic each instance gets.

            Maybe large institutions (universities, some governments, some companies, and so on) can each host their own instance. It would be a drop in their existing hosting costs.

  • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
    51·
    9 days ago

    Reddit executives also discussed how they might introduce more ads into the social media platform.

    Oh how exciting!

  • FackCurs@lemmy.world
    49·
    8 days ago

    I hope all the lemmy instances are ready for a surge of users. Let’s encourage redditors to join Lemmy and learn the kinks and quirks by trial and error. Let’s be kind to the newcomers.

    • Nebula_Express_93462@lemmy.world
      11·
      8 days ago

      Same, fresh refugee here. I’ve tried mastodon before and I didn’t feel good with Fediverse, but only because I never really used Twitter. Surprisingly I only discover Reddit few weeks ago (to properly spend some time there… where was I all these years lol) I’m starting to like this fediverse though 😁

      • vonbaronhans@midwest.social
        11·
        8 days ago

        Honestly, same. Mastodon is fine if you like the Twitter format, but I never did. Lemmy works for me, largely cuz Reddit also worked for me, until the API debacle.

    • FackCurs@lemmy.world
      9·
      8 days ago

      Welcome! Hope you like it here. I’m happy to see people are jumping ship despite the “it’s too complex to switch to Lemmy” false narrative.

        • FackCurs@lemmy.world
          5·
          8 days ago

          I personally don’t really like that analogy. With email, you can send and email to anyone who has an email address. You can only see emails you have received after creating your email account. It’s simple and clear. With the fediverse, for past posts, you can see some: only if it was posted on your instance or if someone on your instance was following them when it was originally posted or has interacted with it since, meaning there is some technicality that prevents you from seeing everything you think you should be able to see.

          In terms of account creation, I agree. Just pick a provider (instance), if you don’t like it you can create a new account somewhere else later.

          • Cataphract@lemmy.ml
            2·
            8 days ago

            I think the analogy will hold only because the problems you’ve presented should get worked out over time. I feel the same with how fediverse links work and how it interacts with your Lemmy account (like it’s super easy to link a fediverse comment/post, just a little harder to get from your account instance to that link where you can interact with it).

            My first Lemmy account was on a little instance where I had to go through subscribing, like you said, for those instance feeds to pop up. I also see that as just another wrinkle that will be ironed out over time, as the setting up and hosting of instances becomes more mainstream (well from at least it’s current state).

    • icmpecho@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      8 days ago

      same! just hopped on today, for both that reason and because friends are here now as well :)