When asked about “new, key features that you plan to roll out for Reddit in 2025,” Huffman responded, in part: “Paid subreddits, yes.”
Reddit’s paywall would ostensibly only apply to certain new subreddit types, not any subreddits currently available. In August, Huffman said that even with paywalled content, free Reddit would “continue to exist and grow and thrive.”
A critical aspect of any potential plan to make Reddit users pay to access subreddit content is determining how related Reddit users will be compensated. Reddit may have a harder time getting volunteer moderators to wrangle discussions on paid-for subreddits—if it uses volunteer mods at all. Balancing paid and free content would also be necessary to avoid polarizing much of Reddit’s current user base.
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I recently saw one of my blank posts on Reddit and almost regretted running the mass eraser…
…Nah, fuck that site. 😂
I wonder if it’ll be the porn.
Of course it will be the porn.
Spez: “hmm. Have we fucked ourselves enough? How can we enshittify harder?”
There’s a guy-thrown-out-window meme in there.
We’re just getting warmed up here! There’s so much to do.
How about we introduce several tiers of premium currency, like copper, silver, gold, platinum rubies and diamonds, each with their unique exchange rates.
You could have limited-time awards purchased with one of the premium currencies. Also, add time-gated features, like temporary access to meme subreddits, or comment and post visibility boosts.
Pay-to-win mechanics should be included too. How about time-limited karma boosters?
Oh, and loot boxes! We’ve got to have those too. You could buy basic loot boxes with copper coins, and in those you could find a few silver coins randomly. With the silver coins, you can buy silver boxes, some of which may contain gold coins, and so on all the way to diamond tier. Now that you have a convoluted assortment of different currencies, you can use them to boost your account, posts and comments in different ways. Oh, and Season passes too, can’t forget those!
Ads. So much ads! Of course, you can get rid of some of them, depending on how much you pay and which currency you use. These are all time-limited features, so you better keep those coins and gems flowing every day.
And subscriptions too! Once you subscribe to something like 1231 copper coins a day, you can’t cancel without climbing the mount Kilimanjaro. The only cancel button is physically located on a computer somewhere up there.
And there’s so much more to come.
Those novel currencies, of course, will be tied to Bitcoin or some other “coin” they’ll create exclusively for that purpose, brothel-money style.
Absolutely! You just gotta involve blockchain, AI and cloud computing. Otherwise, the investors won’t know how hot Reddit is. Slap on some quantum computing, and you’re all set.
This is good. It will drive more people away from Reddit.
Welcome to any reddit refugees that might be reading these comments! we are cool beeple, i promise
You forgot some other instances of not so cool people.
By the way, isn’t there somewhere written in your instance’s website that “this isn’t like Reddit” or something?
Not sure what you are trying to get at?
There is no content on Reddit valuable enough that I would pay for access to it.
Yeah at it’s best reddit is an aggregate of content from around the web and a message board.
The only thing I can think of that this makes sense for is to keep the onlyfans people who promote on reddit(or got started on gonewild) to stay on reddit. I feel like reddit is probably not trying to get more in bed with providing porn so Im curious exactly what the application could be otherwise.
Have you ever been to the reddit gold lounge?
I imagine it will be that, one way or another.
Aren’t you glad you did the work and gave Reddit the content it monetizes for free?
I’m more impressed that they found buyers for my drunk shit posts.
Those can’t possibly be good for AI.
When then announced they’d be selling content for AI training, I went back to my old abandoned Reddit accounts and slightly altered all of my previous posts with actual content to be factually incorrect and misleading in subtle ways. It took me two months to rewrite everything, a few old posts at a time per day.
Now whatever technical or historical stuff I posted on Reddit is false and AI is training on that.
Even if you’re not directly responsible for AI suggesting that you can make pizza cheese stringier by adding wood glue*, you’re still doing good work
* which is technically true, in that this is the technique used to get this effect in adverts
I’m glad that I ran the script to replace 99% of my content with >!CENSORED!< , they can monetize it all they want 😆
I don’t think the option to put some subreddits behind a paywall is necessarily a bad thing. Hopefully the federated link aggregators are in a better place now to absorb another exodus if reddit does scare off a bunch.
Echo-chamber, maximise!
Paid subreddits. I mean look at the free to play live service games, how people like to buy stuff that not everyone has. We can laugh as much as we want and think how dumb this is. But people are dumber. It will drive away some people from Reddit, most won’t care and just stay using the “Free” stuff. Some will pay for the subreddits.
Maybe NSFW content or support subreddits for paying customers.
NSFW is the only one that makes sense tbh. Reddit’s interface would actually be pretty good for an OF like subscription service considering how much OF advertising already exists.
But I strongly suspect they are going to try to do something dumb like tech support or tutoring which nobody is going to pay for.
Remember when porn subs were people just having fun and posting instead of this endless stream of monetization efforts? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Unmoderated user generated nsfw forums were (are?) a beacon for dubious to illegal content. I forget the specifics, but didn’t Pornhub have to pivot from accepting a firehose of free user submitted content after failing to moderate sufficiently? User generated nsfw + free just seems like an impossible balance.
Realistically, Reddit has been useless for porn for quite some time.
That was the avatar NFTs: most people didn’t care, some jumped on the FOMO and paid through the nose to “catch them all”.
If they had opened that to 3rd party apps, even as a requirement to use the API, or better yet if they gave a cut to 3rd party apps, instead of blindly charging for the API, they could have got a great net to catch whales, while most people would just ignore it and keep contributing their time (mods) and content (comments).
Instead… well, this.
You folks ready for the next Rexodus?
Was the last one bad? I came from the last one.
I arrived here in June 2023 as part of the interest in alternatives after the API changes were announced. We saw a spike in applications, so I expect that could happen again, though we’re not as major of an instance as we were back then. Lemmy.world will likely take the brunt of the influx, and as we’re not federated with them, the impact should be minimal.
I’m still on Reddit for niche communities, but I use it very differently from 20 months ago. I’ve grown to enjoy a collective of self-selecting people who want something better than what Reddit offers, which is less and less by the month.
There’s currently an Redexit of Canadians who are looking to get off US-controlled social media.
Lemmy.ca has had a huge spike in enrolment as it’s the one that was most prominently promoted in r/BuyCanadian. Apparently, it’s had over 9k signups in the past day.
I don’t think there’s enough understanding domestically about what has happened to our standing globally. We’re not being made great again, we’re being made a toxic brand that others are trying to cut ties with. But hey, tariffs will fix that, right?
Defederated from lemmy.world? Why?
So did I, haha. This was a “yay new friends”-type comment.
I actually haven’t heard much grumbling about it since, so we seem to have behaved alright. Or at least just provided such an overwhelming share of traffic there’s nobody to complain.
But probably only the useful content.
lol. ok I really need to go through and replace all my content with “f spez” comments. I haven’t logged into that account in a long time.
🤣😂
My theory is that they’ll put all of the default subs behind the paywall.
