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.
Oh no. anyways
That’s why I just joined
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?
Why not all?
Fuck Spez
They already are. They put all nsfw content behind a privacy paywall (pay with email and browsing habits). Luckily it can still be subverted through old.reddit.com - but the question is for how long.
Luckily it can still be subverted through old.reddit.com
Wait, really? That’s hilariously stupid.
There’s nothing ‘altruistic’ about reddit
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.
If anything, they’re the ones benefiting from altruistic users giving them free labor to profit off of.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
That dude is really trying to kill his own platform, isn’t he?
Short-term gains > *
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
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?
And after the Twitter api pricing
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.
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!!!
Just doing my part with the updoots!
Oh god, I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. Thanks stranger. 🤮
Ooh, I wonder if he’ll sue all the users that left Reddit to join Lemmy.
Lot of wishful thinking in here. Fact is, Reddit isn’t going anywhere.
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.
Lemmy’s largest userbase growth of all time, ever, happened during the reddit API fiasco.
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.
Did some people leave? Sure. Any actual significant portion? No, not even a little.
There’s also no correlation between creating a Lemmy account and completely quitting Reddit.
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.
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.
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?
How many of them are real users vs bots though? It’s easy to inflate numbers
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.
Quarterly reports demand that line go up.
The line must always go up.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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
The enshittification must go on!
From the article “helping users dive deeper into products, shows, games” - that right there is their focus. It’s spelled right out that it’s going to be primarily an advertising platform.
…
Wouldn’t the contributors to those subs just make a new one that’s not paywalled?
Reddit is going to be asking users to pay to generate content on specific subs, but they’re forgetting again that the sub isn’t the important part, it’s the users.
This would just fracture the biggest subs and destroy the communities.
Wouldn’t the contributors to those subs just make a new one that’s not paywalled?
My guess is that the paywalled subs are going to be a way of interacting with celebrities. Like, a House of the Dragon sub featuring AMAs with cast members, but behind a paywall. You could make a House of the Dragon non-paywalled sub, but the celebs wouldn’t post there because they have a side-deal where they get paid for posting in the paywalled subreddit.
The common thread I’ve seen online is this:
- Google’s search algorithm sucks. I always append reddit.com to get good forum results
- Reddit’s search algorithm sucks.
These two tools are quickly becoming coupled for Google-Fu expert users. The historical forum history that goes back 3-5 years on Reddit is their goldmine. You can’t just make a new subreddit overnight when a sub gets paywalled. All of that historical data will be lost and paywalled.
I think a paywall could be an effective money maker for Reddit because they’ve basically become their own Google - in that each subreddit acts like a unique website with real, human, responses. The only problem is that reddit has a god awful search algorithm that they refuse to improve. So people use Google to essentially search reddit. The “whales” so-to-speak are the only people they need to capture. People like myself (frugal people) aren’t in their peripherals. But the people that think “I’ll pay each month for NYT” or “it’s just a few dollars for the WSJ” are going to use the same logic for Reddit: “it’s a small amount of money to have access to high quality forums on X, Y, and Z”.
In addition, this might bolster Reddit’s content even further. Since paywalled subs will automatically reduce the amount of AI content spammed on them, they will inherently increase the legitimacy of each forum.
Lastly, this will give them a path towards monetization for moderators which doesn’t require them skimming off of their own pay checks to achieve it.
Do I like this? No. Is this fair? Also no. People contributed to Reddit under the impression that their data would be available and accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. That implicit guarantee is being violated. It’s an afront to the hard working individuals that have developed these communities brick by brick.
But does this “solution” make a lot of business sense? Possibly. As long as they survive the changeover in the short term, I think they’ll thrive from this choice for the reasons I stated above.
Again, it’s going to give them a pathway for:
- Monetization
- Reduce AI spam (a big fear of all forums)
- They could make even more money off the back of this
I’m pretty much over Reddit anyways. Lemmy has been my backup social media for a while now. The Internet is still free - for now. I just hope we can all find better search engines and forums in the future. Google has been degrading. Reddit has been locking things down. We obviously need to pivot to other platforms. Or maybe just go back to the old days where you find niche forums hosted by some dude in his basement. Nothing wrong with that.
I’ve seen some content creators having a discord channel that is pay to get into where the content creator participates in it as a way to generate additional money. I suspect Reddit wants to do something similar and take a cut of fee.
And I fully expect this to devolve into becoming a new OnlyFans.
Sure till they copystrike their own subs
I bet it’s for the porn. I bet you he’s going to paywall the porn.
It’s steve huffman so it’s definitely for jailbait porn.
Who goes to Reddit for porn when so many other better options exist? I always thought that was weird. That’d be the last place I’d look for it.
Also, commenting about porn is creepy as hell to me. Like, I do not want to read some other person’s opinions/fantasies about a piece of media I’m jerkin’ it to. It’s like the people that try to make smalltalk at the urinal. Get in, do your business, get out, and keep that shit to yourself.
I use it only to get niche porn that can be a pain to find manually online.
Oh no! Where will I go to see OF spam bots now???
Do it. Fucking do it, man, I WANT it to happen. Mash that self-destruct like there’s no tomorrow, Spez, see how low you can go!
What’s next? Change the name of the platform to Y.com?
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
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.
There’s also credible reports that Reddit is testing an even sneakier method. They will hide the “deleted” comments when you are logged in and looking for them in your history. But other people can still see them; Reddit just understands you are a hostile actor in their eyes so they pull manipulation games like with shadow banning.
Tone down the snarky comments already guys. Never interrupt the enemy when they’re making a mistake :>
True, don’t want to risk a permanent ban lol
Wow, fuck absolutely all of that
