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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
