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 333 points 3 months ago (8 children)

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

[–] Erasmus@lemmy.world 193 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Taking lessons from Elon.

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

[–] Sludgehammer@lemmy.world 67 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Taking lessons from Elon.

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

[–] NickwithaC@lemmy.world 48 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Huffman is a full on Musketeer.

[–] unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

How has this demonym only just now come to my attention?

It's fantastic, thank you.

[–] NickwithaC@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

See also: Trumpet - people who start singing the same tune as Trump for their own political gain.

[–] Thrife@feddit.org 26 points 3 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!

[–] stonerboner@lemmynsfw.com 15 points 3 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 6 points 3 months ago

And after the Twitter api pricing

[–] Technofrood@feddit.uk 42 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] PopcornPrincess@lemmy.world 18 points 3 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 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Thank you kind stranger!

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

[–] PopcornPrincess@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

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

[–] Krauerking@lemy.lol 2 points 3 months ago

Just doing my part with the updoots!

[–] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 11 points 3 months ago

Ooh, I wonder if he'll sue all the users that left Reddit to join Lemmy.

[–] ch00f@lemmy.world 97 points 3 months ago (2 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 58 points 3 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.

[–] amanda@aggregatet.org 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 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 3 points 3 months ago

No idea honesty, I don’t collect metrics.

[–] The_v@lemmy.world 10 points 3 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.

[–] fossilesque@mander.xyz 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 3 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 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 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 2 points 3 months ago

Happy hunting. :)

[–] thehatfox@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] balancedchaos@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world 42 points 3 months ago

Quarterly reports demand that line go up.

The line must always go up.

[–] cheddar@programming.dev 34 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 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

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 18 points 3 months ago

The enshittification must go on!

[–] iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 12 points 3 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 16 points 3 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 2 points 3 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.

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 11 points 3 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.

[–] skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 25 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] btaf45@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (11 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.

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[–] cygnus@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] IMongoose@lemmy.world 2 points 3 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.

[–] j4yt33@feddit.org 15 points 3 months ago

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

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[–] stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca 10 points 3 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 8 points 3 months ago

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

[–] fluxion@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago

Short-term gains > *