Some subreddits could be paywalled, hints Reddit CEO
Some subreddits could be paywalled, hints Reddit CEO
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has hinted that in future some subreddits could be paywalled, as the company seeks to devise...
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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.”
Frankly, it sounds like he wants to take on OnlyFans, or more prosaically, Patreon? I guess? I suppose as a platform to host paid interactions with people who think they have unique content and interesting takes, Reddit's as good as any, but the upside seems limited here.
This is just taking the old Reddit gold room and expanding on it.
That place was hilariously terrible
Yeah every time I was rewarded gold and would get access to that sub it was nothing more than a big circle jerk of people posting how they got gold. Nothing engaging was ever dicussed.
And how could it have been anything other than that, honestly? For most people with gold (as a reminder, it cost around $5/mo on average), it was something they got spontaneously and saw as a novelty. I think I was gifted it fewer than six times before silver and platinum were introduced. So in order to even see this sub, you needed a relatively rare and expensive award/subscription that more or less did fuck-all if you had an ad blocker. Then you needed to care enough to even go and check it out. Then you needed to care enough to participate. And was there any real difference between a redditor picked out of a hat and one with gold? Were they the "cream of the crop" for engaging conversation? Not really.
A lot of the time it was obtained for random, funny one-liners. Sometimes for a one-off, well-researched explainer on a topic that they're familiar with but which would be too specific for the gold subreddit. And for both of those, they would have gold for only a month and probably wouldn't have time to start actively participating in the sub knowing they'll be booted out in 30-ish days. Maybe they'll comment something in surprise at this discovery and never show up again.
Then you have those who had gold long-term: the karma farmers and the subscription-payers. What do the people willing to pay a subscription have in common? They've probably developed a curated enough sub list that they have more interesting things to read and comment on. And what do the karma farmers have in common? They're trying to min/max the hell out of the algorithm, not appeal to a collection of like 1000 people where their posts can't show up on /r/all literally no matter how popular they get.
I would like this idea if the paid subreddits weren't also scraped for AI training. I'm not paying to feed LLMs. But I'm increasingly getting into private communities.