Reddit will lock some content behind a paywall this year, CEO says
How will Reddit generate content for paid-for subreddits?
To quote Cory Doctorow on enshittification:
Here is how platforms die:
first, they are good to their users;
then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers;
finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
Then, they die.
Paywalled subs existed for ages already. If you had Premium or whatever it was called you could access them. It was mostly uninteresting stuff going on there.
I remember getting premium once (got a few days for free for some reason) and I think the only "premium" sub was r/lounge or whatever and it was just people saying they got premium.
My wife bought it for me as a present once misunderstanding what it was. I looked at those subs once and then never again
I still appreciate the effort, but by far the most useless gift she's ever given
It's the only thing the people in that sub necessarily have in common, and is the theme of the sub. Very very pointless.
I think it's more likely that they paywall some of the NSFW subs than try to make more subs like r/lounge.
There is no content on Reddit valuable enough that I would pay for access to it.
If they were smart they would find a way to paywall all the years-old posts where someone is like "hey how do I fix this specific part on my 1992 sewing machine" and it has a single reply with the answer.
If they were smart