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.

  • ch00f@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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
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      3 months ago

      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.

        • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de
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          3 months ago

          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.

      • The_v@lemmy.world
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        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.

    • thehatfox@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      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
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        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.