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Some subreddits could be paywalled, hints Reddit CEO (9to5mac.com)

submitted 4 months ago by ForgottenFlux to c/technology

447 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] ch00f 97 points 4 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 58 points 4 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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I still do this!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

No idea honesty, I don’t collect metrics.

[–] The_v 10 points 4 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They're still around.

[–] chonglibloodsport 1 points 4 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Good news! https://search.marginalia.nu/

[–] chonglibloodsport 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Happy hunting. :)

[–] thehatfox 7 points 4 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 2 points 4 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.