Reddit is planning to introduce a paywall this year, CEO Steve Huffman said during a videotaped Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Thursday.
Huffman previously showed interest in potentially introducing a new type of subreddit with “exclusive content or private areas” that Reddit users would pay to access.
When asked this week about plans for some Redditors to create “content that only paid members can see,” Huffman said:
It’s a work in progress right now, so that one’s coming… We’re working on it as we speak.
When asked about “new, key features that you plan to roll out for Reddit in 2025,” Huffman responded, in part: “Paid subreddits, yes.”
Reddit’s paywall would ostensibly only apply to certain new subreddit types, not any subreddits currently available.
Reddit executives also discussed how they might introduce more ads into the social media platform. The push for ads follows changes to Reddit’s API policy that, in part, led to the closing of most third-party apps used for accessing Reddit. Reddit makes most of its revenue from ads and can only show ads on its native apps and website.
Reddit started testing ads in comments last year, with COO Jen Wong saying during an AMA that such ads are in “about 3 percent of inventory.” The executive hinted at that percentage growing. Wong also shared hopes that contextual advertising, or ads being shown based on the content surrounding them, will be a “bigger part of” Reddit’s business by 2026.
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In order for lemmy (or any alternative) to really take off, efforts need to be made to mass migrate content. The biggest inhibitor of adoption is the lack of communities, and the user submitted info backing them. Not only would it be beneficial for alternatives to have this on their servers, efforts should be made to index and back up the mountain of how to and general hyper specific sub reddit information for the good of society. The world already lost so much during the last purge of users comments and posts, further enshitification of reddit will only lead to more getting lost. Are any groups working to scrape all (or the most important data) from reddit and break it out in a searchable format here?
Well Reddit started off with a bunch of sock puppet accounts to make the site look larger than it was. Now they have bots doing that so when you refresh Reddit it’s always new. Back when it was good there was a point where you’d just run out of Reddit. It was a meme. They figured out how to stop that feeling.
But that feeling is good! We will have to get used to the fact that real human sites don’t constantly update if we want nice things.
That is something that some tech savy Lemmy users could already easily do. I repost stuff from all over the web. But some systematic preservation of good old subreddits aught to be automated.
So, what’s the stage after “enshitification”? “Enspezed?”
What we’re seeing with Reddit is just the first stage of enshittification: making things worse for the end users who have been captured by network effect and what used to be a good service, in order to benefit advertisers. The second stage is making things shitty for the advertisers who have been captured by all the captive users. Paid subs are probably a harbinger of that kind of thing, but I don’t think advertisers are locked in enough to be really stuck yet.
entshitification 2: electric boogaloo
That’s why I left. I regret nothing.
Digg: “join us reddit…”
We all float down here 💩💩💩
fuck /u/spez
Do it, please, the subreddits need to migrate here
well, not all of them.
I can think of a handful I would much rather see thrown into a furnace.
I wanna talk nerd shit about Sonic, Yugioh, and Sims again
Ok tidy up this place. We have visitors coming soon.
The announcement is why I created a username here. I doubt I’m coming alone.
Welcome! We can definitely still use a few more people, especially if they’re willing to contribute to content.
Still no frictionless account migration…
What’s to migrate other than your name? My reddit usage was limited to lurking so I genuinely don’t know.
History, reputation, relationships (this a nuch bigger problem on mastofon) (yes migration as a lurker is easy)
How do you even migrate history? Would people even want that
Reputation definitely not. Also who even cares about reputation
Subreddits you can migrate in some apps at least
On Voyager app you can “migrate subreddits” at least
Not sure what else would even be feasible
well Hexbear is just about gone so that should help
great timing for them to lose both of their domains
As much as we’d like to joke about the sudden influx of new Lemmy users that will result from this lets all be real, it will be a few new users. Most Reddit users will accept whatever is thrown at them from that company while crying about it on Reddit. I don’t know what the phenomena is but it seems that most people would rather stay on the bad platform than try something new and slightly different. I’m cool with that, I like niche platforms.
Its a toxic relationship, I literally could not leave, became aware of lemmy maybe two months before I left and always had the intention to make an account but put it off til I was perm banned, looking at my notifications I was getting less replies than ever. And if ppl replied it was to actively not be helpful or tell me to do anything other than answer my question.
You’re gonna pay the mods then, right?
Right?
deleted by creator
Most likely it’s going to be some sort of onlyfans system where people can pay to get access to specific content and the content creator gets to keep a share of it
Man this reddit site sounds awful
I’m glad I jumped ship back during the ban on 3rd party apps. That was it for me.
Me too.
Man people really like taking a beating.
Wild that that was almost 2 years ago now…
Same. I had even paid for the paid tier of my 3rd party app because it was such a good value to me that I wanted the devs to have some of my money. Thanks to that app, I was on the site more and pretty much never via computer anymore.
I think it was for the best though. Quality over quantity here. I find it to be far less toxic on Lemmy overall. It’s like how people tend to be nicer in a small town because you know you’re gonna run into these people over and over again, but the big city you came from had more variety in stuff to check out. Definitely a trade-off, but I think it’s worth it to have this much more pleasant space that isn’t so packed with content as to be addictive. Good vibes.
Its improving over time, I think it’ll find a decent grove as more communities pop up. I find the comment sections really engaging too I’ve had some solid conversations over here.
I’ve gone back to reddit a few times from searches, and after spending time away it is really apparent how negative most of the comments over there are.
For example, anytime someone asks for help, someone always has to show up and get angry that they didn’t search instead of asking. Then a third person shows up and says that a search brought them to this thread… and no one ever answers the question. Thanks reddit!
There are some instances where Reddit is still a great source of information just due to the sheer size of the community. But there’s a lot more shit to wade through after the exodus a couple years back. I haven’t signed back in for years.
I don’t even use any apps and was just planning on boycotting it for a few days in solidarity. Then Greedy Little Pigboy made his statement about how everyone will come crawling back and that was that.
Oh i didn’t even hear about that. Fuck spez.
The memo is in this article, if you’re curious.
thank!
This is the actual reason for me too. I’m making a point to never visit that website again.
There’s exceptions like when searching for troubleshooting help and a relevant result happens to be on Reddit, but otherwise I avoid it as much as possible.
I figure as long as you visit with adblock enabled and don’t post anything, you’re not contributing to them in any meaningful way.
Agreed, and to be fair I still stop in at niche subreddits I used to follow to see what’s new, but never logged in.
Same, my mouth dropped reading the article.
Obligatory fuck spez
Yep. When RIF was killed, I closed that door immediately (was not easy). It was to be expected though, I think. Once a site reaches critical mass, money interests enter the picture and greed can always screw up a good thing. It’s a shame.
Tbh, I didn’t care about the 3rd party apps.
I just didn’t like the silencing of opposition.
If they are willing to do mass censorship for benign things like a 3rd party apps protest, what’s to say they wont booklick governments/corportions and censor info of horrible things that a government/corporation is doing.
It’s the censorship that I was more afraid of. Besides, I always wanted a decentalized platform, but none of it had any users until June 12, 2023.
That’s the truth. It was tone deafness, a lack of responsiveness, and a clear lack of principles that made me leave during that.
Another day of thanking my past self for leaving
There’s nothing on Reddit anymore. It’s really unfortunate but I don’t see how this is going to help them regain any consistent user base.
If small dick energy had a face it would be Steve Huffman’s.
Just came to lemmy again after learning this shit!! mass exodus coming soon
I wouldn’t be too sure just yet, seeing how annoying youtube and it’s ads have gotten yet it isn’t replaced still.
We might have an increase, but plenty will never leave.
YouTube hasn’t been replaced because adblockers still work.
Youtube is not easily replacible.
Creating quality videos are much more difficult than memes on Reddit/Lemmy type of sites.
No content creators is gonna move because of the issue of monitization. And most couldn’t care less about Youtube’s enshittification. You cant say “Just use Peertube” when there are like nothing interesting to watch. It’s like trying to stop watching popular Movies / TV shows because “big corp media bad”. Piracy would be the best mitigation in the Movies / TV situation, and that in Youtube’s situation is just using an adblocker.
In contast, Reddit/Lemmy type of sites are just strangers talking to strangers. You are moving from Stanger Group A to Stranger Group B. It’s the easiest transition ever.
Not to mention, the storage for Lemmy instances is like in the GBs. Get a 1TB harddrive and you’re good for a long time. A Youtube replacement? On you’re gonna need PETABYTES, and all the bandwith to serve the content.
Youtube is probably the most difficult platform on the internet to replace. Video content delivery is extremely resource heavy and technically complicated, especially once you start to scale. Many, many competitors have attempted it over the years, and while some found their niche, none of them have achieved anywhere close to the scale of Youtube.
It took decades of Youtube to become profitable, only doing so after achieving mind-boggling economy of scale. The majority of humans on earth have used Youtube. About half of all (global) internet users use it monthly. I don’t know if any other platform can claim stats like that.
Youtube is one of those platforms that only exists because it got a head start in the unique conditions of the early internet. I don’t know if it’s even possible to create a true competitor, though I could see multiple platforms taking over different niches.
