How will Reddit generate content for paid-for subreddits?

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. In August, Huffman said that even with paywalled content, free Reddit would “continue to exist and grow and thrive.”

A critical aspect of any potential plan to make Reddit users pay to access subreddit content is determining how related Reddit users will be compensated. Reddit may have a harder time getting volunteer moderators to wrangle discussions on paid-for subreddits—if it uses volunteer mods at all. Balancing paid and free content would also be necessary to avoid polarizing much of Reddit’s current user base.

  • @thingsiplay@beehaw.org
    19•2 months ago

    Paid subreddits. I mean look at the free to play live service games, how people like to buy stuff that not everyone has. We can laugh as much as we want and think how dumb this is. But people are dumber. It will drive away some people from Reddit, most won’t care and just stay using the “Free” stuff. Some will pay for the subreddits.

    Maybe NSFW content or support subreddits for paying customers.

    • @jarfil@beehaw.org
      8•2 months ago

      That was the avatar NFTs: most people didn’t care, some jumped on the FOMO and paid through the nose to “catch them all”.

      If they had opened that to 3rd party apps, even as a requirement to use the API, or better yet if they gave a cut to 3rd party apps, instead of blindly charging for the API, they could have got a great net to catch whales, while most people would just ignore it and keep contributing their time (mods) and content (comments).

      Instead… well, this.

      • @gk99@beehaw.org
        3•1 month ago

        Great way to lose all of the traffic. This would require two things:

        1. Accounts, which is automatic friction. Whether that’s people who have no account and only come to browse, whether that’s people having to make a second account or choose to be horny on main, this is definitely going to cause some user loss.
        2. Willingness to pay reddit for porn, which like, no. They’d be better off giving paid user pages and simply taking a cut so OnlyFans creators can treat reddit similarly. I don’t think many people are gonna want to pay for what amounts to teasers for other paid options.

        Additionally, this would mean reddit is acknowledging the porn on their site and taking responsibility for it by profiting off of it. Therefore, because reddit is an American company, this will kill off their audience in Texas and Oklahoma where, effectively, American-hosted porn websites are banned.

  • Brad
    12•2 months ago

    There is no content on Reddit valuable enough that I would pay for access to it.

    • @N0x0n@lemmy.ml
      1•1 month ago

      Sadly there is… Recently I found an old post where someone was sharing a script to integrate Thunar’s bulk rename into Nemo as an action…

      There’s still valuable info out there and that’s kinda depressing to still search the web and always fallback to a reddit post :/.

    • @inverted_deflector@startrek.website
      4•1 month ago

      Yeah at it’s best reddit is an aggregate of content from around the web and a message board.

      The only thing I can think of that this makes sense for is to keep the onlyfans people who promote on reddit(or got started on gonewild) to stay on reddit. I feel like reddit is probably not trying to get more in bed with providing porn so Im curious exactly what the application could be otherwise.

  • @corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    13•1 month ago

    Spez: “hmm. Have we fucked ourselves enough? How can we enshittify harder?”

    There’s a guy-thrown-out-window meme in there.

  • Da Cap’nEnglish
    1•2 months ago

    My theory is that they’ll put all of the default subs behind the paywall.

  • @mischievous@beehaw.org
    1•1 month ago

    I wish had erased all my comments before being banned. I used to participate to a legal subreddit and provided lots of legal comments and suggestion about civil law that they now can use.

  • @leetnewb@beehaw.org
    1•1 month ago

    I don’t think the option to put some subreddits behind a paywall is necessarily a bad thing. Hopefully the federated link aggregators are in a better place now to absorb another exodus if reddit does scare off a bunch.

  • @melp@beehaw.orgEnglish
    4•2 months ago

    lol. ok I really need to go through and replace all my content with “f spez” comments. I haven’t logged into that account in a long time.