Reddit Joins Twitter In Squeezing Devs With Unreasonable Fees

[Macallik86]

Sucks altho I'm guessing they are likely referring to monetizing private subreddits a la people paying to join certain discord rooms.

 

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Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible

It’s going to be a lot harder to pull off massive protests.

www.theverge.com

Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible​

Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private. Thousands of subreddits went private as part of last year’s protests.​

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Sep 30, 2024, 12:00 PM EDT

100 Comments100 New

Illustration: The Verge

Reddit is giving its staff a lot more power over the communities on its platform. Starting today, Reddit moderators will not be able to change if their subreddit is public or private without first submitting a request to a Reddit admin. The policy applies to adjusting all community types, meaning moderators will have to request to make a switch from safe for work to not safe for work, too.

By requiring admin approval for the changes, Reddit is taking away a lever many communities used to protest the company’s API pricing changes last year. By going private, the community becomes inaccessible to the public, making the platform less usable for the average visitor. And that’s part of the reason behind the change.
“The ability to instantly change Community Type settings has been used to break the platform and violate our rules,” Reddit VP of community Laura Nestler, who goes by the username Go_JasonWaterfalls on the platform, writes in a post on r/modnews. “We have a responsibility to protect Reddit and ensure its long-term health, and we cannot allow actions that deliberately cause harm.”

Last year, thousands of subreddits went private to protest changes to Reddit’s API pricing that forced some apps and communities to shut down. Going private was effective during the protests in making a statement and raising awareness. But it also blocked off content that Reddit users might have made with the expectation that it would stay public. (Going private made Google searches worse, too.)

During the protests, Reddit sent messages to moderators of protesting communities to tell them that it would remove them from their posts unless they reopened their subreddits. It also publicly noted that going NSFW (Not Safe For Work), a tool moderators used to add friction to accessing a subreddit and to make the subreddit ineligible for advertising, was “not acceptable.”

Related​

• 
  How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history
  

More than a year after the protests, Reddit is essentially back to normal. But it appears the company still feels it has to make changes to protect the platform.
“While we are making this change to ensure users’ expectations regarding a community’s access do not suddenly change, protest is allowed on Reddit,” writes Nestler. “We want to hear from you when you think Reddit is making decisions that are not in your communities’ best interests. But if a protest crosses the line into harming redditors and Reddit, we’ll step in.”

Reddit says it will review requests to make communities private or NSFW within 24 hours. For smaller or newer communities — under 5,000 members or less than 30 days old — requests will be approved automatically. And if a community wants to temporarily restrict posts or comments for up to seven days, which might be useful for a sudden influx of traffic or when mod teams want to take a break, they can do so without approval with the “temporary events” feature.

A GIF showing how to make a Community Type request on Reddit. GIF: Reddit

Reddit worked with mods ahead of announcing this change, Nestler tells me in an interview. The same day Nestler and I talked, for example, she said that she had spoken about the changes with Reddit’s mod council, which has about 160 moderators.

She characterized their reaction as “broadly measured” and said that the mods understand Reddit’s rules and why Reddit is making the change, “even if they don’t necessarily like it.” But “the feedback that was very obvious was this will be interpreted as a punitive change,” particularly in response to last year’s API protests, she says.

I asked if Reddit would reconsider this new requirement if there was significant blowback. “We’re going to move forward with it,” Nestler says. “We believe that it’s needed to keep communities accessible. That’s why we’re doing this.”

Nestler says the change is something that the company has talked about since she came to Reddit (she joined in March 2021, two years before the protests). But the protests made it clear that letting moderators make their communities private at their discretion “could be used to harm Reddit at scale” and that work on this feature was “accelerated” because of the protests.

Nestler wanted to make clear that its rules aren’t new and that the enforcement of the rules isn’t new. “Our responsibility is to protect Reddit and to ensure its long-term health,” Nestler says. “After that experience, we decided to deprecate a way to cause harm at scale.” However, she says that the company only did so “when we were confident that we could bring our mods along with us.”

 

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Reddit will lock some content behind a paywall this year, CEO says

How will Reddit generate content for paid-for subreddits?

arstechnica.com

Reddit will lock some content behind a paywall this year, CEO says​

How will Reddit generate content for paid-for subreddits?

Scharon Harding – Feb 14, 2025 11:06 AM |

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Credit: Getty

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. 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.

Reddit has had paid-for premium versions of community features before, like r/Lounge, a subreddit that only people with Reddit Gold, which you have to buy with real money, can access.

Reddit would also need to consider how it might compensate people for user-generated content that people pay to access, as Reddit's business is largely built on free, user-generated content. The Reddit Contributor Program, launched in September 2023, could be a foundation; it lets users "earn money for their qualifying contributions to the Reddit community, including awards and karma, collectible avatars, and developer apps," according to Reddit. Reddit says it pays up to $0.01 per 1 Gold received, depending on how much karma the user has earned over the past year. For someone to pay out, they need at least 1,000 Gold, which is equivalent to $10.

Monetizing Reddit users’ interactions​

Huffman also said that Reddit is “laying the foundation” for the ability to monetize commerce within subreddits this year, including when Reddit users buy something from another user via discussion on a subreddit. With Reddit marketplace features, Redditors could potentially make these transactions without leaving Reddit. Some subreddits, like r/Watchexchange, where Redditors “buy, sell or trade watches,” according to the subreddit’s description, are centered on transactions. Huffman said the fact that users are already “transacting on Reddit kind of opens the door” for such monetization.

“Though, that might be a little ways off,” the executive noted.

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.

Reddit’s AMA was in relation to its Q4 2024 earnings results announced on Wednesday. The company reported a net income of $71 million for the quarter ending December 31 and a net loss of $484.3 million for 2024. The company notably missed its global daily active uniques target (101.7 million for the quarter versus 103. million), which it attributed to Google changing its search algorithm.

Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.