Some subreddits could be paywalled, hints Reddit CEO

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Some subreddits could be paywalled, hints Reddit CEO - 9to5Mac

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has hinted that in future some subreddits could be paywalled, as the company seeks to devise...

9to5mac.com

Some subreddits could be paywalled, hints Reddit CEO​

Ben Lovejoy | Aug 7 2024 - 5:15 am PT

14 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.

Huffman raised the prospect during an earnings call in which he said Reddit would also be testing AI-powered search results later this year …

Reddit’s drive for cash​

Reddit has been very focused on making money both in the run-up to its IPO, and since.

The first big news on this front was more than a year ago, when the company started charging developers for API calls, forcing the closure of the popular third-party app Apollo. That led to wide-scale protests that the company had to forcibly shut down.

It was subsequently revealed that the company had signed a deal with Google to allow Reddit posts to be used as training data, which subsequently saw the company blocking all other search engines.

AI search could generate ad revenue​

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Liked by 4 people

I have doubts that this could work in practice, primarily because a big part what makes reddit useful is the ability for anyone to comment, you'd lose the people who have knowledge but aren't going to spend money to share it. Then there's moderation; is reddit going to pay for moderation because its a paid premium experience, unlikely as they just want money but then who is going to spend the money to moderate ie who's going to pay to volunteer for a company; or will moderators get free access in which case how do you get the moderators in the first place?

What will likely happen is these paid subreddits will end up being just like the wave of dead subreddits, you'll occasionally see a post that might get some interaction but it's not people's go to place. They may get a ton of people for the first month or two trying it out(especially if there's a free trial) but very few people will be interested in paying and the subreddits will die down until no one is left, after all if there's no content then why would you keep paying and it would enter a death spiral as more people have that same thought.

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Engadget reports that Huffman now sees AI-powered search as a potential revenue source.

During the call, the Reddit co-founder said the company would begin testing AI-powered search results later this year [and] that search could one day be a significant source of advertising revenue for the company.

Some subreddits could be paywalled​

More worryingly, Huffman also hinted that in future some subreddits could be paywalled.

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.”

9to5Mac’s Take​

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.

Image: 9to5Mac collage using image from Reddit

 

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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.”

 

[Pazzy]

Good. fukk reddit. I hope that site dies off soon. That site is a narcissistic cesspool.

 

[Field Marshall Bradley]

The last repository of organic/authentic information…… Everything succumbs to the dollar eventually

 

[Richard Glidewell]

Good...... greed will end the centralized information structure and I can't wait........ revive blog spots and vlogs........ imagineas soon as a sub reddit you struggled to create stats to take off they subscription your shyt........lmao..... funny not funny...... they even plan on compensating people?

 

[feelosofer]

He gonna make people pay for the porn subreddits.

 

[datnigDASTARDLY]

But it’s Reddit, somebody will create a free sub immediately

 

[Elim Garak]

 

[Rev Leon Lonnie Love]

This will only make Lemmy more popular

Lemmy - A link aggregator for the fediverse

join-lemmy.org

Get you the Voyager app if you on android and forget about reddit

 

[newarkhiphop]

Probably all the porn ones

 

[RickyDiBiase]

Good riddance, fukk reddit.

 

[beenz]

the free version of reddit already is riddled with ads on the mobile version. I do have the ads blocked on my laptop, but I wish the apollo app was still a viable option cuz that joint had no ads, but reddit killed that off.

that said, I would NEVER pay a subscription to view a subreddit. I'd just find an alternative.

 

[Sleepy Floyd]

Good. fukk reddit. I hope that site dies off soon. That site is a narcissistic cesspool.

The racist cacs will pay for it

I got banned from Reddit for defending black people

 

[Big Blue]

Reddit's arrogance is crazy. It's site that is based on basic HTML. The barrier of entry for competitor is so low.

 

[BrothaZay]

Good riddance, fukk reddit.

Came in here to basically say this

Can’t even have a discussion on your cities subreddit because racist liberal Cacs are the mods, even if the city is only 10% cac and they live somewhere else.