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.

    • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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      2 months ago

      I’m more impressed that they found buyers for my drunk shit posts.

      Those can’t possibly be good for AI.

      • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 months ago

        When then announced they’d be selling content for AI training, I went back to my old abandoned Reddit accounts and slightly altered all of my previous posts with actual content to be factually incorrect and misleading in subtle ways. It took me two months to rewrite everything, a few old posts at a time per day.

        Now whatever technical or historical stuff I posted on Reddit is false and AI is training on that.

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
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      2 months ago

      I’m glad that I ran the script to replace 99% of my content with >!CENSORED!< , they can monetize it all they want 😆

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    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.

    • socsa@piefed.social
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      NSFW is the only one that makes sense tbh. Reddit’s interface would actually be pretty good for an OF like subscription service considering how much OF advertising already exists.

      But I strongly suspect they are going to try to do something dumb like tech support or tutoring which nobody is going to pay for.

      • Pete Hahnloser@beehaw.org
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        2 months ago

        Remember when porn subs were people just having fun and posting instead of this endless stream of monetization efforts? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
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      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.

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        2 months ago

        So did I, haha. This was a “yay new friends”-type comment.

        I actually haven’t heard much grumbling about it since, so we seem to have behaved alright. Or at least just provided such an overwhelming share of traffic there’s nobody to complain.

      • Pete Hahnloser@beehaw.org
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        I arrived here in June 2023 as part of the interest in alternatives after the API changes were announced. We saw a spike in applications, so I expect that could happen again, though we’re not as major of an instance as we were back then. Lemmy.world will likely take the brunt of the influx, and as we’re not federated with them, the impact should be minimal.

        I’m still on Reddit for niche communities, but I use it very differently from 20 months ago. I’ve grown to enjoy a collective of self-selecting people who want something better than what Reddit offers, which is less and less by the month.

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    2 months ago

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

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      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.

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    2 months ago

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

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

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    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.