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

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.”

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.

        • btaf45@lemmy.worldEnglish
          81·
          3 months ago

          Yes. More than a little. It was a huge event for lemmy. Did you think the entire reddit userbase was going to switch in one week? Reddit didn’t get their userbase in one week. It’s a process. Now there is a well known alternative to reddit. Everything in reddit looks shittier than it was before the exodus. It’s nearly impossible to become a ‘new user’ on reddit and with the rando-bans they keep giving out they are just going to keep shrinking.

            • manualoverride@lemmy.worldEnglish
              31·
              3 months ago

              If you’d like to post evidence that contradicts my source, please do. “Leaving” for a few days doesn’t count.

              I was not discussing anything to do with “switching”, I was discussing users leaving Reddit.

              Maybe they encountered so many charming people like you on Lemmy they had to go back to Reddit in case they turned nice?

              Would that mean they switched and switched back? Or left and re-joined?

        • cygnus@lemmy.caEnglish
          7·
          3 months ago

          There’s also no correlation between creating a Lemmy account and completely quitting Reddit.

          • Ilovethebomb@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            3 months ago

            No, but it’s a reasonable assumption that individual will be spending less time on the platform, at the very minimum.

            Personally, I haven’t used Reddit on my phone since they killed third party apps, although I have used the desktop site for a few subreddits that don’t really exist here.

      • IMongoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        Reddit has over 1,000,000,000 active users per month. Lemmy has about 50,000. The API fiasco was a big deal for lemmy, but it was not a big deal for reddit. Lemmy is a rounding error to them.

        I would also bet that a lot of lemmy users still visit reddit for their niche communities. I know I do, even though I host a server for my own niche hobby, but I’m the only one who’s ever posted anything to it.

    • j4yt33@feddit.orgEnglish
      15·
      3 months ago

      How many of them are real users vs bots though? It’s easy to inflate numbers