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.
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.
So, what’s the stage after “enshitification”? “Enspezed?”
What we’re seeing with Reddit is just the first stage of enshittification: making things worse for the end users who have been captured by network effect and what used to be a good service, in order to benefit advertisers. The second stage is making things shitty for the advertisers who have been captured by all the captive users. Paid subs are probably a harbinger of that kind of thing, but I don’t think advertisers are locked in enough to be really stuck yet.
entshitification 2: electric boogaloo
In order for lemmy (or any alternative) to really take off, efforts need to be made to mass migrate content. The biggest inhibitor of adoption is the lack of communities, and the user submitted info backing them. Not only would it be beneficial for alternatives to have this on their servers, efforts should be made to index and back up the mountain of how to and general hyper specific sub reddit information for the good of society. The world already lost so much during the last purge of users comments and posts, further enshitification of reddit will only lead to more getting lost. Are any groups working to scrape all (or the most important data) from reddit and break it out in a searchable format here?
That is something that some tech savy Lemmy users could already easily do. I repost stuff from all over the web. But some systematic preservation of good old subreddits aught to be automated.
Well Reddit started off with a bunch of sock puppet accounts to make the site look larger than it was. Now they have bots doing that so when you refresh Reddit it’s always new. Back when it was good there was a point where you’d just run out of Reddit. It was a meme. They figured out how to stop that feeling.
But that feeling is good! We will have to get used to the fact that real human sites don’t constantly update if we want nice things.
There’s nothing on Reddit anymore. It’s really unfortunate but I don’t see how this is going to help them regain any consistent user base.
Looks like I dropped Reddit at just the right time.
If you don’t mind me asking, how did you find it?
There are reports of Reddit banning Lemmy mentions, and Google searches floating “Lemmy is bad” Reddit threads to the top.
I googled Reddit alternatives. I see Reddit as turning into just the next Twitter cesspool. There’s no longer any constructive conversation.
The problem is you can’t have real conversations that stoke any flames because they’re a public company and answer to the shareholders, so they, reddit, deem what is appropriate to be posted.
It was word of mouth for me. But now you’ve got me curious about occurrences of the term Lemmy on Reddit.
I came over to Lemmy during the Great API third party disaster. The exodus had commenters saying to come over to Lemmy.
Same, word of mouth is how I found lemmy. Beehaw, then a few others, now I’m here on db0.
By far one of the easiest decisions was jumping on over here - and I barely understand it half the time.
Second best was ditching Facebook like it was cancer.
Enshittification intensifies.
spez is slow walking Reddit to the graveyard.
It’s slowly becoming twitter/x
It’s been obvious for a while that spez is trying to be a Musk/Zuck.
I’m glad I jumped ship back during the ban on 3rd party apps. That was it for me.
Same. I had even paid for the paid tier of my 3rd party app because it was such a good value to me that I wanted the devs to have some of my money. Thanks to that app, I was on the site more and pretty much never via computer anymore.
I think it was for the best though. Quality over quantity here. I find it to be far less toxic on Lemmy overall. It’s like how people tend to be nicer in a small town because you know you’re gonna run into these people over and over again, but the big city you came from had more variety in stuff to check out. Definitely a trade-off, but I think it’s worth it to have this much more pleasant space that isn’t so packed with content as to be addictive. Good vibes.
I’ve gone back to reddit a few times from searches, and after spending time away it is really apparent how negative most of the comments over there are.
For example, anytime someone asks for help, someone always has to show up and get angry that they didn’t search instead of asking. Then a third person shows up and says that a search brought them to this thread… and no one ever answers the question. Thanks reddit!
There are some instances where Reddit is still a great source of information just due to the sheer size of the community. But there’s a lot more shit to wade through after the exodus a couple years back. I haven’t signed back in for years.
Its improving over time, I think it’ll find a decent grove as more communities pop up. I find the comment sections really engaging too I’ve had some solid conversations over here.
Wild that that was almost 2 years ago now…
Tbh, I didn’t care about the 3rd party apps.
I just didn’t like the silencing of opposition.
If they are willing to do mass censorship for benign things like a 3rd party apps protest, what’s to say they wont booklick governments/corportions and censor info of horrible things that a government/corporation is doing.
It’s the censorship that I was more afraid of. Besides, I always wanted a decentalized platform, but none of it had any users until June 12, 2023.
That’s the truth. It was tone deafness, a lack of responsiveness, and a clear lack of principles that made me leave during that.
Yep. When RIF was killed, I closed that door immediately (was not easy). It was to be expected though, I think. Once a site reaches critical mass, money interests enter the picture and greed can always screw up a good thing. It’s a shame.
Same, my mouth dropped reading the article.
Obligatory fuck spez
Me too.
Man people really like taking a beating.
I don’t even use any apps and was just planning on boycotting it for a few days in solidarity. Then Greedy Little Pigboy made his statement about how everyone will come crawling back and that was that.
This is the actual reason for me too. I’m making a point to never visit that website again.
There’s exceptions like when searching for troubleshooting help and a relevant result happens to be on Reddit, but otherwise I avoid it as much as possible.
I figure as long as you visit with adblock enabled and don’t post anything, you’re not contributing to them in any meaningful way.
Agreed, and to be fair I still stop in at niche subreddits I used to follow to see what’s new, but never logged in.
Oh i didn’t even hear about that. Fuck spez.
The memo is in this article, if you’re curious.
thank!
I can’t imagine what sub-reddits they think people would willingly participate in that are paid-only. Decreasing visibility and potential participation group automatically makes those worse in most cases.
Porn?
Yeah, actually. I could see them taking on OnlyFans if they wanted to. But I think they want to be more mainstream than that.
Digg: “join us reddit…”
We all float down here 💩💩💩
As much as we’d like to joke about the sudden influx of new Lemmy users that will result from this lets all be real, it will be a few new users. Most Reddit users will accept whatever is thrown at them from that company while crying about it on Reddit. I don’t know what the phenomena is but it seems that most people would rather stay on the bad platform than try something new and slightly different. I’m cool with that, I like niche platforms.
Its a toxic relationship, I literally could not leave, became aware of lemmy maybe two months before I left and always had the intention to make an account but put it off til I was perm banned, looking at my notifications I was getting less replies than ever. And if ppl replied it was to actively not be helpful or tell me to do anything other than answer my question.
The key part here is that (at least initially…) they won’t put any existing subreddits behind a paywall. So users’ habits won’t really be interrupted.
That’s fine. A more fragmented internet is better for the world
Lemmy can expect some inbound traffic
Hi, I think I’m doing this right. Just joined Lemmy lol because of this. Can people see my comment?
Not only do I see your comment, it’s not yet buried even 5 days after you’ve made it.
Hi mate
Happy cake 🎂 day!
One of us!
yep, even from my solo instance
si
yes we can :) welcome!
Yes! Welcome to the fediverse
One of us!
Same here.
Nope, cannot see this.
😉
hunter2
One of us!
Welcome!
Is there anywhere I can find a complete scrape of Reddit threads and comments from before the 3rd party app apocalypse? There was a lot of useful info shared on there, but I don’t want anything to do with what that site has become. I’m happy just to CTRL+F a big dataset. It’ll probably still work better than either Reddit or Google does nowadays. Without media I imagine I could fit it somewhere.
Also, Spez is a greedy little pig boy.
Yes, there’s a torrent somewhere…
https://academictorrents.com/details/c398a571976c78d346c325bd75c47b82edf6124e
This is what I could find with a quick search, but I know there’s a larger database backup.
are you going to use it to train your deepseek?
I never understood the desire to search in conversational language via AI. It’s gone to far for my taste. I just want to be able to scour a huge volume of info for my exact search terms, maybe with a few synonyms or misspellings included. Google and AI keep trying to assume they know what I’m looking for, but they’re always wrong (intentionally wrong based on their own motives).
The reason the dataset interests me is that search has gotten so bad that I can’t get any non-corporate information from search engines anymore, just more pig swill, chumbucket ads, and misinformation slop. Anything I search for would probably give better results if I just searched old reddit, Wikipedia, and a few other datasets locally in a simple way. Not sure what software is best to use for something like that, but I’d like to collect a few mostly pre-AI datasets now to get the ball rolling before you can’t find those online anymore either.
Not everyone is perverted like you.
We really need efforts made to bulk upload historical posts of value to lemmy. If done right, we could significantly expand the amount of subs and content, even if they are ghost towns initially with just the old posts from reddit. Build it and they will migrate.
Not a great decision from Reddit.
It does seem like a lot of ads for “3% of inventory”. I can’t ever see a reason to pay for a subreddit.
