- cross-posted to:
- redditwasfun
- technology
- cross-posted to:
- redditwasfun
- technology
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.
Medium’s paywall gets lots of hatred, but at least they use it to pay the authors of the paywalled posts, so it kind of makes sense - you pay to consume content and get payed to create content. But Reddit is a forum, not a blogging platform - the separation between content creators and content consumers is much more blurred. If a subreddit gets paywalled, then the Redditors who create the content there - both the posts and the comments - will need to pay. Which will instantly ruin these subreddits when most of the posters will just take their posts elsewhere.
Did Reddit decide to imitate the business model of academic journals?
Over the last few years I’ve started to notice this weird increase in people misspelling the word paid as ‘payed’. Where is this coming from ?