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.
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i hope there is a mass migration here
The more they do shit like this the more they will
I mean, honestly Reddit is a dead site walking. At this point is not if it will “die” but how fast and I guess more importantly where will its users go. Hopefully here but who knows
I feel like this is gonna be a cash cow for reddit, just not in a way spez can just openly talk about.
A huge portion of reddit is OnlyFans promos. Reddit is making zero off of all this, because traditional advertising doesn’t want to associate themselves with porn. A bunch of these “paid subreddits” will basically be a reddit’s attempt to compete with OnlyFans.
I honestly think it’ll work. There’s a lot of money in porn.n
You’re gonna pay the mods then, right?
Right?
no
Do it, please, the subreddits need to migrate here
well, not all of them.
I can think of a handful I would much rather see thrown into a furnace.
fuck /u/spez
More ads? There’s already a bunch of them mixed with posts and comments. What more, force people to watch an ad before loading pages?
There are ads in comments now?
Yep, ads masquerading as comments. It’s awful. I’m so glad I moved to Lemmy.
Yeah, people like me and I assume you, who used to browse reddit via a third party app or with RES + an adblocker on pc did not see it but it’s a bit insane how much ads there’s already on reddit right now. I migrated to GNU and firefox last week and forgot to add the extensions as I was just looking for some information in the Endeavour subreddit and I was shocked at the state of “default” reddit… I’m glad I left and I hope most of the userbase will…
Yea ads have been in comments for at least a year now
They snuck them in during some AB testing like 5 years ago, they didn’t stick though obv
I’m not on Reddit much these days but every time I am and I see threads with people discussing these Reddit policy changes Lemmy gets mentioned. Usually with people complaining they already tried or couldn’t figure it out or that it isn’t good enough…
I think as the enshittification marches on they’ll be some more exodus from Reddit but generally I think everyone is just getting used to all online social media being a total corporate disaster.
Lemmy was hard to use a year ago or so.
No it wasnt.
I’m not particularly tech savvy and I found it confusing and hard to parse at first. It was worth it to figure out, because fuck Reddit, but I can understand people struggling with it, especially at first.
Yes it was.
Been here 2 years. Its just as easy to use as its always been.
I dont know where this sudden anti-lemmy “OMG ITS TOO HARD TO USE CAUSE WORDS ARE HARD I PREFER (insert site with same exact fucking usability” misinformation/propaganda has come from in the past few weeks, but its patently absurd and obviously fake.
It’s not that everyone’s getting used to the current hellscape of the internet. Kids born today have never experienced a world without it. I watched my niece playing on my dad’s phone, and she was just blasting through every single ad, interacting with every ad until it took her to the install page, and then she moved on to the next ad. People were upset about the tiktok ban cause they didnt care about their data. Shit like that is wild to me, coming from the early internet era.
Unless countries step up with better tech laws, I only see it getting worse from here.
the internet was better when it was anonymous, where you were explicitly and forcefully told that no one should know anything about you but your handle.
I just joined yesterday because of this article. Honestly I feel like I’m using Apollo to access Reddit again. My Reddit account was 12 years old and I deleted it.
Welcome
We’re happy to have you here
This is a cool guide for starting https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started
Thank you! I literally signed up 30 mins ago after seeing Lemmy mentioned a few times on Reddit. I’m at the ‘what the heck is this, where am I’ stage but feel like I understand how it works a bit better now!
Welcome to Lemmy!!
Oh god, you’ve out me down a rabbit hole. Thank you!
Welcome friend. :)
Thank you!
Honestly, I was just giving up going here, lemmy is very complicated, also I miss my beautiful snoo :(
r/spezholedesign
Ok tidy up this place. We have visitors coming soon.
The announcement is why I created a username here. I doubt I’m coming alone.
Welcome! We can definitely still use a few more people, especially if they’re willing to contribute to content.
Still no frictionless account migration…
On Voyager app you can “migrate subreddits” at least
Not sure what else would even be feasible
What’s to migrate other than your name? My reddit usage was limited to lurking so I genuinely don’t know.
History, reputation, relationships (this a nuch bigger problem on mastofon) (yes migration as a lurker is easy)
well Hexbear is just about gone so that should help
great timing for them to lose both of their domains
Another day of thanking my past self for leaving
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?
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.
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.
It does seem like a lot of ads for “3% of inventory”. I can’t ever see a reason to pay for a subreddit.
Wave incoming
It’s crazy how everything slowly turns into shit in the end
Just came to lemmy again after learning this shit!! mass exodus coming soon
I wouldn’t be too sure just yet, seeing how annoying youtube and it’s ads have gotten yet it isn’t replaced still.
We might have an increase, but plenty will never leave.
Youtube is not easily replacible.
Creating quality videos are much more difficult than memes on Reddit/Lemmy type of sites.
No content creators is gonna move because of the issue of monitization. And most couldn’t care less about Youtube’s enshittification. You cant say “Just use Peertube” when there are like nothing interesting to watch. It’s like trying to stop watching popular Movies / TV shows because “big corp media bad”. Piracy would be the best mitigation in the Movies / TV situation, and that in Youtube’s situation is just using an adblocker.
In contast, Reddit/Lemmy type of sites are just strangers talking to strangers. You are moving from Stanger Group A to Stranger Group B. It’s the easiest transition ever.
Not to mention, the storage for Lemmy instances is like in the GBs. Get a 1TB harddrive and you’re good for a long time. A Youtube replacement? On you’re gonna need PETABYTES, and all the bandwith to serve the content.
Youtube is probably the most difficult platform on the internet to replace. Video content delivery is extremely resource heavy and technically complicated, especially once you start to scale. Many, many competitors have attempted it over the years, and while some found their niche, none of them have achieved anywhere close to the scale of Youtube.
It took decades of Youtube to become profitable, only doing so after achieving mind-boggling economy of scale. The majority of humans on earth have used Youtube. About half of all (global) internet users use it monthly. I don’t know if any other platform can claim stats like that.
Youtube is one of those platforms that only exists because it got a head start in the unique conditions of the early internet. I don’t know if it’s even possible to create a true competitor, though I could see multiple platforms taking over different niches.
This is what people always seen to ignore about YouTube. It’s not just another database frontend to use generated content. That is definitely part of it, but behind that is probably the largest public facing content library on the Internet with a full video recoding infrastructure attached. YouTube is the platform for which I understand that they need to monetize.
Sure, nowadays there’s also tiktok as another big video service. But I like to think that YouTube is way bigger in most metrics.
YouTube hasn’t been replaced because adblockers still work.
same here lol. If they paywall subreddits ive been visiting for the past FOURTEEN years, i will lose my shit. by throwing it at the reddit headquarters.
