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.
This is good. It will drive more people away from Reddit.
Welcome to any reddit refugees that might be reading these comments! we are cool beeple, i promise
I wonder if it’ll be the porn.
Of course it will be the porn.
Great way to lose all of the traffic. This would require two things:
- Accounts, which is automatic friction. Whether that’s people who have no account and only come to browse, whether that’s people having to make a second account or choose to be horny on main, this is definitely going to cause some user loss.
- Willingness to pay reddit for porn, which like, no. They’d be better off giving paid user pages and simply taking a cut so OnlyFans creators can treat reddit similarly. I don’t think many people are gonna want to pay for what amounts to teasers for other paid options.
Additionally, this would mean reddit is acknowledging the porn on their site and taking responsibility for it by profiting off of it. Therefore, because reddit is an American company, this will kill off their audience in Texas and Oklahoma where, effectively, American-hosted porn websites are banned.
Aren’t you glad you did the work and gave Reddit the content it monetizes for free?
I’m more impressed that they found buyers for my drunk shit posts.
Those can’t possibly be good for AI.
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.
Even if you’re not directly responsible for AI suggesting that you can make pizza cheese stringier by adding wood glue*, you’re still doing good work
* which is technically true, in that this is the technique used to get this effect in adverts
