There is, Reddit gold. Not that I’d give them any money for the decisions they made, I don’t reward bad behavior and I paid with my data.
Prior to ads and the current dark patterns you see on the site, Reddit primarily tried to monetize through Reddit Gold. It didn't work, and users never purchased it in any meaningful volume to keep the site afloat. So while you wouldn't give them money for the decisions they've made recently, they weren't making enough money when they were (ostensibly) making better decisions.
How would you go about solving this problem? It's a genuine question without snark - if social media companies are unable to stay sustainable through direct user funding, then they're going to look to ads or other sources eventually.
Can you talk about your work there? It’s cool if you don’t want to, how was it? You left obviously so I can guess.
I sincerely believe that the leadership tried to avoid the ads revenue stream and all the ills that come with it for as long as possible, and searched for a lot of ways out (see things like Reddit Notes in the past). But I don't think I'll work in the social media domain again, because the experience really soured me on the sustainability model as a whole. People are generally unwilling to donate/pay for the content, and it's impossible to operate a site where there's no subscription revenue coming in.
I don’t disagree with you though, if it’s given to you free it’s expected to be free forever. They’ll try to get money somehow but nobody will like it. I definitely liked it at first too, but it’s become so much different.
I'm not sure where the P2P interactions will go - it's possible that they stay centralized on the major platforms of today, or we see a return to smaller forums as we had back in the late 90s and early 2000s.
I thought Reddit gold was just some meaningless emoji thing.