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Comment by rngname22 | Hacker News Reader

Would you pay a subscription model for access to Reddit? If you're unwilling to pay in any way whether its watching ads, API fees, or a subscription, my guess is they'd be happy you're done for good.

(If your answer is yes: well, I think they are dumb for not offering a paid, ad-free version).

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I was absolutely willing to pay for it, and I did (Reddit Gold subscription) for a few years!

And then I was banned for no apparent reason. A 9-year Reddit account, Reddit Gold for several years, moderator of a moderately sized community. I had never posted anything controversial, never gotten conduct warnings or subreddit bans. Never got an explanation despite multiple appeals.

A few months ago they unbanned me. Still no explanation. My theory is that maybe somebody at Reddit saw me complaining on HN a few months back.

I've moderated communities, and mistakes happen. I recognize how difficult Reddit's job is. And I realize it's just impractical for them to provide personalized customer service.

However, I will never give them my money again unless I get some transparency about why I was banned.

Otherwise I'm not willing to become invested (emotionally or financially) in Reddit again because I am thinking to myself: "I could probably be randomly banned again at any moment."

My 11 year account was just banned as well. I don't remember posting anything terrible recently. So not sure what's going on, but I won't be appealing or making a new account or going to the site anymore.

I would not, because reddit doesn't deserve my money. A different organization running a similar but different site would get money from me, but that doesn't really exist.

The dichotomy isn't really "ads" vs "subscription" in most cases; it's "ads + data harvesting (with negative societal externalities)" vs "subscription vs data harvesting (with negative societal externalities)". I am willing to use such a service as a parasite, but not as a paying user.

I happily paid for Premium for years, I've gotten a lot of value out of Reddit and I wanted to make sure that they got money even though I blocked all their ads. I cancelled when they announced these API changes since it's the only leverage I have.

A paid ad-free version of their site isn't really good enough though. To keep me happy I need to be able to keep using third party apps on mobile, maybe something like 'exempt requests from Premium accounts from API billing'.

> (If your answer is yes: well, I think they are dumb for not offering a paid, ad-free version).

... they do offer exactly that.

One of the core features of reddit is that far too many people use it with anonymous accounts. Its a good way of saying things that they don't want their families/friends/work/governments to know.

So a paid ad-free version simply doesn't work for these people.

Reddit not only doesn't have anonymous accounts, new pseudonymous accounts can get shadowbanned after the tiniest mistake (yes, this is a huge violation of netiquette, but then reddit is basically built assuming that people are going to violate it, so...)

I would pay for an Apollo app subscription model since the main reddit site and app are comically bad in UI/UX. But as we've seen in the last month reddit is not interested in that kind of option.

I paid for Boost on Android, but the value proposition of a food third-party client is more clear to me than Reddit itself ironically. I get an extremely small amount of tangible value from Reddit, so little that I prefer to rack up an arbitrary amount of Karma and then delete my account periodically, which sort of resets my relationship with it. Most of that Karma is just shit posting.

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