Some subreddits could be paywalled, hints Reddit CEO | Hacker News Reader

Some subreddits could be paywalled, hints Reddit CEO

9to5mac.com

17 pointsFDAiscooked8 comments

When a person searches for something and clicks a Reddit link, Reddit instantly knows exactly what that person wants. Advice about which widget to buy, or how to solve a problem or whatever. That seems like an incredibly valuable data point for advertisers, way more so than vague guesses about demographics.

Is the ad business so bad these days that they can't effectively monetize this? It seems like they're flailing around in desperation instead of leveraging their core advantages.

From what I hear, ads got hit just as hard as tech did during the 2023 purge. The answer could be as simple as ad networks being very careful on where/what to ad, if not outright shuttering. So this (poor) attempt from Reddit is some way to be self-sufficient.

The paywalls are just a way for them to let the unsavory/porn sections of the website remain while appeasing investors

https://fediverser.io/ [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41143632

Reddit already shot itself in the head shortly before its IPO.

The sycophants at the top have cashed out, and the corpse is just still falling towards the ground.

Meanwhile Reddit's stock is down 30% since July 12.

So the headline is worrying, and I think a bit clickbaity. If the idea was to take e.g. r/iama or NSFW subreddits or something and require a paid subscription then that would suck, and is clearly the spectre the headline is trying to raise.

But the actual suggestion seems to be more along the lines of a competitor to patreon-linked discords, where patrons get access to a specific community, which is fine? As long as Reddit doesn't ban other subreddits discussing the same topics as the paid subreddits, they can be safely ignored if it's not your thing.

Still not quite sure if the value is there.

1. You can make private subs for free and manage your own ways to get approved users in. How many would want to go through a middleman for that? Or is that next on the chopping block of enshittification?

2. Reddit is a much slower medium than discord. The appeal in discord chats is having (ideally) quick communication with a creator you support. Reddit also doesn't self-host except for media so it'd be hard to copy Patreon and use it to host paid rewards.

3. Reddit's whole scheme only works at scale. Have you seen how slow traffic can be for <1000 sub subreddits? You're paying more to ultimately get a worse experience unless you are lucky enough to have some hyperengaged posters.

4. as you mentioned, people can and will just up and make their own free space to post on if something goes paid. And due to #2 the free space may end up better than the paid one without a lot of careful tailoring by the creator.

On a completely different tangent:

>Huffman raised the prospect during an earnings call in which he said Reddit would also be testing AI-powered search results later this year …

You can't put lipstick on a pig. That base search indexing is abyssmal. Even to the point where I can search exact titles and not find posts that Google would find with a tiny bit of prodding (either adding site:reddit.com and/or adjusting date ranges). I sure wouldn't bother using a generalized search engine, if that's the idea.

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