Reddit Will Introduce Paywalls in 2025 | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Will Introduce Paywalls in 2025

pcmag.com

39 pointsmadmanweb33 comments

Ironically the only thing for which Reddit is still a useful website is NSFW User Generated content on subreddits that focus on the NSFW bit and forbid any political or relevant discussion.

Any typical sub today regardless of what the official topic of the sub is taken over by overly political content just barely reworded to fit the sub's topic.

that seems very anecdotal and does not mirror my experience

Nor mine. I mostly sub to small niche topics and there's hardly anything political. Large subs on the other hand...

Are there any clones of reddit out there that have a reasonable level of popularity?

Lemmy with apps like summit or https://old.lemmy.world/ are good for big topics like this https://Lemmy.ml/post/26020520

Reasonable level of popularity is hard to really gauge. There is no current Reddit replacement for everything it is. Federated services like Piefed, Lemmy, etc are trying and there's good content to be had on those. It's like an early reddit but not as mainstream. Checkout something like https://beehaw.org for one such instance and see if it's your thing.

It seems to me that a reasonable level of popularity is where you get into trouble, as there is regression to the mean. If Eternal September has taught anything it is that the average person is pretty bad.

Seems like there isn’t. But it’s weird, why not?

The audience and the posters are the content, not enough people want to start posting and commenting on a dead reddit clone to get it off the ground to entice more people

IIRC, Reddit created tons of fake users and posts early on to pretend to have a userbase.

Given the rise of competent sounding LLMs since that time, it should be easier than ever to replicate that strategy...

And also, there was less competition and a lot of lazy market leaders. Digg v3 facilitated reddit's rise in a week the same way that Skype's negligence and TeamSpeak's technical focus made is really easy for Discord to take over.

Those conditions don't really exist anymore.

I think user moderation is where the opening will be. Reddit as a whole is pretty heavy handed in banning anyone who says anything wrongthink, or worse, actively bans users who participate in subs they don't approve of.

You had Voat spin out but it had the same problem, with a vastly different opinion of what wrongthink was. It didn't last long.

I think the between that, the unpopular API changes, new Reddit that nobody asked for, and now paywalls, there is an opening. One challenge is that it's hard to actually make money from the idea, which I guess is why there haven't been a lot of entrants in the first place.

Can you build threaded convos on top of the AT Protocol? Subs->Topics, threads, users, tada!

Edit: @freetonik much obliged for the reference.

There was a post about that exact idea a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43058285

Is Digg.com still around? This is a joke as back in the day reddit was the small fish.

Joking aside, Diggnation has returned and Kevin Rose has said a few times he wants to buy back Digg.com

No, but if this happens, there will be.

https://tildes.net/

From the article it sounds more like they want to introduce paid communities... which is not a bad idea.

Many content creators have some sort of paid community, so if Reddit can take some of that market it could out work well for them.

There’s a mod comment on WSB saying that they were invited to get pay-walled, and refused.

It will be interesting to see if Reddit forces them to anyway.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/s/nyocKWohon

Just realized that I had posted a non-old.reddit link from mobile. My mistake.

https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/s/nyocKWohon

Paywalling /r/wallstreetbets of all things is such a terrible financial decision it's actually fitting.

Honestly just sounds like reddit wants to get some of the only fans money, reddit is already filled with only fans girls advertising but they're not getting a actual cut of it.

More akin to patron or medium /substack I guess. They won't go all in on the NSFW only fans type of creators I'm sure.

possibly, but taking money opens them up to the headache of visa mastercard issues relating to adult content. increased attention could get them removed from the app stores. they could also remove it

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43050423

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43058591

Reddit is a far left wasteland. I would highly recommend using X instead, which is a balance of 48% Democrats, 47% Republicans and 100% entertainment.

I gave up on both X and Reddit because for whatever reason they're both annoying echo chambers full of edgelords.

I just remembered that Tildes (https://tildes.net/) still exists, I wholly forgot about it. Anyone else using it these days, perhaps over reddit and even lemmy, mastodon etc?

I honestly can't imagine paying for reddit. Especially when just being part of reddit creates the content they're hoping to sell.

Paywalls on people's content would work well if they have some type of revenue sharing, but paywalls on entire subreddits would be a disaster.

It sounds more like they want to compete with either Patreon, OnlyFans or both. Though reddit as it is now is a horrible place to build a community. It's hard to keep bad actors out, but moderation (and the culture surrounding most moderation on reddit) is also completely opaque. So you simultaneously have a problem repelling trolls (participating in trans subreddits essentially guarantees hateful DMs), but you can also shape comments in their entirety to make a place a perfect echo chamber. Entrance fees might actually solve this problem.

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