this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
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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.

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[–] mischievous 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I wish had erased all my comments before being banned. I used to participate to a legal subreddit and provided lots of legal comments and suggestion about civil law that they now can use.

[–] HenchmanNumber3@lemm.ee 86 points 6 days ago (2 children)

This is good. It will drive more people away from Reddit.

[–] theangriestbird 38 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Welcome to any reddit refugees that might be reading these comments! we are cool beeple, i promise

[–] P4ulin_Kbana@lemmy.eco.br 6 points 5 days ago (2 children)

You forgot some other instances of not so cool people.

By the way, isn't there somewhere written in your instance's website that "this isn't like Reddit" or something?

[–] t3rmit3 4 points 4 days ago

The part about not wanting this to become Reddit is more about content and site ethos, not size.

And sure, there are some ex-redditors whose views may not be welcome here, but there's no need to put disclaimers in every comment.

[–] theangriestbird 1 points 4 days ago

Not sure what you are trying to get at?

[–] ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 57 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Aren't you glad you did the work and gave Reddit the content it monetizes for free?

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 22 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I’m more impressed that they found buyers for my drunk shit posts.

Those can’t possibly be good for AI.

[–] ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 21 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] Pa_Kalsha 2 points 5 days ago

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

Thank you for feeding the garbage collector. Your service is appreciated. o7

[–] jarfil 5 points 5 days ago

I'm glad that I ran the script to replace 99% of my content with >!CENSORED!< , they can monetize it all they want 😆

[–] thingsiplay 30 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Paid subreddits. I mean look at the free to play live service games, how people like to buy stuff that not everyone has. We can laugh as much as we want and think how dumb this is. But people are dumber. It will drive away some people from Reddit, most won't care and just stay using the "Free" stuff. Some will pay for the subreddits.

Maybe NSFW content or support subreddits for paying customers.

[–] socsa@piefed.social 13 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

NSFW is the only one that makes sense tbh. Reddit's interface would actually be pretty good for an OF like subscription service considering how much OF advertising already exists.

But I strongly suspect they are going to try to do something dumb like tech support or tutoring which nobody is going to pay for.

[–] Powderhorn 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Remember when porn subs were people just having fun and posting instead of this endless stream of monetization efforts? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

[–] leetnewb 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Unmoderated user generated nsfw forums were (are?) a beacon for dubious to illegal content. I forget the specifics, but didn't Pornhub have to pivot from accepting a firehose of free user submitted content after failing to moderate sufficiently? User generated nsfw + free just seems like an impossible balance.

[–] Powderhorn 3 points 5 days ago

Realistically, Reddit has been useless for porn for quite some time.

[–] jarfil 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

That was the avatar NFTs: most people didn't care, some jumped on the FOMO and paid through the nose to "catch them all".

If they had opened that to 3rd party apps, even as a requirement to use the API, or better yet if they gave a cut to 3rd party apps, instead of blindly charging for the API, they could have got a great net to catch whales, while most people would just ignore it and keep contributing their time (mods) and content (comments).

Instead... well, this.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 22 points 6 days ago (1 children)

You folks ready for the next Rexodus?

[–] melp 3 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Was the last one bad? I came from the last one.

[–] Powderhorn 12 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

I arrived here in June 2023 as part of the interest in alternatives after the API changes were announced. We saw a spike in applications, so I expect that could happen again, though we're not as major of an instance as we were back then. Lemmy.world will likely take the brunt of the influx, and as we're not federated with them, the impact should be minimal.

I'm still on Reddit for niche communities, but I use it very differently from 20 months ago. I've grown to enjoy a collective of self-selecting people who want something better than what Reddit offers, which is less and less by the month.

[–] StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

There’s currently an Redexit of Canadians who are looking to get off US-controlled social media.

Lemmy.ca has had a huge spike in enrolment as it’s the one that was most prominently promoted in r/BuyCanadian. Apparently, it’s had over 9k signups in the past day.

[–] Powderhorn 7 points 5 days ago

I don't think there's enough understanding domestically about what has happened to our standing globally. We're not being made great again, we're being made a toxic brand that others are trying to cut ties with. But hey, tariffs will fix that, right?

[–] P4ulin_Kbana@lemmy.eco.br 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Defederated from lemmy.world? Why?

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

So did I, haha. This was a "yay new friends"-type comment.

I actually haven't heard much grumbling about it since, so we seem to have behaved alright. Or at least just provided such an overwhelming share of traffic there's nobody to complain.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 19 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Spez: "hmm. Have we fucked ourselves enough? How can we enshittify harder?"

There's a guy-thrown-out-window meme in there.

[–] TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

We’re just getting warmed up here! There’s so much to do.

How about we introduce several tiers of premium currency, like copper, silver, gold, platinum rubies and diamonds, each with their unique exchange rates.

You could have limited-time awards purchased with one of the premium currencies. Also, add time-gated features, like temporary access to meme subreddits, or comment and post visibility boosts.

Pay-to-win mechanics should be included too. How about time-limited karma boosters?

Oh, and loot boxes! We’ve got to have those too. You could buy basic loot boxes with copper coins, and in those you could find a few silver coins randomly. With the silver coins, you can buy silver boxes, some of which may contain gold coins, and so on all the way to diamond tier. Now that you have a convoluted assortment of different currencies, you can use them to boost your account, posts and comments in different ways. Oh, and Season passes too, can’t forget those!

Ads. So much ads! Of course, you can get rid of some of them, depending on how much you pay and which currency you use. These are all time-limited features, so you better keep those coins and gems flowing every day.

And subscriptions too! Once you subscribe to something like 1231 copper coins a day, you can’t cancel without climbing the mount Kilimanjaro. The only cancel button is physically located on a computer somewhere up there.

And there’s so much more to come.

[–] TheBrideWoreCrimson@sopuli.xyz 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Those novel currencies, of course, will be tied to Bitcoin or some other "coin" they'll create exclusively for that purpose, brothel-money style.

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[–] Brad 19 points 5 days ago (2 children)

There is no content on Reddit valuable enough that I would pay for access to it.

[–] inverted_deflector@startrek.website 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Yeah at it's best reddit is an aggregate of content from around the web and a message board.

The only thing I can think of that this makes sense for is to keep the onlyfans people who promote on reddit(or got started on gonewild) to stay on reddit. I feel like reddit is probably not trying to get more in bed with providing porn so Im curious exactly what the application could be otherwise.

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[–] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 days ago

Sadly there is... Recently I found an old post where someone was sharing a script to integrate Thunar's bulk rename into Nemo as an action...

There's still valuable info out there and that's kinda depressing to still search the web and always fallback to a reddit post :/.

[–] OneRedFox 16 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I wonder if it'll be the porn.

[–] Banzai51@midwest.social 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Of course it will be the porn.

[–] gk99 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Great way to lose all of the traffic. This would require two things:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

[–] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

you already need an account for NSFW stuff on reddit fyi

[–] desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

no? Just claim to be a desktop computer.

[–] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

weird, for me it works even with just setting a mobile browser to "desktop mode".

[–] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Weird, must depend on the region or something. Good to know.

[–] f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I recently saw one of my blank posts on Reddit and almost regretted running the mass eraser...

...Nah, fuck that site. 😂

[–] mischievous 2 points 2 days ago

wish I had done it.

[–] haverholm@kbin.earth 9 points 6 days ago

But probably only the useful content.

[–] melp 6 points 5 days ago

lol. ok I really need to go through and replace all my content with "f spez" comments. I haven't logged into that account in a long time.

[–] JokeDeity@lemm.ee 5 points 5 days ago
[–] somedev@aussie.zone 5 points 5 days ago

Echo-chamber, maximise!

[–] Etterra@discuss.online 2 points 4 days ago

And that's how Reddit lost even more users.

My theory is that they’ll put all of the default subs behind the paywall.

[–] leetnewb 1 points 5 days ago

I don't think the option to put some subreddits behind a paywall is necessarily a bad thing. Hopefully the federated link aggregators are in a better place now to absorb another exodus if reddit does scare off a bunch.

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