Reddit is planning to introduce a paywall this year, CEO Steve Huffman said during a videotaped Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Thursday.
Huffman previously showed interest in potentially introducing a new type of subreddit with “exclusive content or private areas” that Reddit users would pay to access.
When asked this week about plans for some Redditors to create “content that only paid members can see,” Huffman said:
It’s a work in progress right now, so that one’s coming… We’re working on it as we speak.
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.
Reddit executives also discussed how they might introduce more ads into the social media platform. The push for ads follows changes to Reddit’s API policy that, in part, led to the closing of most third-party apps used for accessing Reddit. Reddit makes most of its revenue from ads and can only show ads on its native apps and website.
Reddit started testing ads in comments last year, with COO Jen Wong saying during an AMA that such ads are in “about 3 percent of inventory.” The executive hinted at that percentage growing. Wong also shared hopes that contextual advertising, or ads being shown based on the content surrounding them, will be a “bigger part of” Reddit’s business by 2026.
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Hi, I think I’m doing this right. Just joined Lemmy lol because of this. Can people see my comment?
Not only do I see your comment, it’s not yet buried even 5 days after you’ve made it.
Yes! Welcome to the fediverse
One of us!
Welcome!
One of us!
Hi mate
Happy cake 🎂 day!
si
yep, even from my solo instance
Same here.
hunter2
One of us!
yes we can :) welcome!
Awwww yeaaah. Welcome friend, stay a while
You’re gonna pay the mods then, right?
Right?
I just left, deleted my account of 15ish years tonight, no regrets. Happy to be here.
I left 2 years ago from my 13yo account, deleted everything as well
Obligatory Fuck You spez
No regrets, I love Lemmy
With the API changes, I became read-only (without an account) on Reddit.
I now skim the communities that don’t really exist here.
… it’s actually saved me a lot of time now that I can’t (and thus don’t feel the need to) debate local politics with morons anymore!
… unless and until they come to Lemmy.
Looking forward to having more conversations with fewer people. I’m not trying to argue politics anymore. It’s fruitless.
The energy and time I’ve saved not arguing on reddit is wild, I initally came here defensive and its been so nice
The internet feels post-apocalyptic now. I no longer have any social media accounts (does lemmy count?) . Places that I spent over a decade on now feel so hostile and foreign. I joined reddit as a teenager wanting to read f7u12 comics, and now reddit feels like a total outrage machine. I mean the ads are crap but the algorithm doesn’t show me content I WANT to see anymore. It just shows me videos of car accidents and street fights and other things that get my cortisol levels up. Blocking subreddits straight up doesnt work. I like that on lemmy I can just filter only by the communities I subscribe to
I’ve been online since the late 80s and the Internet, generally speaking, has gone to shit. I’ve been on Reddit for 16 years and it’s been going down the tubes for a while now. Too many people, overzealous mods and now a soft paywall? Yeah, I’m done.
Yes same. I don’t want to be stressed out by the internet anymore. I want internet for millennials back.
Nice to meet you, everyone’s been so lovely thus far.
Same thing here… I only just discovered Lemmy. I don’t know how I managed to only discover it now. But so far so good. It’s not quite as active but that’s okay, Reddit used to be the same way and was actually better then.
I do feel like the old parts of the internet were decentralized and based on protocols, not single websites. So this is very refreshing and feels like getting back to the roots.
Welcome, I joined here after the API protests. It’s a smaller community so content is slow to move but it’s nice to have forums where you’re having constructive conversations with people, not a huge amount of bots or repeated to death catch phrases
Enjoy this little bastion before it attracts mainstream attention. :)
Welcome!
The fediverse situation has been improved a lot since the first API migration, hope you enjoy it here!
Same bromo, finally felt like it was time. So many good memories on Reddit for me over the last 14 years but finally felt like it was the right move to no longer give it my attention!
thére are dozens of us
Do it, please, the subreddits need to migrate here
well, not all of them.
I can think of a handful I would much rather see thrown into a furnace.
I wanna talk nerd shit about Sonic, Yugioh, and Sims again
I’m not on Reddit much these days but every time I am and I see threads with people discussing these Reddit policy changes Lemmy gets mentioned. Usually with people complaining they already tried or couldn’t figure it out or that it isn’t good enough…
I think as the enshittification marches on they’ll be some more exodus from Reddit but generally I think everyone is just getting used to all online social media being a total corporate disaster.
I just joined yesterday because of this article. Honestly I feel like I’m using Apollo to access Reddit again. My Reddit account was 12 years old and I deleted it.
Welcome friend. :)
Thank you!
Welcome
We’re happy to have you here
It’s not that everyone’s getting used to the current hellscape of the internet. Kids born today have never experienced a world without it. I watched my niece playing on my dad’s phone, and she was just blasting through every single ad, interacting with every ad until it took her to the install page, and then she moved on to the next ad. People were upset about the tiktok ban cause they didnt care about their data. Shit like that is wild to me, coming from the early internet era.
Unless countries step up with better tech laws, I only see it getting worse from here.
the internet was better when it was anonymous, where you were explicitly and forcefully told that no one should know anything about you but your handle.
Lemmy was hard to use a year ago or so.
No it wasnt.
I’m not particularly tech savvy and I found it confusing and hard to parse at first. It was worth it to figure out, because fuck Reddit, but I can understand people struggling with it, especially at first.
Honestly, I was just giving up going here, lemmy is very complicated, also I miss my beautiful snoo :(
More ads? There’s already a bunch of them mixed with posts and comments. What more, force people to watch an ad before loading pages?
There are ads in comments now?
Yep, ads masquerading as comments. It’s awful. I’m so glad I moved to Lemmy.
Yeah, people like me and I assume you, who used to browse reddit via a third party app or with RES + an adblocker on pc did not see it but it’s a bit insane how much ads there’s already on reddit right now. I migrated to GNU and firefox last week and forgot to add the extensions as I was just looking for some information in the Endeavour subreddit and I was shocked at the state of “default” reddit… I’m glad I left and I hope most of the userbase will…
Yea ads have been in comments for at least a year now
They snuck them in during some AB testing like 5 years ago, they didn’t stick though obv
Just came to lemmy again after learning this shit!! mass exodus coming soon
I wouldn’t be too sure just yet, seeing how annoying youtube and it’s ads have gotten yet it isn’t replaced still.
We might have an increase, but plenty will never leave.
YouTube hasn’t been replaced because adblockers still work.
Youtube is probably the most difficult platform on the internet to replace. Video content delivery is extremely resource heavy and technically complicated, especially once you start to scale. Many, many competitors have attempted it over the years, and while some found their niche, none of them have achieved anywhere close to the scale of Youtube.
It took decades of Youtube to become profitable, only doing so after achieving mind-boggling economy of scale. The majority of humans on earth have used Youtube. About half of all (global) internet users use it monthly. I don’t know if any other platform can claim stats like that.
Youtube is one of those platforms that only exists because it got a head start in the unique conditions of the early internet. I don’t know if it’s even possible to create a true competitor, though I could see multiple platforms taking over different niches.
This is what people always seen to ignore about YouTube. It’s not just another database frontend to use generated content. That is definitely part of it, but behind that is probably the largest public facing content library on the Internet with a full video recoding infrastructure attached. YouTube is the platform for which I understand that they need to monetize.
Sure, nowadays there’s also tiktok as another big video service. But I like to think that YouTube is way bigger in most metrics.
same here lol. If they paywall subreddits ive been visiting for the past FOURTEEN years, i will lose my shit. by throwing it at the reddit headquarters.
Looks like I dropped Reddit at just the right time.
If you don’t mind me asking, how did you find it?
There are reports of Reddit banning Lemmy mentions, and Google searches floating “Lemmy is bad” Reddit threads to the top.
I googled Reddit alternatives. I see Reddit as turning into just the next Twitter cesspool. There’s no longer any constructive conversation.
The problem is you can’t have real conversations that stoke any flames because they’re a public company and answer to the shareholders, so they, reddit, deem what is appropriate to be posted.
I came over to Lemmy during the Great API third party disaster. The exodus had commenters saying to come over to Lemmy.
It was word of mouth for me. But now you’ve got me curious about occurrences of the term Lemmy on Reddit.
i hope there is a mass migration here
The more they do shit like this the more they will
I mean, honestly Reddit is a dead site walking. At this point is not if it will “die” but how fast and I guess more importantly where will its users go. Hopefully here but who knows
Another day of thanking my past self for leaving
Digg: “join us reddit…”
We all float down here 💩💩💩
I haven’t had an account since the Apollo purge but fuck Spez.
The api shit they pulled is why i left and never went back
Same. I left when it was announced.
Fuck Spez
watch them lock old reddit behind a paywall just because it’s the best part about reddit
Can’t wait to see the mental gymnastics subreddit moderators will perform to defend this!
It was wild how spineless most of them were when the API stuff happened, and it showed how attached they are to their little bubble of power.
And some of them acted even more pathetic with virtue signaling.
Like the r/de mods allowed memes for a full week in “protest”. Such rebels… they sure showed spez with that one…
I was proud of them for those subreddit blackouts, but when communities started to come back online after the mods were threatened with replacement - I knew I had to get out of there for good.
I managed to stave off the threats until a couple of months ago since someone put a reddit request in. Oh well, fuck spez and reddit.
You have my respect. I’m guessing all the mods with a tad of integrity left during this time, leaving their subreddits closed
Over half of us in r/Android left and while a few of headed over here and made our very own instance, some stopped on and, I paraphrase
I’m not seeing some shitheel coming and doing spezs deeds, and I’ll just mass approve/remove shite
Brave fucker that mod.
Is there anywhere I can find a complete scrape of Reddit threads and comments from before the 3rd party app apocalypse? There was a lot of useful info shared on there, but I don’t want anything to do with what that site has become. I’m happy just to CTRL+F a big dataset. It’ll probably still work better than either Reddit or Google does nowadays. Without media I imagine I could fit it somewhere.
Also, Spez is a greedy little pig boy.
Yes, there’s a torrent somewhere…
https://academictorrents.com/details/c398a571976c78d346c325bd75c47b82edf6124e
This is what I could find with a quick search, but I know there’s a larger database backup.
We really need efforts made to bulk upload historical posts of value to lemmy. If done right, we could significantly expand the amount of subs and content, even if they are ghost towns initially with just the old posts from reddit. Build it and they will migrate.
are you going to use it to train your deepseek?
I never understood the desire to search in conversational language via AI. It’s gone to far for my taste. I just want to be able to scour a huge volume of info for my exact search terms, maybe with a few synonyms or misspellings included. Google and AI keep trying to assume they know what I’m looking for, but they’re always wrong (intentionally wrong based on their own motives).
The reason the dataset interests me is that search has gotten so bad that I can’t get any non-corporate information from search engines anymore, just more pig swill, chumbucket ads, and misinformation slop. Anything I search for would probably give better results if I just searched old reddit, Wikipedia, and a few other datasets locally in a simple way. Not sure what software is best to use for something like that, but I’d like to collect a few mostly pre-AI datasets now to get the ball rolling before you can’t find those online anymore either.
Not everyone is perverted like you.
