Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has hinted that in future some subreddits could be paywalled, as the company seeks to devise new sources of income.
He suggested that the company might experiment with paywalled subreddits as it looks to monetize new features. “I think the existing, altruistic, free version of Reddit will continue to exist and grow and thrive just the way it has,” Huffman said. “But now we will unlock the door for new use cases, new types of subreddits that can be built that may have exclusive content or private areas, things of that nature.”
This is another move likely to anger Redditors. While the platform is a commercial enterprise, its value derives almost entirely from freely offered user content. That means Redditors feel at least some sense of ownership in a community endeavour, so the company needs to tread carefully when it comes to monetization at user expense.
The best thing is how many different servers people are from here. No single gatekeeper who can wreck it.
I’m honestly a bit worried because I’ve noticed that most users are from lemmy.world, and the whole point of Lemmy should be decentralisation.
Yes this is the biggest flaw of Lemmy. It happens because if you go to /c/books, the default view is not an alglomeration of all /c/books on all federated servers.
There are many bullshit reason why this has been refused. Some people try to push for a useless multi-reddit-like solution instead.
But there are fatal consequence for Lemmy not doing this. Largely it concentrates all the power into the hands of the “one big community” (inevitable under current conditions) in the one big instance.
The decentralization promise of Lemmy has been effectively defused by the Lemmy elite from the get go.
Honestly it shouldn’t be either. Moderation requirements are too different and the direction and culture can be way too different.
Multi-subs is better when you have this big differences between subs and between servers and no guarantee that the same name means same content. And what mod/admin gets to take down what and where? Do all the server admins have to get involved to block spam threads submitted to other servers? How do you even know what others can see from the comment threads as a reader in a thread, when propagation and filters can be so different?
What we need is better multi-subs instead. Like having the ability for mods to publish officially approved multisubs, and for coordinating mod actions (like pushing removal suggestions, as a dedicated report moderation queue from trusted mod teams that’s separate from normal reports).
The most complicated part here is deduplication of threads. That’s easiest to deal with by detecting crossposts and showing them as a single view with comments from all crossposts across all participating subs.
I disagree on all points. Moderation is irrelevant to an agglomerated view and without a DEFAULT view of the entire Lemmyverse, it will just centralize around the “one big community”, it is already happening. “Multireddit” feature is useless against this. If full agglomeration view is not the default view of /c/books then it will never make sense to post anywhere but “the one big community”. This kills decentralization and dooms Lemmy to be just teddit with extra steps.
It is probably already too late for lemmy, the entrenched Lemmy elites would probably block this from becoming the default even if the codebase supported it.
I think the real trick should be having big communities in many different instances.
It’s okay to have a big community on one instance, it’s like having a forum hosted at one server. The problem arises when most big communities are on the same big server.
That already happens in the global popular feed though, I already see multiple variations of the same subs across different servers without subscribing.
Any shared agglomorated view based just on name needs to allow subs to opt out (I run /r/crypto on reddit, and it’s for CRYPTOGRAPHY and I wished all the spammers would go and set themselves on fire) and you absolutely can not force it onto everybody.
You’re also stuck with the same problem of less popular subs not getting many views because their content ends up last, because they don’t have as big dedicated userbases, and because this just doesn’t give them any increased visibility at all.
You also get an even worse problem of malicious servers faking high popularity to dominate (like when /r/T_D manipulated reddit) if you do it the naive way, every admin needs to filter bad servers. And new users won’t know the best place to post to (usually the place with the most reliable mods). In fact they won’t even understand why they’re asked to choose, so they’ll prefer what’s listed at the top, probably their own server, and thus the .world server keeps dominating.
You also can’t do thread deduplication without cooperating mods, so you get intense clutter. You also break apart sub specific culture if they get flooded by strangers.
The only way you can even get close to a sane implementation with your take is by putting a banner at the top of every thread in that view with the host sub description and the rules and forcing everybody to agree before interacting. Otherwise off topic content gets upvoted when it shouldn’t, sub specific events gets ruined immediately, and people will get pissed when they get moderated under rules they should’ve read but didn’t.
A hybrid view controlled mutually by mods allow you to advertise the different subs by highlighting their differences.