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.
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.