So the same MO as always. To take a stranglehold of the internet. "Creators" or "influencers" or whatever buzzword will be all over this as it's an opportunity to monetize. I'm sure reddit corporate will be taking their piece of rent seeking of course.

The bigger implication that everyone always ignores is that this is going to lock users into the walled garden. Up to now posters have been driving people off site. The comic artists are a good example. They post their comics as image posts. They direct people off site to access more content. They will no doubt jump on the chance to have a paid subreddit. This is an attempt to kill off whatever sites the artist use. If they had some other service providing monetization then that company is probably panicking a little right now.

Good. At this point reddit is just a weak sauce place for bots/marketers to post where other bots/marketers scrape them. It's rumored that 10% of their revenue is from content deals with Google. At this point, most of the interesting communities on reddit have gone elsewhere and it's long ago jumped the shark.

It's clear that the corporate goons in charge are busy just trying to squeeze any remaining nickles out of the userbase. At this rate it won't be long before a private equity firm buys reddit and you start seeing articles "Reddit: what happened?"

Too bad, it was a site that used to be so good and was sold out 5 ways to Monday and the corporate overlords have fucked it again. At least lemmy is around... it doesn't have the scale of reddit but it's way better in a lot of ways already.

Reddit has been shit since 2014, some would argue since its inception. It never properly replaced serious forums that specialized on their own niche, like PC hardware, gossip, cars, or whatever. The subreddit replacements always felt like lower quality EVEN THOUGH Reddit mods are (in general) more trigger happy than those running proper forums. The astroturfing, the deception, the lack of respect for its users, the UX dark patterns, it has all been getting worse and worse. Some haven't gotten the memo yet, that Reddit serves no one but itself, it's a cancer.

Forever growing profits and money to grow the IPO this is the logical choice. I saw this comming. I left reddit a few months ago. Never been happier.

The bonfire is about to be lit.

Curious to see the comments about it on Reddit

Edit:

• https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1ipfaz0/with_reddit_announcing_paywalled_subreddits_this/
• !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Well, that’s the death of the free* forum. Went from BBS to newsgroups to phpBB to Reddit, each soft-killing its predecessor. But like WalMart killing Main Street, Reddit is going to kill the free forum.

Thank goodness for Lemmy and other free* social network software.

*free with the asterisk because we know it’s not free, we are enjoying the service that others volunteer to pay for.

I don't think that is a good idea.

This will be good. They will eventually drive everyone away!

Just. Fukken. Lol

CEO, tell me you don't know what you're doing without saying you don't know what you are doing.

It'll be the porn they charge for.

They know only wankers will give them money.

I forget the word for this, outpoopification? Insufficification? It escapes me.

I hate reddit as much as the next guy but from time to time I find myself searching in subreddit like newborns, New parents etc. These subreddits do have a lot of experience shared from the past which has not yet come over to lemmy. And now reddit is pulling this subscription shenanigans I'm like WTF??