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.
I don’t believe there are any real technical hurdle to overcome, except overcoming the current system inertia (which might already be too late and easier to start over)
The thing is that, if posting in say
https://lemmy.ca/c/books
instead of
https://lemmy.ml/c/books
Is the difference between 10k people seeing it and 1 person seeing it.
Then people are going to choose the bigger reach community. And it will in turn grow bigger, attain critical mass and become the only /c/book that most people ever go to.
This is catastrophic for decentralization. The more concentrated the attention becomes in that place the less it will make sense to post anywhere else.
Then the small clique of mods at https://lemmy.ml/c/books become entrenched and all they need to do is manage public opinion to keep their place as the shaper of all book discussion on all of lemmy basically for as long as they want.