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Reddit CEO Steve Huffman discusses how he wants every subreddit to be its own media company and he wants to see money being exchanged from users to users and users to subreddits
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- Title
- Are we allowed to discuss what Spez brought up in the CEO AMA on the Mod Summit yesterday?
- Authors
- born_lever_puller
Thats an ...interesting vision for the site. I can see some interesting aspects - like people contributing/donating to mods on a well-moderated sub, or experts writing up an in-depth explanation (from stuff like /r/AskHistorians all the way to what is essentially a guide in a small video game sub) - basically gilding a post, but you're giving cash or a visa card or something and reddit takes their cut. There are some interesting things that could come about, like users donating for a sub to get a custom bot or professional CSS. Or perhaps having custom swag like stickers or tshirts (though we have custom print shops all over the place...if you want a shirt that says "/r/myfavoritesub", then you can just get it printed...so...eh?).
However...I see so many downsides. Reddit's original userbase is from a more free internet from 10+ years ago. They run adblockers and don't like corporate influence. This is very much not in line with that. I know the redesign and general move to mobile has worked well for the newer generations, but I'm not sure what reddit would look like if you alienate the remaining old school users.
Not to mention the many problems with conflicts of interest. We've seen problems with "powermods" taking over many subs and then doing silly things with them. Imagine the conflicts we would have if being a mod was monitized - we'd have users attempting to become mods of any mildly successful sub and subterfuge to take over the sub and gain all the money. The powermods who unevenly enforce rules and basically rule their sub with an iron fist will have monetary incentive to continue doing stuff. Then you get into subs with conflicts of interest...imagine if an owner of a dispensary was a mod of /r/trees...now they have a vested interest in promoting their own posts and removing post on the competition. That probably not a good example, but something similar could definitely happen in smaller subreddits. And what about subs that are about a specific video game or a piece of software or something? How will it work if the mods of /r/overwatch are getting paid based on what is essentially Blizzard content? It will especially be a problem with NSFW subs, where many subs are already basically an advertisement for the mods who happen to be promoting their OnlyFans accounts.
How will copyright and ownership work, as reddit is mostly a link aggregation site? Its one thing if a well-written comment gets gilded for money, but what happens to someone who simply posts a link? Does that person get paid for posting the BotW2 trailer to /r/zelda? If someone finds a cool piece of fanart and posts it in /r/zelda, then they might be profiting instead of the artist? If the artist posts their work, then that has some cool potential...but theres a lot of room for abuse and fraud there.
Reddit is already definitely astroturfed with bots and "subtle" marketing...I can only imagine how bad it would get if there were possible monetary incentives. Same thing with repost bots - we already have people reposting things word-for-word to farm meaningless karma...but if you could make money with it?
Ultimately this is just a vision of a possible future from an interview...and I can see what they want. Take a look at TF2 and how they enabled map creators and model designers to contribute content and get compensated for it. That is a rather cool concept.
...but oh boy are there devils in the details. I can see something like gilding comments with actual money or having a button to donate to the sub's mod(s). Its still got avenues for abuse, but at least its fairly limited and straightforward. The grand vision they describe has so many potential pitfalls...I don't think it would be good for reddit.
What's happened to Reddit's original userbase? Clearly some of us are here on Tildes, but have we just gotten drowned out by the deluge of new users? Is there some other site people have migrated to that I just missed?
Drowned out, aged out, migrated to a variety of other places? I'm still on reddit daily, but I'm in my little niche subreddits and don't pay attention to the larger ones, or the ones that involve controversy (If I want drama I'll watch a TV show). It seems like a long-term version of Eternal September.
There were a lot of discussions about this on r/theoryofreddit when I would browse that sub over a year ago.
This post and specifically the comments contains some discussion about that and what it means to be a “classic Redditor.”
I guess I'll continue with my various niches then. It works, but it definitely seems like once a subreddit hits 100k subscribers or so, things go downhill.
It also goes downhill when you notice there is no real conversation and astroturfing takes over. I also still subscribed to niche subreddits but migrated to other communities on Discord, Twitter and forums.
My opinion, which I have done no research to back up, is that many of the older users have either aged out or shifted away from the big popular subs in favor of the smaller niche subs. There are certainly a set of diehard power users that still use old.reddit.com and RES and whatnot...but we are far outnumbered by mobile users. Whether that is because folks have shifted to mobile, or newer generations tend to use mobile (or almost certainly some of both), it definitely feels like there are two reddits. The front page and /r/popular and /r/all tend to be high engagement and low value posts - mostly memes and various headlines phrased for outrage. The comments tend to be very much in the "hive mind", with recycled memes and comments and takes-from-people-who-haven't-read-the-article. And then on the other side you have folks who have curated their higher quality subs that either have strict moderation and/or are small enough to maintain a unique identity. There you tend to have more insightful conversations and meaningful interactions in the comments.
So I guess I don't really know where the original redditors are. Some are probably on other sites like here and hackernews, some probably left with no replacement, some likely embraced what reddit is today - but theres definitely a small crew that is still there with their small slice of curated subs. Its hard to leave the communities that you've known for years...but every new change from the redesign to NFTs has likely aliented more and more.
I'm definitely dreading the day that RES and old.reddit stop working. The writing is on the wall with RES no longer being actively developed and it seems like the admins have been trying to move towards getting rid of old.reddit ever since the redesign.
I'm curious because I'm in the same boat as you with old.reddit but I find Apollo is a decent mobile app that I could see I would use even when old.reddit dies. The desktop experience will be gone though.
I used to use Apollo, but spending that much time on my phone was giving me RSI issues, so I ended up stopping.
I think it's worth noting that the people who made up 'original reddit' are all a decade or more older. That means they don't have time for social media because school/college is over and it's work/marriage/family time for them now. It makes me wonder if anyone has ever done research into posting behaviors and frequency based on age and occupation over longer time periods, to see if and when people switch from spending so much time online back to the real world.
Discord has really strong communities as well, and Telegram catching up.
I really don't understand how to use Discord. Which is to say, I use Discord quite a bit but I'm always frustrated because it feels like a firehose of parallel chat rooms and a neverending whack-a-mole game of unread badges. There's no way I can keep up with the flow of conversation in there or feel connected to anyone else. Whenever I say something I feel like I'm either shouting into the void, or asking some dumb noob question everyone has already hashed and rehashed a thousand times.
I'm sure I'm doing it wrong, but I'm not sure what "right" is supposed to look like.
I've had good luck with groups of 10 or fewer people, but that's much more a groupchat with channels than it is a traditional community.
You just go with the flow. You’re right in that in big discords, it’s impossible to keep up with every message, but you shouldn’t. Pick some channels that are likely to have conversations you’re interested in, check in on them occasionally, if the topic at hand is something you can talk about then pop in, when you don’t want to, you just fade out.
Also, inevitably Discords have regulars that make up the plurality if not majority of conversation, and you’ll learn who they are in time.
This was even more the case with IRC back in the day - there was no chat history at all, so you really had to jump in blind.
I agree some messages are hard to keep track in the conversation, you get used to it but the time you get there is longer than traditional static conversation. I believe new generations start with this type of communication as TikTok or Twitter, and Discord is taking that market cap little by little to traditional social media as Reddit. Feature wise Discord is more stacked with features managing communities than the simplicity of Reddit.
I think I'm at the 10 years mark. I will stop using Reddit the day old.reddit is no longer viable. Until then, I'm mostly fine.
I'm continually amazed at their ability to top previous bad ideas with even more hilariously bad ideas. This might make them a bit of money, but it also means money will determine the content more than ever before and utterly subvert every aspect of every community. I'll pass, thanks.
One could argue that the slow descent into monetisation was inevitable — investor pressure, tantalising user numbers, and a 'tech bro' CEO... it is a shame.
Yeah. Those communities deserve a better website.
I mean independent of anything else a company fundamentally needs to at least break even to continue existing as an entity. You can only get so much outside financing.
Reddit does not make money. It must at least make $0 every year instead of -$100m to continue existing in the long term.
Reddit has way more people on staff than it needs to run the site. They're all off working on worthless junk like NFTs.
I bet if they stripped their business down to just maintaining and improving the core experience, they could turn profitable fairly quickly.
The problem is they don't just want to be profitable, they want to be hugely profitable, and they're spending lots of money flinging shit at the wall to see what sticks
They should cut marketing, I believe that's still the majority of their payroll. Dropping even a quarter of it would save them mountains of money.
Honestly it reads to me like a straight up transposition onto reddit of the monetization model that has been envisioned for the various competing alternatives for the "Metaverse" by Zuckerberg and his ilk.
At least he was truthful in this part of his response.
Reddit should just copy patreon and double down on porn, effectively taking out onlyfans and taking a huge bite out of patreon itself. IPO be damned!
If reddit offers a way to sell shirts, stickers, pins, etc -- I'd be willing to sell them through the site... even if I, the only mod of a 400k sub, don't turn a dime. But if they did do a redbubble model via printful or another tshirt printing business, that could be great.
Ultimately, reddit covers a lot of territory and has a lot of potential. They've dipped into NFTs, but that isn't very forward thinking. It'll be interesting to see where this all goes.
One mod for 400k? That seems... not great? Is the sub actually active or are these dead subscriptions? I've got 5 for ~160k and still need a pretty active automod to get the job done. Even our group tends to be pretty hands off. I can't imagine how hands off one has to be.
automod does most of the work. Its just /r/pizza. I wouldn't mind having other mods, but so far nobody else does any work or they're too aggressive / take it too seriously.
Man...I've been on reddit for 13 years and never been to /r/pizza. One of things that made me fall in love with reddit was these subreddits that just sprung up around more or less random subjects and created great communities. What makes this a great subreddit? Besides looking at and talking about pizza of course.
if you want to learn how to make pizza, its a great sub. If you want to just look at food porn, there's a lot of that.
Its a lot like /r/breadit, /r/icecreamery, and other food subs.
I love these subreddits but they are dangerous for me. I must look but not touch.
Easily one of my favorite subreddits. 🍕
<3 <3 I love it, too. At least from what I see (outside of removals), everybody is super nice.
Rocking like 19 on our sub of 250k, but it's extremely busy and realistically probably only 11-12 super active mods.
I mod a 600k r/ask subreddit. We have ~5 active moderators. None are 'power users' and the average number of mod actions is about 10 per day. AutoModerator does the lion's share of the work for us.
Different subs require different levels of effort. I mod (under separate accounts for each NSFW sub) a 1.4M (largely)hetero NSFW subreddit, a 200k lgbt+ NSFW subreddit, and a few smaller SFW specific topic subreddits. I only recently added a mod for the 1.4M sub as I'm working my way out of reddit entirely and I'm less attached to that sub, but until the new mod was added 4 months ago I was the only mod. I'm the only mod for all the other subs.
The NSFW subs are easy. Trolls, spammers, etc. aren't creative and through about a dozen automod rules, 99% of them are caught. The ones that manage to circumvent the rules are typically stolen accounts (older accounts that suddenly have no history and start posting spam porn) or otherwise can't be caught via a filter. Mod actions will typically only ramp up when a new site pops up (Fansly arriving after OnlyFans for example).
The topic specific subs have fewer trolls or spam, but heated fan disagreements can turn into insults from time to time which isn't really controllable with automod. So they require greater attention.
The modmail in the NSFW subs is much more entertaining. The SFW subs are usually appeals and apologies for getting a ban as they like the community and don't want to be pushed out of it. The NSFW sub modmail is full of people complaining about me banning them for breaking the rules, hurling insults because I banned them for breaking the rules, accusing me of whatever made up slight they have that week for banning them for breaking the rules, or pleading/insulting because banning them is hurting their income stream like it's my fault they broke the rules and can't try to sell their wares in the sub.
I used to be a mod in /r/trees (among many other subs large and small over the years). It was hell. Stoners all think they're funny, don't bother to read the rules, and automod can't catch most of them because they all have their own approach to share whatever rule-breaking content they think the world needs to see at that very moment. They also all think the response to being told "no" is "be cool man."
That makes me feel a little better. I only counted active for my 5 mods. The actual list is a bit longer, but I likely won't remove any of them anytime soon having done a cleanup not too long ago. I'm #1 so I mostly just make those decisions and let the others do the actual work these days.
I like the idea of a site like Reddit making money from subreddits selling swag more than I like it depending on ad money. Assuming subreddits are in charge of their own commercialization strategies, I'm sure some subreddits will try some obnoxious commercialization strategies, but I'm not particularly attached to any specific subreddits, so if I have to switch a subreddit or two I follow to a less-obnoxious alternative that inevitably pops up, then I think that's a small price to pay to let some possibly-useful funding experimentation happen.
I use Twitch and Patreon subscriptions to pay a little to a few streamers, some random software projects, and this site itself. I like the way this model encourages projects that are supported by their dedicated fans; it pushes the projects to be more aligned with their dedicated fans, as opposed to the user-hostile behavior that ad-funding models do. I wonder if something like a "Patreon subscription for a subreddit" can work out as well at keeping a project sustainable, though I'm not sure of what the specifics should look like and I expect there's certain versions of it that will happen that won't work out well.
In principle yeah absolutely, but in practice lol no. Not at Reddit. For them, it's not either-or. It's both, and the reason is Reddit's taken on over a billion in debt as of their Series F last year. They don't even have the freedom to choose a monetization strategy other than "all of them" and designed in such a way that profits must continually increase year over year. With Meta's properties hemorrhaging users and ad views, I can only imagine how hard of a push Reddit is making to capture those eyeballs. They won't be reducing reliance on advertising anytime soon. Just hedging that strategy with a basket of other, much much smaller, revenue generators.
Putting Reddit aside, I could see that new sites taking ideas like the user subscription model will succeed in segments where Reddit cannot. As long as the new players don't make the folly of massive disproportionate funding, they can be freer to align themselves with their userbases, instead of profit extraction models requiring KPIs like a maximum percentage of users to piss off before putting on the brakes.
It seems like the core of the issue is some people, mostly moderators are putting in a ton of effort and not getting much value back. The answer to this IMO is that reddit should pay moderators if they meet certain basic criteria. Paying for that is a somewhat separate issue but seems doable with reddit gold.
But that isn't going to happen. The obvious thing is that they don't want to do anything truly interesting. They just want to copy etsy, patreon, etc. but built into their own platform so they can skim some off the top. It's just more centralization of services that everybody is doing. But you can't do everything well so they'll implement anti-competitive policies and features to force users toward their crappy implementation.
Something sort of like this exists: Substack. Each Substack is a different business with its own subscription revenue (if any) and Substack takes a small cut. In theory, a Substack could have an active enough community that the author could just post open threads. In practice I don’t think that’s ever happened, though.
I can see wanting Reddit to be more like Substack, but I don’t see any way that Reddit can do that? The community dynamics are entirely different.
If mods just get a flat sum, it’s tremendously unfair to the better ones. Quantitatively measuring their work seems even worse since it just opens the door to all kinds of abuse. Basically encouraging clickbait on a mod level.
The issue I see is that it would discourage mods from bringing in new people, even when they need the help. Better to let the subreddit suffer than split their earnings.