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One surviving Reddit app plans to charge based on how much you use it
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Technology
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Excellent points. That being said, Reddit will never pay contributors. They have never had interest in quality of the content on the platform, only it's engagement rate - the years of publishing subs like jailbait and The_Donald speak to that. Engagement, now that they've got a critical mass of users and 20 years worth of content, can be maintained with bots, sockpuppet accounts, and reposts (all of which have become the course du jour for the front page and /r/all since the API revolt began)... at least until they go IPO, after which it's not their problem anymore.
The biggest problem with online publishing is that without that critical mass of readership, it's very difficult to become profitable enough to pay your contributors. Reddit's never gotten to this point, even with millions of users. It's my hope that with contributors moving off of Reddit, we'll see new publishing models appear that utilize some of the excellent ideas you've outlined above. I particularly like the suggestion of using Monero as a currency to ensure anonymity.
Tying voting to currency is an interesting idea, but I think that voting should be free, as my experience running forums is that only about 10% of your viewers will care enough to vote, and maybe 10% of those choose to post actual content. Putting a paywall in front of voting will kill engagement. However, limiting the number of free votes an account gets per day, then allowing people to buy more votes with currency, and earn currency for posting content could work very well if run correctly. The trick is balancing the actual profit you make off of the contribution with the need to pay your contributors, and here it becomes a question of determining the proper margins and payouts.
The other problem is that the only real revenue source outside of the users of the site is going to be Google Adwords or a similar platform (unless you go for ancillary streams of revenue, like attaching an e-commerce store to the site). If you charge for access to the content, you're killing your engagement. I haven't used Adwords for awhile now, but when I did the payouts were absolutely abysmal (like less than a penny per click). They were so bad that it wasn't even worth dedicating the visual real estate to put up the ads.
Ultimately, this is the same challenge traditional publishing has had for a long time. It's generally unprofitable unless you have a runaway hit or ancillary streams of revenue (like syndication deals with other media types) - most of the actual content almost never makes money, which is why so much of our traditional media is paid for by advertising and subsequently controlled by corporate interests.
I'm wasn't averse to paying but the problem I have is without ownership of content and anonymity/privacy as well as abillity to use my app of choice (which they're already letting mods do anyway), none of which Reddit wants to address.
It wants to own your content, make it so you accidentally click/tap on ads more than the actual content, and they likely want to sell all your clicks/taps/etc (== engagement) to ad companies) while claiming all the benefits and none of the liabillities for doing so.
Kagi is proving that people will pay for things that were traditionally "free" (search) provided they have privacy respected and that a profile isn't being built to be used against them in the economic/legal sense. Reddit wants you to act like a Wikipedian but make money off it. Its completely one-sided and they've really gone out of their way to make the community of communities resent the fuck out of them.
They refused to bargain with Christian of Apollo in good faith and would have gotten away with it had it not been for his scrupulousness is documenting their interactions.
Sorry, the worst thing Reddit could have done to roll out changes was what we all watched unfold, and I want no part of any kind of business/community like that
This is like Victoria all over again * 1,000,000 Btw, does anyone know WHY or what the story was with Victoria the IAMA facillitator?
I totally hear you there and agree with you re: the business choices Spez made. Reddit lost a 20 year contributor when I walked away, and even if they rolled back all the changes, I won't be returning.
I was more looking at applying your suggestions to a fresh publishing model, as your ideas intrigued me (having run a publishing forum in the days of the early internet). I want to have a space on the internet where content creators can keep ownership of their content and get adequately paid for publishing - I think properly run, it could become a vital hub for our cultural legacy (as Reddit was, albeit clumsily and destructively). The incoming revenue is the biggest challenge, which is why I focused on that element.
Some users will pay if you have a paywall, but only if you already have a substantial amount of content they want to access. This works for a search engine crawling pre-existing content, but not so well for a forum style site like Reddit, where most of the content creation is driven by engagement with other content. If you reduce the engagement rate (aka through a paywall), you're actually reducing your incoming content in the long run (something we're seeing on Reddit after the blackout).
I don't know what the ultimate solution here is, but I really do like your payout concept with Monero. If I did build another publishing attempt, it's something I'd try to implement if I could get the incoming revenue to support it.
They're dreaming if they think any Redditor is going to want to transparently tie their IRL identity to their content.
Like MLK said but shoehorned into the current context: People want interact and be judged based on the quality of their content, rather than the knowledge of their character/identity which Reddit will absolutely fucking sell to the lowest bidder and infinitesimally so.
Bonus points: you know the moment they get a request from law enforcement, thats all becomes public knowledge and it takes far less than the entirety of most Redditors ourvre to convict them of any number of real or thought crimes.
Not exactly fertile knowledge-sharing grounds.
Agreed again. If I wanted folks IRL to know what I post, I'd be on Facebook. Reddit's value to posters was its anonymity. Without it, there's no reason to use it over its centralized competitors in the social media space.
I think you missed the mark a little bit on what voting is on a forum like this or reddit. Voting is crowd sourced content curation/moderation. Like content creation it brings value to a site, limiting it or making users pay for it seems counter to achieving a well curated community.