Is the ad business so bad these days that they can't effectively monetize this? It seems like they're flailing around in desperation instead of leveraging their core advantages.
The sycophants at the top have cashed out, and the corpse is just still falling towards the ground.
But the actual suggestion seems to be more along the lines of a competitor to patreon-linked discords, where patrons get access to a specific community, which is fine? As long as Reddit doesn't ban other subreddits discussing the same topics as the paid subreddits, they can be safely ignored if it's not your thing.
1. You can make private subs for free and manage your own ways to get approved users in. How many would want to go through a middleman for that? Or is that next on the chopping block of enshittification?
2. Reddit is a much slower medium than discord. The appeal in discord chats is having (ideally) quick communication with a creator you support. Reddit also doesn't self-host except for media so it'd be hard to copy Patreon and use it to host paid rewards.
3. Reddit's whole scheme only works at scale. Have you seen how slow traffic can be for <1000 sub subreddits? You're paying more to ultimately get a worse experience unless you are lucky enough to have some hyperengaged posters.
4. as you mentioned, people can and will just up and make their own free space to post on if something goes paid. And due to #2 the free space may end up better than the paid one without a lot of careful tailoring by the creator.
On a completely different tangent:
>Huffman raised the prospect during an earnings call in which he said Reddit would also be testing AI-powered search results later this year …
You can't put lipstick on a pig. That base search indexing is abyssmal. Even to the point where I can search exact titles and not find posts that Google would find with a tiny bit of prodding (either adding site:reddit.com and/or adjusting date ranges). I sure wouldn't bother using a generalized search engine, if that's the idea.
