[ad404b8a372f2b9]

Go to any popular subreddit and click the "gilded" tab at the top. At the top of this page it tells you how many months of server time "gold"s purchased in the subreddit paid for, you will be shocked.

I've seen subreddits with less than 50000 subscribers who had enough purchases to cover 3 years of server cost. /r/aww alone paid for 772 years of server time according to their calculations.

Reddit could go on indefinitely as is with no advertising.

[colinmhayes]

> Reddit could go on indefinitely as is with no advertising.

I don't think the goal of tech companies is to just "go on indefinitely." Their investors need them to make billions of dollars.

[ad404b8a372f2b9]

Well of course, I was only responding to the point about whether the website made any money without advertising.

Given that the technology is solved, and the financing is solved, I wish there were a way to build such a website with such a community without the cycle always ending in its destruction for the sake of profit.

[purerandomness]

They did, once, and called it IRC. It's still good.

[renonce]

Even freenode is no longer good. At least it had to be renamed libera chat.

[spoils19]

I'd be careful with that - it's widely known that Reddit admins use "fake" gold to artificially bring content that they want to the frontpage.

[josephcsible]

To be clear, it costs real money for regular people to give Reddit gold, but Reddit admins can do it for free. So it's a very strong signal from everyone but them, but just as meaningless as an upvote from them.

[ad404b8a372f2b9]

Good to keep in mind for the large subreddits and to put a grain on salt on those approximations, but even the subreddits hated by the admins show years-worth of purchases, it's also not likely to be prevalent in those like /r/aww where it's exclusively pictures of pets.