[TheOtherHobbes]

Reddit could just charge its users $5 a month, offer a $10 a month tier for some extra features and co-offers, and keep the API free.

It's a spectacularly stupid move, almost on a par with Musk >50% of Twitter's value and Waves trying to force their customers onto a subscription model by making old versions obsolete.

Reddit will lose a huge number of users, its brand will be trashed, and the app companies will be forced out of business.

There is no way this can't end up as a net loss.

[that_guy_iain]

This doesn't make sense. Make me, a user of their app and website who sees ads and other stuff pay money so that the API users can avoid them?

Reddit will lose a bunch of deadbeat users, who generate little to no income for the company but cost money to serve. In business, these are the sort of people you don't want.

Who do you think will spend hundreds of millions a year to replace Reddit so that deadbeat users can use it? There would be no money in serving those users and any attempt to serve them and monetize later will result in the same thing that is happening at Reddit. The days of VCs burning money for social networks seems to be over.

[zipperhead]

It's not so simple These "deadbeat users" are the ones generating the content.

[linker3000]

And some of the deadbeats are us moderators who invest our time voluntarily to keep the subs tidy, handle the mod queues and answer questions etc. I dive into queue management using the Boost app on my phone durimg breaks away from my corporate laptop, which I won't use for such personal stuff. The official Reddit app is not as good as Boost for moderation.

[that_guy_iain]

Do they? Most content is reposts, news, or content from other sites.

I would suspect Reddit has done the maths. And saw that most content generators use their app or the website to post.

[garbagecoder]

I'm going to say [citation needed] on the assumption Reddit is capable of doing math. They have almost never made a good decision.

[that_guy_iain]

Haven’t made good decisions yet literally one of the biggest sites on the internet. Those two things are mutually exclusive.

[garbagecoder]

That's not correct. It's entirely possible they got their on accident. There are engineers in this thread who would know claiming they don't have a real good sense of why things work.

And every big decision they've made has made it worse, not better. Do you use new reddit?

[ink_13]

I had Reddit Gold for over a decade for exactly this reason.

I've cancelled my subscription.