[harvestmoon]

Reddit is a great site in what it does. And due to its nature, it has tremendous amount of niches, some of which are worth a lot of money if handled properly.

For instance, /r/watches is an active area for discussion of watches. The people who post there often share their new Rolex or their treasured Patek Phillipe. /r/watches is just one of many, many such niches on the site which have a lot of potential value.

My thinking has been that reddit could focus on developing the value in its many product oriented subforums.

Also, interestingly enough, reddit has already sort of created its own new cybercurrency - dogecoin. Though it may not be doing well, I think most of the value in dogecoin was how easy it was to use on reddit.

reddit does need to find a way to monetize. I think it could do so quite successfully due to the nature of it having many high value niches.

I say all this as a big fan of the site and have even been considering making a subreddit finder (so that someone who is a fan of the TV show Suits, for instance, can know that there is /r/suits to discuss the show, which they would have simply no way of knowing if they just landed on reddit's homepage with pictures of Very Round Eggs, to use a current example).

[minimaxir]

It should be noted that this is one of many recent product failures in Reddit's attempt to monetize.

Others include the Reddit YouTube video channel, Reddit Live, and most notably, RedditMade, which was also killed without a trace and the employees responsible laid off.

[personlurking]

In essence, this is the direction PH said they're going in. To create niches/communities around products.

There could also be some sort of sub quality indicator, perhaps merely based on submission and comment numbers/frequency, etc. For example, one country sub I know of, there's a lot of submissions and commenting but it's almost strictly politics, strictly in the language of the country, and everyone is extremely negative there. It's a shame for people to land on a country sub and see such things. On the other hand, taking another country sub I know as an example, they have two versions (one in English, one in their own language). The latter, in particular, has diversified quite a lot in the last 6 months or so and there are now many language-related (in regards to this country) subs as a result.

[sharkweek]

To your first point, I always wondered if there was a way to monetize the individual subs and allow moderators of these subs to somehow take a part of the cut. There are a million risks in this, and I assume the biggest fear would be that it would destroy a lot of the current culture and increase "MOD CONSPIRACY" fears; but it would still be interesting to test.

Regarding the subreddit finder, Pinterest has the perfect model for your first login where it asks you about your interests and subscribes you specifically to those types of things. Reddit should most certainly do the same thing as it did take me a while to get into the site, and the best day on Reddit was discovering that I could unsubscribe from the defaults I didn't care much for and find the communities I cared about.

[bhayden]

My issue is most subreddit moderators are young guys who, for the first time in their life, have some small authority over a group of people and are total shitheads about it. They have no credentials other than having thought to make the subreddit before anyone, and have done nothing to deserve a cut of profits of anything. If I owned reddit, I wouldn't want these people to work for me.

[Phlarp]

This is essential-- mods already have way too much power, and are constantly found to be doing naughty things on a very reliable basis. Selling sidebar links, keeping funds from "charity drives", squashing certain domains, outright selling mod accounts to industry marketers (/r/android) and these are just the things we know about! Moderator powers need to be restricted with constant vigilance by the admins and community.

Adding the potential for monetary rewards will not move this problem in the correct direction.