Reddit: Don't like us anymore? Pay us $50/year!

Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 911 points – 1 years ago

I'm not sure if this is new, but when I clicked on the /r/pics protest post link from the frontpage here, I was redirected to this: https://old.reddit.com/premium

I'm not sure if this is well-known or not that they're pushing it now, but it's the first time I've seen it, especially on old.reddit.

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I'm not paying for social media. Unless it's a donation to my server.

Id rather pay for a subscription for a forum site or something. I know echo chambers are dangerous, but sometimes you just need a gated community. Money makes it really easy to keep the lunatics out.

You can't stay anonymous if you use a credit card to pay for social media.

The very same anonymity people use to get away with terrible behavior on free sites. I don't see the downside here.

You can't hurt anyone by saying things online. But you can be hurt if the government does not like what you are saying.

Lunatics also have money.

A site you pay for has incentive to keep you on their site for ads and data collection. One way to do that is to keep serving data you engage with. So, keeping you in a bubble.

Diversity your sources.

based

I don't really understand this sentiment, I'd rather pay a subscription for a service like fb / insta / reddit than have ads and my identity sold to the highest bidder.

Social networks are expensive to run, the idea they should be "free" is half the problem.

Though of course the enterprises behind them make far more money through advertising and mining user data than they would through a subscription model.

Delusional to think a paid subscription would keep them from selling your identity to the highest bidder. Even if you sued them on GDPR bases they'd gladly take that loss if you somehow won so they could keep abusing you.

It's just another revenue stream to make people feel better about their poor financial decisions.

You will pay a subscription and have ads and your identity sold to the highest bidder.

YouTube has been shown recently to be sliding ads into premium user feeds so I can only expect the same, if not worse, especially from a company so blatantly caught lying.

In the case of Reddit, apparently yes. By which they also spit in the face of their most loyal (paying) customers.

The problem is that selling your data + targeted advertising is always going to be more lucrative than a subscription model. So even if you are willing to pay a subscription, it's usually only a matter of time before the social media company in question changes tack. Especially if they have shareholders and/or venture capital investors breathing down their necks. If you run it like Wikipedia is run, I'm pretty sure you can operate a social media company on subscriptions/donations, but as a business model that doesn't make sense as it is not the least effort way to make the most money.

Yup, agree totally. Only way it can work is if the org running it is a not for profit with great transparency, which hopefully is what we will see with the likes of Lemmy etc.

There is an argument to make that things like reddit or even Facebook (original fb, not what it is now) should be publicly owned services. They CAN provide value to society, similar to how a town hall can.

I have no problem paying an app developer to remove ads.

But I'm not going to pay an organisation that has just hiked it's API prices which means it's now going to be earning a fortune from the likes of Google/Microsoft.

Fuck u/spez

Paying for social media forces you to doxx yourself. It's impossible to pay anonymously.

According to that logic, I'm doxxing myself every time I go to the supermarket.

I doubt you discuss your political opinions in the supermarket.

Paying for social media would allow companies and governments to associate every opinion on the internet with a credit card.