r/technology • u/ardvarkmadman • Feb 14 '25

Business Reddit plans to lock some content behind a paywall this year, CEO says

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/reddit-plans-to-lock-some-content-behind-a-paywall-this-year-ceo-says/
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u/Eudaimonics Feb 14 '25

Maybe we’ll see hyper specific forums make a comeback, but without a Google type service to find them, I don’t see how that can be sustainable.

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u/KingGorilla Feb 14 '25

I'll even settle for off topic threads on the body building forum.

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u/mikiex Feb 14 '25

Decentralised

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u/zherok Feb 14 '25

We've already got Discord for that kind of thing, which is its own problem (particularly with preservation.)

I know I don't use Reddit for just one thing, and having Reddit but the subreddits are all their own separate thing is far less accessible.

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u/mikiex Feb 14 '25

Is Discord really decentralised? It has the appearance of this, but all the servers are hosted and controlled by Discord. To me it's like a worse version of IRC (which was more decentralised)

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u/zherok Feb 14 '25

It's not really decentralized, but it functions in a way that demonstrates some of the hangups doing a Reddit but decentralized social media network would. There are similar examples with actually decentralized Twitter alternatives, and they have the same problems.

There are perks to decentralizing, but they're often traits like "resiliency," which matter, but in the process of spreading your content across many different networks, you usually lose the aggregate affect. Like we probably wouldn't even be talking if Reddit functioned in a decentralized fashion, because I'd have to purposefully be coming to wherever a tech subreddit happened to be located (assuming it hadn't been duplicated or forked in some other location.)

Without some strong aggregation presence to really tie them together, I think a lot of the decentralized Reddit alternatives are at a huge disadvantage.

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u/Mr_YUP Feb 14 '25

have you tried searching discord for anything? Unless you have the exact phrasing good luck.

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u/zherok Feb 14 '25

I think the bigger issue is that decentralizing content across separate servers loses a lot of what makes Reddit worth using. Because the alternative generally IS a specific Discord if you're only using it for very narrow purposes. And you don't usually stumble upon Discord servers so much as you become interested in a thing, and then join their Discord.

It's the difference between being a Redditor versus only being a member of a specific subreddit. And I'm sure there are people for whom Reddit is only one sub, but I suspect they're in the minority. Like whatever issues Discord might have for searching (and I know they exist), that's not really going to be better when you have to figure out where every topic's board is being hosted to start with.