Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has hinted that in future some subreddits could be paywalled, as the company seeks to devise new sources of income.
He suggested that the company might experiment with paywalled subreddits as it looks to monetize new features. “I think the existing, altruistic, free version of Reddit will continue to exist and grow and thrive just the way it has,” Huffman said. “But now we will unlock the door for new use cases, new types of subreddits that can be built that may have exclusive content or private areas, things of that nature.”
This is another move likely to anger Redditors. While the platform is a commercial enterprise, its value derives almost entirely from freely offered user content. That means Redditors feel at least some sense of ownership in a community endeavour, so the company needs to tread carefully when it comes to monetization at user expense.
That already happens in the global popular feed though, I already see multiple variations of the same subs across different servers without subscribing.
Any shared agglomorated view based just on name needs to allow subs to opt out (I run /r/crypto on reddit, and it’s for CRYPTOGRAPHY and I wished all the spammers would go and set themselves on fire) and you absolutely can not force it onto everybody.
You’re also stuck with the same problem of less popular subs not getting many views because their content ends up last, because they don’t have as big dedicated userbases, and because this just doesn’t give them any increased visibility at all.
You also get an even worse problem of malicious servers faking high popularity to dominate (like when /r/T_D manipulated reddit) if you do it the naive way, every admin needs to filter bad servers. And new users won’t know the best place to post to (usually the place with the most reliable mods). In fact they won’t even understand why they’re asked to choose, so they’ll prefer what’s listed at the top, probably their own server, and thus the .world server keeps dominating.
You also can’t do thread deduplication without cooperating mods, so you get intense clutter. You also break apart sub specific culture if they get flooded by strangers.
The only way you can even get close to a sane implementation with your take is by putting a banner at the top of every thread in that view with the host sub description and the rules and forcing everybody to agree before interacting. Otherwise off topic content gets upvoted when it shouldn’t, sub specific events gets ruined immediately, and people will get pissed when they get moderated under rules they should’ve read but didn’t.
A hybrid view controlled mutually by mods allow you to advertise the different subs by highlighting their differences.
These problem should all be resolved client side by mutually curated block lists, boost lists, aliases list and many other methods and it should happen with the users final say. They must always be the one to choose which ideological blinders they want to put on. And when posting to any /c/books the default visibility should be the same assuming a neutral reputation server and a neutral reputation user.
Anything else will lead to the one big community controlled by a small caste of moderator-kings forever as has happened on reddit.
To me escaping the filter bubble through decentralisation is the winning promise for Lemmy and it currently falls far short of that. And every day that this remains the case, the lemmy elites are becoming more entrenched and better able to steer the narrative in their favor.
See also https://slrpnk.net/comment/10312933
What you’re suggesting can’t work
I sympathize with some of it, but you’re going too far
Content addressable posts like what Bluesky’s atproto does and cryptographic identity allows for portable posts and identities, and it even allows forkable communities as you can import and move entire conversations, and even mirror conversations that one team of mods may not like into another community (I made my first blog post about content addressable forums literally a whole decade ago)
Literally impossible according to the CAP theorem (database terminology) in a decentralized network where not all servers federate with all (often because they just never have interacted and thus don’t know of each other)
You have to push the communities to participate in multiple parallel communities, that’s much more reliable. Together with a credible threat that the community can depose bad mod teams by forking, you have a much better chance of preventing bad mod behavior
I don’t believe there are any real technical hurdle to overcome, except overcoming the current system inertia (which might already be too late and easier to start over)
The thing is that, if posting in say
https://lemmy.ca/c/books
instead of
https://lemmy.ml/c/books
Is the difference between 10k people seeing it and 1 person seeing it.
Then people are going to choose the bigger reach community. And it will in turn grow bigger, attain critical mass and become the only /c/book that most people ever go to.
This is catastrophic for decentralization. The more concentrated the attention becomes in that place the less it will make sense to post anywhere else.
Then the small clique of mods at https://lemmy.ml/c/books become entrenched and all they need to do is manage public opinion to keep their place as the shaper of all book discussion on all of lemmy basically for as long as they want.