The bigger story is that they've changed Reddit Gold from a feel-good, pay-what-you-want model to a standard, fixed-price model. It went from being the neighborhood self-serve coffee bar to Starbucks. It will be interesting to see if the Predictably Irrational prediction holds and payments actually end up dropping off.
"We plan to make this more granular in the future, for those of you who want to see, say, house ads in the sidebar, but not third-party advertising that contains autoplaying Flash."<p>Why on earth would they require users to pay for better targeted ads? If ads target me better, the net effect is more money for them. It just seems like a bad business idea to require that customers pay for something that ultimately makes the company more money.
There needs to be real tangible benefits to the service. I understand it is early, but there aren't many benefits here (hide ads? friend notes?). Perhaps you guys should poll users on pain-points and alleviate them instead of introducing features. Otherwise I expect that very, very few people will sign up, and many more will be offended that you even offer it.
Two hours later: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/croqe/i_gladly_donated_to_reddit_but_i_wont_pay_for_it/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/croqe/i_gladly_d...</a><p>It's interesting seeing which opinions of outrage become popular on reddit. Before this it was Saydrah and that outrage was on and off before it turned into a virtual mobbing. I'm curious if a large population of reddit has this opinion, or if it originally cared for this opinion before the above post. Was this opinion bubbling within the threads when the donation request was announced? Of course cultural trends are difficult to measure, so I doubt I'll ever know.<p>Personally, raldi announced this subscriber service when he announced the donation, so I'm those reddit users whose not going against their subscription model at all (however, I am waiting on them to add Amazon payments). Still, when I compare their model to Ars Technica's, this comes to mind: Ars has paid writers while reddit has user contributions, their only service is the forum they have set up and maintained (duh). Good luck with them and I hope they have a subscription model that fairly monetizes their user's contributions without smoking them out.<p>EDIT: May I also add that there's the extra challenge of being under a larger company. It played a factor with Saydrah and its currently playing a factor with above.
It's funny Anandtech forums went through this many years ago facing the same problems that Reddit is. It was pretty much the same thing, I think $30 made you a subscriber and you got some benefits that non subscribers didn't. THen after only a couple years they removed it. Wonder if reddit will do the same?
I wish they would give us features that people like me, who don't submit and comment much, would want and pay for as a reddit gold subscriber. So far I just click on ads occasionally, and would love to become a subscriber, but there's just nothing that they offer that would entice someone like me.
Wow. All of these features are auctually pretty neat. Now let me "save" comments and block/hide certain users. Good work, can't wait to see how this works out.
Gird your loins, boys, for the influx of disillusioned redditors!<p>(a good chunk of whom were disillusioned meme-spouting 4channers before they were disillusioned redditors)