I’m reading this as a play to allow communities to have their own paid for areas and Reddit takes a cut in exchange for hosting this.

I recall a while back they were looking at a way to financially compensate major contributors and moderators, so possibly this idea is being revisited in a way.

Right now though, most people contribute to communities to share their knowledge or creativity and to connect with others- and monetisation might be there in the background but isn’t a first class feature of the platform. It makes business sense to make this play, even though it’ll make the site worse.

To conclude: Reddit becomes an only fans competitor. Calling it now.

Well I had hoped, naiively that Reddit would respect the developer community that had helped make their website so popular. A community of developers provided apps and services for them for the simple price of a free API. I thought the APIpocolypse might happen, but I thought reddit was special somehow and they would see how beautiful and vibrant that community was and not damage it for fear of damaging the soul of the website. Yeah, that was pretty fucking naiive.

Ah well, I’ll put my energy into Lemmy and Fediverse projects instead.