As I mentioned in the attached article, we actually do have a monetization strategy in place outside of relying on advertisements and VC funding.
We take a cut of each transaction that occurs on the platform to help fund the development. Some examples of such transactions include:
1. Giving communities the ability to offer tiered monthly membership plans. Users will also be able to purchase memberships for other users similar to the system on Twitch. Communities can also chose to gate entire communities behind a membership.
2. We are also adding the ability for users to pay to bump posts and buy comment awards which the revenue is all shared with the community owner.
3. Adding a platform wide subscription fee that would give users some additional benefits however we haven't fully fleshed this out yet.
See this section of the attached article for more on that:
I think stating explicitly that you will NOT take VC funding at any point in the future is important. Otherwise there is no confidence that your product will stick around
It's certainly our intention to make the platform work with relying on outside funding as little as possible. Ideally we will be able to get the platform to being profitable without needing much. The economics of our platform start to play out at scale, so it does take some money for us to get there. Ideally if we can land a few larger content creators with communities active in supporting them we will be able to fund a lot of that early development through that
> My ideal situation would be that mods and content creators get paid from the reddit awards
I've been working on a community platform/Reddit alternative that has a business model exactly like this.
It's like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid taking the best features of each platform and combining them under one umbrella. One key aspect is we have non-intrusive monetization methods baked into each community where the revenue primarily goes to the community owners. The monetization stuff is completely optional and disabled by default, however it feels like the people curating the communities should have the option to be rewarded for the work that they do.
I'm not sure the wedge created between the communities and the platform is repairable at this stage without extended displays of good will from Reddit's side.
Lots of communities have started the process of migrating to different platforms. The federated alternatives like Lemmy have had recent success although I question the complexity of it in terms of getting mass adoption. Most of the alternatives seem to be missing the core idea of what Reddit really is (a community of communities). I think first and foremost the community aspect of Reddit is what makes it appealing.
I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just another Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts.
I gave up Reddit not due to their API pricing issues but due to their incredibly tone deaf response to the concerns laid out by the community who makes Reddit what it is.
I'm all for businesses to be allowed to make solid business decisions which keep them afloat. I am NOT for businesses to treat their users poorly when they do so and u/spez continued to spout his usual non-CEO-material responses when questioned.
I realize I wasn't a poweruser or even who Reddit most targets. I had only had around 185K karma total (the lion's share of that via comments) that I had blocked 1000 ad accounts before moving to Apollo because I was tried of seeing so many enshittified ads in my feed and Reddit's official app only allows 1000 blocks total on a site with millions of daily users. But, I was there, helping Reddit be a great place for others to go for help on really niche topics (BigQuery, for example), and now that is gone.
According to u/spez, WE are the problem. We are all supposed to tolerate his infantile and exhausting behavior without him moving an inch toward the middle--and if anything moving more hardline against those who were active users. I cannot possibly fathom how anyone would think he should continue as the face of Reddit knowing the damage he has done.
> Reddit uses 100% volunteer work and the entirety of the Reddit content moderation structure is Volunteer
Perhaps this is a fundamental flaw with the platform. I see no reason why the people hosting and curating the communities shouldn't have a share of the money generated from them.
I've been working on a platform called Sociables to help address this problem. On the platform, people who create and run the communties have optional means of renumeration baked into the platform such as offering monthly membership plans, selling "awards" that can be assigned to comments and posts, donations, and more.
While it's not a fit for every type of community, I think aligning the incentives of the platform provider with the sources of where the the value is created (the communities) is crucial for fostering a healthy environment and avoiding this situation where the platform goes to war against itself.
I've been working on a platform with a bit of a different take on the online community space. It's like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid taking the best features of each platform and combining them. One key aspect is we have non-intrusive monetization methods baked into each community where the revenue primarily goes to the community owners. The monetization stuff is completely optional and disabled by default, however it feels like the people curating the communities should have the option to be rewarded for the work that they do.
Lots of communities on Reddit have started the process of migrating to different platforms. The federated alternatives like Lemmy have had recent success although I question the complexity of it all in terms of getting mass adoption.
Most of the alternatives seem to be missing the core idea of what Reddit really is (a community of communities). I think first and foremost it's the community aspect of Reddit that makes it appealing.
I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just another Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts.
Looked at this last night briefly before going to bed and said I'd check it again today but then got distracted by the whole twitter fiasco.
This looks awesome dude way to go :D
I forgot the link was in this thread (didn't bookmark it). It was a real pain trying to find it via google or startpage (until I remembered what thread I was reading last night) I remembered "sociable" but searches for "sociable social media platform" and even "sociable site:news.ycombinator.com" yielded zilch.
Long story short I'd suggest working on your SEO just a little you're competing with "sociable.co". But design+concept are 10/10 as far as I'm concerned, god speed o7
Lots of communties on Reddit have started the process of migrating to different platforms. The federated alternatives like Lemmy have had recent success although I question the complexity of it all in terms of getting mass adoption.
Most of the alternatives seem to be missing the core idea of what Reddit really is (a community of communities). I think first and foremost it's the community aspect of Reddit that makes it appealing.
I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just another Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts.
> The federated alternatives like Lemmy have had recent success although I question the complexity of it all in terms of getting mass adoption.
It's a community by community thing.
Eg: Astro-nerds have places such as universeodon.com with 10K active users (more science journo's and tangential-astro than hard core gravitional physicists) which is one sub reddit equivalent.
With similar Fediverse clumps for various types of math, cyber security, alternative OS hacking, etc. things are happening.
Mass adoption might be missing .. but that can be a good thing, the charm of old reddit a decade+ ago was small groups of high quality.
This bill is so backwards. If anything the news companies should be the ones paying Facebook and Google for doing free marketing for them.
Google and other social media platforms seem like the primary source of traffic for these legacy media companies. I mean a lot of news organizations upload links to their content themselves because that's how people find what to read. I reckon very few people go directly to the news websites to find articles and that's certainly not going to change because of this law in my opinion. The concept of a service provider having to pay to host links is absurd and goes against the nature of how the internet works. It's an attack on the very nature of the internet framed in a manner of "Protecting Canadian's" when in reality, the people who's pockets its meant to line ironically are the ones who are going to be hurt the most by it.
What a disaster.
I can't wait to watch how this backfires when the legacy media companies start complaining about how they are getting next to no traffic once this passes. That's not even to mention the smaller publishers who now aren't able to promote their own content on these platforms because of this bill.
The news companies don't want clicks, they want subscribers. They don't want traffic from Google News or Facebook, they want users to open their own app/newspaper directly.
I also imagine that there's a pretty low clickthrough rate for FB embeds of news articles, compared to "see headline, leave angry comment" engagement that only benefits Facebook without returning anything to the publishers.
If that's the case, whey don't they stop posting their content to social media? Is the idea with this bill to prevent a race to the bottom, where all the news organizations post their content for free in order to compete with each other?
While social media shows news items, the traditional outlets need to compete THERE. If there's no more news on social media, the hope is that people will close those apps and open their local news app.
> The news companies don't want clicks, they want subscribers.
My understanding is that news companies make their money primarily on ads. If it's subs, then why don't these news companies go entirely behind a paywall and demand google and facebook remove all links to their content. Instead, they are using government to essentially steal money from tech companies for those links.
I've been working on a platform with a bit of a different take on the online community space. It's like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid taking the best features of each platform and combining them. One key aspect is we have non-intrusive monetization methods baked into each community where the revenue primarily goes to the community owners. The monetization stuff is completely optional and disabled by default, however it feels like the people curating the communities should have the option to be rewarded for the work that they do.
As I mentioned in the attached article, we actually do have a monetization strategy in place outside of relying on advertisements and VC funding.
We take a cut of each transaction that occurs on the platform to help fund the development. Some examples of such transactions include:
1. Giving communities the ability to offer tiered monthly membership plans. Users will also be able to purchase memberships for other users similar to the system on Twitch. Communities can also chose to gate entire communities behind a membership.
2. We are also adding the ability for users to pay to bump posts and buy comment awards which the revenue is all shared with the community owner.
3. Adding a platform wide subscription fee that would give users some additional benefits however we haven't fully fleshed this out yet.
See this section of the attached article for more on that:
https://sociables.substack.com/i/134540416/monetization-mode...