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Comment by dealforager | Hacker News Reader

I think the "everything should be free and no one should make money" mentality that is popular on the internet is very harmful in the long term. Moderators should be paid for doing a good job and content creators should be paid for good content. Making ads the only way to do this ends up forcing content to essentially become an ad. This is happening everywhere on the internet.

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I agree. I think that the revenue model for websites like Reddit was what set them up for failure. In the beginning, focused on growth, it probably made sense to get as many users as possible, as quickly as possible. But Reddit doesn't need more users. It stopped needing more users a long, long time ago. It needs better users and healthier communities. And less incentive for mods to collect hundreds of subreddits and use them for self-interest.

Sidenote: Look at the growth of r/WallStreetBets https://subredditstats.com/r/wallstreetbets from January (less than 2 million users) to the beginning of February (almost 9 million users). There is no way the mod team could handle that, given the resources and tools they have available (I'm not affiliated with WSB).

It is the essential flaw of the VC growth model based on advertising. Not just for communities like reddit but for all companies. They take on more investors and more control goes to people who really don't care too much about it.

I think we're at the stage now where a solo indie founder (or 2) could start a site like Reddit that could run very cheaply and then get monetized by paid subscribers.

Even just 0.5%-1% paid subscribers could support a site like that with the right infra.

Of course, you'd have to start out in one small niche and then gradually grow outward.

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