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Comment by codemaster3000 | Hacker News Reader

This is a terrible, terrible idea. The mods of each subreddit are what keep the subreddit alive, and subreddits are the building blocks of Reddit. There are mods who put tons and tons of time maintaining the quality of their sub(s), and they are volunteers and don't get paid for any of their work. Asking them to "pony up" their own money would, with no doubt in my mind, drive them away and completely destroy Reddit. You are grossly over-estimating the number of mods who would "help foot the bill," and completely forgetting about how much hatred Reddit would get form the community if this was implemented.

If Reddit considered this strategy for monetization, they'd be much better off shooting off their foot, then shooting their other foot.

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The mods of each subreddit are also what kill it. There are people who squash subreddit names just for the lulz[1]. Furthermore, moderator hierarchy is solely based on the date of when they accepted the moderator invitation, which cannot be changed it any way -- if you want to change the hierarchy, someone at the top needs to remove all moderators and re-invite them in the exact order, making sure not to invite anyone before the previous invitation has been accepted, since the timestamp of when you accepted the invitation, not the timestamp of when you were invited, makes the hierarchy.

That system on its own is atrocious, but reddit admins also will leave subreddits suffering from moderator abuse to rot, suggesting to split the userbase by having those not happy with the status quo create a new subreddit. While this is common practice on IRC networks, too, they have more differentiated systems.

Rizon provides a channel takeover policy, which is based on people with minimal access actively requesting foundership over a channel[2], implying that they do care. reddit has /r/redditrequest, but it has intransparent times for how long a reddit request is allowed to stay unanswered, and you can't "skip" moderators higher in the moderation list[3], unlike Rizon's takeover policy, where you can do so if nobody else claims the channel during the three-day grace period. Undernet has a very strict timeout on channel managers (or founders), 21+ days of inactivity allows for a vote by the highest-ranking ops for a new manager[4].

reddit is thus intentionally staying in the past, refusing to deal with a long-standing issue, for which proposals have been made numerous times.

Now, the nice thing about paying money for a subreddit name (which, given the current size of reddit, cannot possibly hold worth comparable to a good domain name) is that it requires a commitment. At least someone on the moderation staff will have to actually shell out money, a limited resource. Instead of solving the moderation/subreddit squashing issue through the way of administrator intervention/software development, which has repeatedly been ignored (search for "mod" on /r/ideasfortheadmins for a bit), it could be solved through requiring active commitment.

Similarly, IRC networks are all run by volunteers who don't get paid for their work, and there are people paying money to keep servers running. While this completely breaks the subreddit <-> IRC channel analogy I've been making above, it still needs to be said. It's not like doing things for free implies that you get things for free.

As for reddit getting backlash over changes? Just check the last two /r/changelog posts, full of angry comments[5]. I don't think they're going to care, so what's there to stop them from charging money for subreddit names?

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/1wvx09/subreddi...

[2] http://forum.rizon.net/showthread.php?3850-Channel-Takeover-...

[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/wiki/faq

[4] https://cservice.undernet.org/docs/guidelines.html

[5] http://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/2a32sq/experiment... and http://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/27f3a3/reddit_cha...

Mods pay nothing. Just one owner pays a fee to keep the subreddit alive. Similar to buying a domain name.

> Asking them to "pony up" their own money would, with no doubt in my mind, drive them away and completely destroy Reddit.

He wrote nowhere that mods should pay. I as a user would certainly pay $10/yr to keep subreddits I care most about going on.

User pays is equally as ridiculous as mod pays.

No way as a user i would pay $10/yr when there are multiple sites that will do the same thing as Reddit for free.

Im not interested in paying any website for the privilege of expressing my opinion and reading others.

I see two valuable things for the end user at reddiit: a. Finding good sub reddits (out of 500k am sure that is a pain) b. Getting their content some sort of traction in the community which is ofcourse mod configured & rev shared with the mod maybe.

Do you think users would pay for this? besides, do you think the 2nd point has a scope of creeping in poop?

I agree that there are users who would pay for that. Indeed, there are successful business models based on this idea already. Those models see nothing like the traffic that Reddit gets, so they are not as interesting to advertisers.

Yes, i see point b) having a scope of creeping in poop.

I'm pretty sure that point b) was a large part of the reason for the downfall of Digg.

Moderators are the people who govern a subreddit, so naturally they are the ones who are most invested in a subreddit, and ones who will have to pay the bill each month if no one else volunteers, or watch their sub die.

> I as a user would certainly pay $10/yr to keep subreddits I care most about going on.

How many subreddits and how many years would you be willing to do this for? This might be feasible for subs like r/AskReddit, r/iama, and the other big ones, but as many other people in this thread have mentioned, "powerhouse" Reddit users are the ones that don't follow the terrible front page subs, and have found their niche. One of my favorite subs to go to, r/tabbletennis, has only about 2k subscribers, and I'm sure that there are more subs that certain people love, but have even less subscribers.

My point is that the logical point for payment would be through a mod, and I'm sure that outside of the larger subs, mods would be the ones footing the bill. This is a very dangerous game as mods are the pillars upon which Reddit stand, and aggravating them would pretty much be the death of Reddit.

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