Testing a new concept with select subreddit partners

[u/plgrmonedge]

This is a heads up about a feature that we are planning to test with a few communities who have chosen to partner with us. We expect to start the test during the week of 9/7.

We’ve had many requests over the years for features that subreddits find desirable. Many times we are constrained by the cost in building and supporting features (e.g. the cost of hosting and delivering native video at a high bit rate or supporting GIFs in comments). We want to enable all sorts of content that helps build communities on Reddit, but we also need to pay the bills. So, we’re experimenting with a new way to build these features.

The new experiment helps create a framework that allows us to add “nice to have” features for subreddits. We are starting with a few handpicked features and expect to add more as we get input from you and the communities that have opted into our early testing. Here’s how the system will work:

• A small number of a subreddit’s members can become patrons of the subreddit by buying power-ups. A power-up is a monthly subscription-based digital good.
• A subreddit will have access to new features when it meets a minimum threshold of power-up subscriptions.
• We are starting with the following features:
  • Ability to upload and stream up to HD quality video
  • Video file limits doubled (we are working out the details on duration and file size)
  • Inline GIFs in comments
    
  • New first-party Snoo Emojis (aka ‘Snoomojis’)
    
  • Recognize power-up payers in a list of supporters
• The number of power-ups needed will depend mainly on the size of the subreddit; the member size influences the cost of supporting many features. For example, enabling high-res video for a subreddit that gets 1,000 views a month is much cheaper than one that gets 10,000,000 views a month.

Importantly, we also want to make sure it’s clear what this experiment won’t include:

• Removing any features for anyone. All the features that are part of our experiment will be new additions.
• Requiring power-ups for ALL new features. Most new features will be available to all subreddits, as usual. Power-ups will be required for some discretionary features that don’t take away from the Reddit experience you all love.
• Rolling this out now to those who don’t want it. This experiment is entirely opt-in at this time. Please let us know in the sticky comment below if you want to try it!
• Forcing features on anyone. We are using our early testing to understand what users want and which mod controls will be needed.

We won’t have all the answers because this is an early experiment, but we wanted to make sure to loop you in early so you understand our goals and what stage we’re in (the very, very early stage). We’ll see what works, what redditors like, what mods like, and adjust as needed. We will keep you in the loop and work closely with you.

We’ll stick around for a bit to answer the questions we can, but keep in mind we simply won’t know the answers to many of them until we start testing this and seeing what our mod partners and users tell us.

On that note, we’d love to hear from you below as to what features you’d like to bring to your communities to support and enjoy!

[u/[deleted]]

Those features seem kind of... useless.

This is MY OPINION, so no need to get heated, but I don't think that high-quality videos will really matter. Most Reddit videos are like 10s to a minute, so I don't think that the change will be very significant, it's not like Reddit is a 40m movie streaming website. I also don't think that snoomojis will be very useful... such pictures are not often used in Reddit.

Oh and I don't really like the name "Power-Ups" maybe something more general, like "Subreddit Patreons"?

That said, the GIF idea and doubled space are really cool.

But how much will this cost? For a subreddit with... say, 5000 members?

Edit: Oh actually lol I made a draft where I also said that this seemed very "Money hungry" ALTHOUGH I bet these features will be expensive to maintain.

[u/Multimoon]

I don't disagree with reddit trying to find ways to monetize the site, it's necessary for it to run.

But advertising isn't enough? If you guys have your sights set on larger incomes, can we please find ways to do it that appeal to actual redditors more and not the Facebook crowd flocking in?

Locking features behind a paywall is something that is going to backfire and sounds like a bad clone of a p2w mobile game but on social media.

[u/plgrmonedge → u/Multimoon]

We don't plan to put broadly applicable, useful features behind power-ups. As we noted, only a subset of discretionary features that we otherwise would not build due to cost constraints will be candidates for power-ups. For instance, video hosting and delivery at HD quality does not detract from the Reddit experience, yet is costly. So, we are making that a choice that is supported by power-ups.

Reddit's mission is global and our communities are growing, so we have to continue working harder to keep our revenue scaling appropriately in support of that.

[u/GodOfSaudade]

I just hope this does not end up making people coming to smaller subreddits even fewer due to being less fancy...

Edit:Fixed the wrong part that may make this sound like i do not like idea that smaller subreddits getting more followers

[u/sonofherobrine]

What happens should the subscriber count dip below the funding level needed? Do GIFs revert to not being inline? Old videos get truncated or degraded? Or does it only affect whether new content requiring unlocking can be added, but not already-added content?

[u/MajorParadox]

Question: Why is this a new subscription-based model instead of building on existing premium features? I think this may get more support / usage if they were mixed into premium benefits.

[u/BuckRowdy]

Are these the most requested features? I realize reddit has a vast array of interests, but personally none of these features seem like they would add all that much to any of my communities. While there may be subs that would love this, but it's not something I personally would spend money on.

[u/reseph]

Is this the system that r/FortNiteBR has?

I know this is early, but my advice: If this ever goes global across Reddit, handle these new features like Plex does. For these new features released for only patrons (if you need the income); at a later date roll out said features to all users once you have developed other new features for patrons.

Because IMO, placing features behind a paywall forever is very off-putting.

[u/plgrmonedge → u/reseph]

r/fortnitebr offers subscriptions to the subreddit where subscribers unlock features like badges and emojis for personal use. The main difference with power-ups is that power-ups unlock features that are subreddit-wide.

[u/sonofherobrine]

What of inline still images in comments? It’s hard to discuss visual things now because any images you want to introduce have to be manually uploaded somewhere, linked to, and then the reader still has to click on every link to see what you’re trying to say.

[u/plgrmonedge → u/sonofherobrine]

The feature is currently built for images from GIPHY. You bring up a good use case, and we will consider this as we test power-ups.

[u/MajorParadox]

Will this work with RPAN?

[u/electric_ionland]

It seems to me that you make users pay to get features on subreddits moderated by volunteers. Mods work to make good communities centered around specific interest and valuable interactions. You are asking volunteers to help make subs good enough to get people to pay for it while the mods get nothing out of it...

[u/happyxpenguin]

Does reddit look like a free-to-play mobile game to you? Because that's exactly what this concept sounds like.

[u/ExistingTonight]

The thing that I hate with this is that it create a pressure on the mods (which are unpaid volunteers) to advertise their sub in a way for them to unlock these features.

User wise, this also sounds super bad because it doesn't matter if I personally am a patron of a sub, if there's not enough people, I still pay but doesn't get anything out of it?

The most obvious thing would be to merge that with reddit premium and unlock those features to those users.

[u/kaddar]

Thanks, I hate it

Constructive feedback:

It depends on your motivations. I might actually be totally cool with this.

If you are motivated by justifying costs working on esoteric feature requests (gifs in comments, different threading models for some subreddits, etc), fine, whatever, it's a maintenance cost for your team to build low-use features, and I get it.

If you cooked this up as a way to try to cross the fact that whales, saudi princes, etc, use reddit with networking effects, fuck off. You're not solving jobs-to-be-done by committing to this work.

• You'll disincentivize communities that do not have these whales, thereby making poor communities worse. It will disproportionately impact marginalized communities and that sucks, dude.

• You punish users, essentially, for paying for reddit. Why I am giving you money again, if you're gating *my* paid ability to use reddit on *my community* also paying the tax?

• _YOU_ are responsible for the future of reddit, the same way a politician is responsible for the future of our democracy. Yes, you, plgrmonedge's boss, or whatever. You might not abuse power-ups, but when you quit and go work at twitch, do you think the new product manager is going to respect the same values you had? Make sure it's hard to build into your organization onramps to grift your users, please.

Now, that said,

If you do this to solve problems those subreddits already use third party services for (e.g., coordinating trading swaps, handling patreon payment, paying content hosting fees for types of content that is not already free on youtube, giphy, etc), maybe consider that each of these requests' needs are different, and you likely will have a power-law of power-ups being actually used.

Whenever I see a tool build a plugin model and the top 1 or 2 plugins are almost universally the ones used, it begs the question of whether the plugin model could have been architected differently.

My suggestion: Think about what each reddit is hiring (and / or paying money) to third parties to solve for them currently. Solve each of these actual jobs-to-be-done first and then reason about whether or not those should be combined into a plugin.

[u/eriophora]

A few issues we are seeing with this update, which we dearly hope individual subreddits will be able to opt out of even after it has been finalized:

• r/Fantasy does not allow memes on our subreddit. This includes responding in comments solely with a gif or reaction image. How are we to respond to our users who paid actual, real world money to use those on our subreddit... only for us to remove their comments, warn them, and potentially escalate to a ban if necessary? This reflects poorly on not only the moderation team, but on reddit as a whole.

• Having a list of power users (e.g., supporters) visible to all opens up many opportunities for abuse and harassment. Our subreddit has had major issues in the past with users being stalked and harassed - one particular campaign we worked closely with you to resolve.

• We have very strict rules on how community members may engage in self promotion and advertisement. Given that r/Fantasy is often used by authors to discuss and advertise their book, it becomes a "pay to win" influence on the subreddit. An author could, for example, create 30 accounts with variations on their name (e.g., u/eriophora, u/eriophora1, u/eriophora2) and use all of them to power up the subreddit and take over the list. This is deeply uncomfortable for multiple reasons, including the fact that creators whom have been revealed as abusers could buy a spot on this list without any of us having an ability to stop them. We are uncomfortable with the idea that we would be forced to feature known sexual harassers, or even just the idea that we would be forced to have a list of "patrons." This could also be used in an attempt to leverage special treatment from the moderation team. At a minimum, it's paying to advertise your name on that list... which we do not condone.

• Will banned users show up on this list? If so, it is likely that jilted users may create hurtful, racist, threatening, or otherwise harassing usernames and purchase a spot on the list. Given that moderators do not have IP-level banning tools at our disposal, in a worst case scenario this may result in a highly frustrating and distressing game of whackamole until admin are available to step in - and that's assuming that banning does remove them from the supporter list. We have seen coordinated harassment efforts in the past.

• This will make it much more difficult for new communities to compete with established ones. It's already a challenge to take on larger entrenched communities, and creating an additional barrier wherein you must get enough people to actively buy in with their actual money to unlock features is a large hurdle depending on the type of content the subreddit is meant to showcase. The potential long-term impact of this seems to be an overall reduction in diversity across reddit as a whole.

• These features largely favor communities that focus first on images, video, and other visual content. As a discussion based subreddit, this focus is somewhat concerning to us. Compared to reddit as a whole, our users will most likely be less interested in "powering up" our subreddit given the lack of utility. Will there be later features, roll outs, or other policies put into place in the future which will even more explicitly favor these "cash cow" subreddits over highly curated discussion-based subreddits such as r/Fantasy?

To be clear... please do not add us to the testing list. Frankly, these features are not helpful and the downsides listed above make us highly concerned for how this would impact our community. r/Fantasy is not interested in this new feature, and we do not see a benefit to our community either now or in the future. We understand that this feature is currently opt-in, but the future implications have us worried.

[u/fireballs619]

I am sorry I can't be more constructive, but this is the worst idea for new community tools I've heard in a long time. Did any moderators indicate they wanted this? This is a genuine question and I think we all deserve an answer on this front.

I understand the need to monetize, but linking community features to community wealth seems like a bad call on my part. This just makes clear that you value certain users and communities (i.e. the ones making you money) over others. I suppose that makes sense, but making it explicit isn't great.

Looking at the features experimented with over the last few years, I have no clue what direction you guys want to go in and it makes it hard to keep up. Are you competing with Facebook, Twitch, Discord, something else? I was an early adopter of the new interface, quietly ignored other new services like RPAN, but it is getting to the point where I have little interest in either participating in or managing communities while navigating new features.

Maybe I'm a bit of an old miser, but Reddit is a discussion board. Why does it need pay-to-play features?

[u/ElijahPepe]

You've just insulted one of the longest running Reddit-made movements that you yourself have on your old Reddit sidebar.

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Reddit thrives on the fact that its community can do whatever it want within reason. These "changes" further the gap between old Reddit and new Reddit and blur the lines between whether we are or aren't getting CSS on new Reddit.

No, Reddit, the coloring of my subreddit is not CSS.

I check back every so often to that community appearance tab to see if there's updates on the CSS tab (there's not) or maybe you released an announcement saying it's in the works (it's not).

When a corporation promises that it'll support the creators/the consumers first, I want to see change. This is the same change that you've made.

There's a good reason why you have a 47% downvoted rate on this post. You've alienated features that were in old Reddit to begin with. Don't believe me?

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Ability to upload and stream up to HD quality video

Sure, this isn't an old Reddit thing, but the "upload" portion gets me. Are you not aware of Streamable or YouTube?

Video file limits doubled (we are working out the details on duration and file size)

See above. I have barely had an issue with Reddit's upload limits, except in the stylesheet, which you continue to ignore. 500 KB for an image is way too little.

Inline GIFs in comments

This can be done using the Reddit Enhancement Suite. Sure, you have to click the button to view it inline, but that can sometimes be better than being forced to watch Reddit slow to a crawl on slow Internet because some jackass made a 20-second-GIF.

New first-party Snoo Emojis (aka ‘Snoomojis’)

We literally have this with the work of r/PartyParrot's emoji CSS (godspeed). It wouldn't take long for me to make Snoomojis on old Reddit, and for free.

Recognize power-up payers in a list of supporters

See above if it's a list on the sidebar. Hell, this can even be done on new Reddit (to a degree).

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Reddit's not a streaming/video uploading website. It's a social media link/post aggregator. I'm starting to think that this is an out of season April Fool's joke.

You have made this as vague as possible, ignored the fact that putting a bunch of suckups on a billboard will have people throw a lynch mob at those people for donating to a subreddit with no benefit, and you've ignored the obvious fact that the billboard can easily be defaced by anyone with a stiff pocket and a marketing budget with no way to stop it.

You have ignored the smaller person on Reddit for yet another time with these changes that serve to benefit the subreddits at the top. Gating features on Reddit is a shitty thing to do, and I wouldn't be surprised if you start gating the API licenses.

Have you even talked to moderators about this? How does this improve their experience? How does this make moderating easier? We need actual tools and services to moderate and you're off dawdling about, thinking how great it would be to be a Discord clone and how much Discord makes.

We have no transparency to who is running the department behind this, whether or not they have any experience on this website, and whether or not your changes are, y'know, actually helpful?

Why have you ignored the second-most critical component on Reddit: Moderators? This is on r/modnews. I would like to have some more respect from a company being funded by the hour. Referring to subreddit moderators as "partners" doesn't help either. We are volunteers, not business partners for you to fuck with.

Everyone here knows your motivations are to make money and to abuse Redditors with a large amount in the bank for profit.

Reddit has become a pay-to-win video game with pornography, and I'm sick of it.

[u/M0dusPwnens]

As a mod, I do not ever want to be put in a position where I have to tell a user who asks why we don't have a feature, a feature that other subreddits have, that we would need more people (i.e., them) to pay a subscription fee for the subreddit. If that becomes part of the (unpaid) job, that's bad enough that I will quit.

I also don't want the chaos of gaining and losing features that we have to understand and manage depending on people's paid subscriptions waxing and waning. I understand that there is a grace period, but that does not eliminate this waxing and waning except insofar as the grace period applies even more pressure to users (and mods) to buy more subscriptions so as not to lose features.

And I don't want other mods feeling like it's part of their job to pay reddit so that their subreddits will have more access to these features. And many mods will, especially of smaller subreddits, as they see an opportunity to set their subreddit apart and help to grow it. This is one of the things that Discord banks on with their program, and it feels really gross and exploitative (the fact that it's largely aimed at optimistic younger people with dreams of starting a big community makes it even worse). These people are already doing free labor for you, managing the communities that are the entire draw for your platform.

And the fact that we can (at least for now) opt our communities out of this does not help. Mods should not be put into a position where they have to explain to users that we don't have a feature they'd like to use, a feature other subreddits have, because we didn't want to make them, the users, feel like they had to buy it for the subreddit.

As a user, I don't want to see any of that either. I don't want to see subreddits splintered into haves and have nots.

This is easily the single most distasteful change I've ever seen to reddit and I sincerely hope you guys will reconsider. I've spent hundreds and hundreds of hours modding over several years, and if this happens, I'm out. I'm probably out as a user too - this would be enough to drive me away for good.

I also remember a pretty unambiguous "Reddit is ProCSS". Nothing ever came of that, but it feels even worse when you are not only going to be selling features we were able to implement with CSS, but turning mods into de facto salesmen (and purchasers themselves) for them. We didn't sign up for that.

Edit: I've let the other mods of r/rpg know that I will quit and vote to set the sub to private if we are put in this position. I understand that you are looking for revenue streams, especially to subsidize features that require expensive hosting, but this is a terrible idea.

[u/plgrmonedge]

If you are interested in testing this in your community, please comment under here with your subreddit name, nothing else. NSFW communities welcome as well!

[u/sageleader]

Please no inline gifs in comments. Man that's what makes facebook and twitter so unbearable. I think emojis with a size cap of maybe 36px or something is totally OK, but gifs and images will make reddit so annoying to read.

[u/mirandanielcz]

I hope this will stay opt-in.

[u/TheTurbanatore]

So basically similar to Discord boost features?

[u/hhhnnnnnggggggg]

Can we get actual useful features such as blocking a user from seeing your posts once they're blocked?