Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has hinted that in future some subreddits could be paywalled, as the company seeks to devise new sources of income.
He suggested that the company might experiment with paywalled subreddits as it looks to monetize new features. “I think the existing, altruistic, free version of Reddit will continue to exist and grow and thrive just the way it has,” Huffman said. “But now we will unlock the door for new use cases, new types of subreddits that can be built that may have exclusive content or private areas, things of that nature.”
This is another move likely to anger Redditors. While the platform is a commercial enterprise, its value derives almost entirely from freely offered user content. That means Redditors feel at least some sense of ownership in a community endeavour, so the company needs to tread carefully when it comes to monetization at user expense.
You’re basically suggesting bluesky style label services, except as the only solution
And no that can not be the only solution avaliable, ESPECIALLY not in communities around important topics like security, health, or for marginalized communities, etc. Your suggested default would be a trashfire by default until people have opted into some kind of moderation filters. And few will review the filters they subscribe to.
You also haven’t solved the issue of how to get people to submit content to smaller communities
You have probably never seen a well moderated community, or at least not participated in one for long.
By making the default view a chaotic mess of free expression would spur the need for efficient and easy to use self-help user-centric moderation tools.
The worse it really is, the more people will be motivated to figure out, basically clicking “subscribe” to a blacklist filter. It could make sense to even have a default suggestion blacklist that are strongly consensus base as one of the first thing the users is told.
The alternative is the currently happening reddit-equivalent centralization which makes lemmy a pointless, far less popular reddit clone.
There is no other alternative.
If posting in https://lemmy.ca/c/books gets you zero views then nobody will post there instead of https://lemmy.ml/c/books which will get 10k views. So https://lemmy.ml/c/books will gets posts and grow and https://lemmy.ca/c/books will stagnate forever. Once in a a while the hegemonic community moderator will push their corruption so such egregious level that a tiny amount of users will revolt and create a 2nd community and it will get maybe 5% of the viewership of the big community.
This is just the cost of freedom, the user HAS to participate in moderation and moderation has to be a collective effort. The alternative is handing over your thought patterns to an unaccountable anti-misinformation ideological cabal and they will shape your reality into whatever shape they see fit without you even knowing they exist.