zlacker

People have to realize, from a standpoint of "how do I make all of the money?", this is the only way these sites can survive in a world of reasonably-high interest rates.

There are only so many people who would be willing to pay $x for a Reddit subscription. Would the quality of content and discussion go up? Absolutely, but that's not what Huffman and his VC backers care about. They care about _scale_, and if you can collect the information of every person who goes so far as to even click on a Reddit post that's a result in a Google search, you can have near-infinite scale. At that point, the question isn't "how do I get Joe Schmoe to pay for a Reddit subscription?", it's "How many ads can I cram into every GET request made to Reddit and maximize the price advertisers are willing to pay to be in that GET request?"