As a product manager, here is what I would do if I was in Steve’s shoes. Instead of employing dark patterns that take advantage of casual user’s trust, I would actually listen to users and evolve the site in the direction users are asking for.

Reddit just killed their Santa Program, this year will be it’s last. The Secret Santa program was amazingly popular but perhaps complicated to manage so instead of improving it, they killed it - favoring dark patters to drive mobile adoption, lol.

Why not double down on the things the community has already indicated it wants. My analysis says they should evolve into a marketplace to drive more peer-to-peer activity between users while enabling monetization that could scale significantly.

Reddit seems to be mentally stuck in the Advertising model and lacks vision. Encourage more peer-to-peer interaction, make it a marketplace, drive real economic activity between users, adopt cryptocurrencies as well as conventional payment mechanisms to enable commerce between users. Think different.

What's worse with Secret Santa is they didn't have to take it over in the first place. Community / active users ran it. Which is what (feeling like used to) makes Reddit special. AND they aren't giving the keys to the exchange back to the original creator...

Now starting over in a new user run sub but it is super sh*ty behavior.

They tried the marketplace idea too with reddit gold etc. wasn't that also originally a co-opted user created joke like silver? and they seem to be changing that too? though I can't find the mod post so maybe I'm not remembering correct?

>gold - wasn't that also originally a co-opted user created joke like silver?

From my recollection gold came first, silver was a image macro meme to be pasted as a poor man's gold, and then the expanded rewards system came.

It started on 4chan with the 4chan Gold meme. Users would joke about a non-existent premium subscription that unlocked exclusive content. Reddit went ahead and actually implemented that idea, complete with the /r/lounge subreddit (available only to users with Reddit Gold).

Reddit users created Reddit Silver as another meme, indicating that a post was valuable (but not worth spending real money for Reddit Gold). Then reddit implemented that later on.

>Why not double down on the things the community has already indicated it wants.

Diminishing returns and a huge variety of communities with diverse wants.

Steve Huffman's approach has been to not touch it as much as possible (except with engagement it seems), which leads to it's own issues.

What? More peer to peer activity and make it a marketplace? Then you add in crypto for good measure…

They added chat, and everyone hated it. People aren’t on there to build up yet another social network. What would this marketplace even sell? Is it like a less localized Craigslist?

Peer to peer exchange of goods and services backed by reputations established in Subreddits sounds like it has potential worth exploring to me. A similar model has worked out very well for Facebook.

Also, please note Reddit is already another social network so that train has left the station.

As for crypto, well I am a big fan of crypto currencies and I see a compelling use case here. Perhaps you disagree? Fine, ignore the crypto suggestion and comment on my others.

Their Secret Santa program is a great example of a successful peer to peer marketplace already. Reddit Gold’s success is a good indicator of the potential for virtual currencies, stable coins, traditional payment systems, or yes even crypto.

Their desperation to monetize through Ads alone is a dangerous strategy. It leaves the site vulnerable because it separates the needs of the Advertiser (Reddit’s real customer) from the community (Reddit’s users) when ever a company decouples users from customers it makes it easy to compromise the user in favor of the business model and customer.

In the short run the metrics go up. In the long run you end up with another Digg.

So, of course my suggestion might seem naive given I don't have access to the numbers or knowing exactly the stack or employee numbers, etc. but it's a good exercise.

So:

I would basically copy Patreon in service of getting content creators paid.

In support of that:

1. A lot of the structure already exists so it shouldn't be a lot of work. For instance, there are already personal subreddits, there is already a payment gateway, there are coins that can be used for microtransactions, etc. I need to implement sub-only features and paying for individual content.

2. I can cite Patreon/OnlyFans etc revenue and MAU.

3. I can cite how many users have links to their Patreon/OnlyFans in their profiles. Beyond individual users I can make the case that organizations might want a piece of this too.

4. I believe in this vision which means I can sell it to the team, to the users and to the public better. It's also a positive vision around which people can rally.

5. Then I expend the rest of my political capital pushing this through and stake my job on it. I'd be OK doing that since I'd be doing something I really believe in.

6. If it doesn't work, there's two possibilities. Either it didn't work in a suitable time frame but there is traction in which case I can demonstrate that we are making progress and perhaps buy more time. Or it didn't work at all in which case I've failed at doing something I believed in.

7. If it does work then I've regained all my capital and much more. At which point I can go further into becoming a platform where content creators can get paid. Think Gumroad, TeeSpring, Etsy, etc.

Come up with some innovative ways to monetize, beyond just the usual ads and tracking and dirty tricks to boost engagement. The article has a few decent directions.

I'd start with adding an option to set up paid private subreddits. Like, the creator specifies that you have to subscribe to that sub for some monthly cost in order to see / interact with the content, with a percentage skimmed off the top. It seems like it'd be really easy to implement the most basic version of it and see what users do.

There's already a ton of stuff kind of like that. Tons of people pay for a creator's content on Patreon and various special-purpose copycats, and many of them include access to a private Discord in that. No reason why Reddit couldn't take over a chunk of that, since it's convenient to have all of the content and all of the community discussion features on the same platform.

Lots of ways to expand if it catches on, like multiple subscription levels, different levels of permissions for different subscription levels, etc.