The users of reddit are downright hostile toward anyone trying to make money. There was a thread last week about paid accounts. Out of 2000 comments, I think I only found one or two people supporting the idea. Most of the comments were somewhere along the lines of "paid accounts creates two classes of users and everyone should be equal" and "it's not my job to figure out how reddit makes money" (advertisements are actively blocked by 30% of users).
When your userbase is filled with college kids and anti-capitalist, you are going to have a tough time making money,
There had been a donation drive the week prior to that, which was very well supported. I think people were saying that they thought the idea of 'paid accounts' just wasn't going to work as well as the donation drive had. The idea being that once people are paying for a actual service they expect more for their money.
After all, they're aiming for 2% of the userbase subscribing. That's a large number when they're offering basically nothing of value in return. I know other 'freemium' business get 1-2% subscribers, but surely that's when they're offering a real improvement in the service, such as Dropbox's 2GB -> 20GB.
"There is a good argument that advertising actively moves you away from the EMH which is one of the strongest arguments in favor of capitalism."
I said anti-capitalist because many people were against advertisements and the gold accounts. While there may be many people lurking on reddit that are not anti-capitalist, it's a sentiment I see in almost every topic related to making money on that site.
Yep. I think it's a valuable business lesson: unless you know what your plan to make money is, don't announce that your attitude is "ads are bad". Although I think they'll figure out how to make money, this situation could've been avoided if they ran ads from early on and weren't loudly against them.
Also keep in mind that out of the 2000 comments, I imagine a large number of gold members didn't respond. I know I didn't.
The users of reddit are wide and varied. There is a significant number of redditors who have demonstrated their willingness to pay reddit, me among them, and don't regret it.
In my experience, the first rule to learn about reddit is "when not to comment/reply". So what you say rings true to me: People know better than to comment on threads like that because the vocal "i hate this" types may decide to harass you, and who needs that?
