It feels like the "natural" development of VC funded websites - they offer a service that's heavily subsidized and losing money hand over fist to displace other services (I guess in Reddit's case it was self-hosted forums and similar?).
But that's clearly not sustainable, it's inevitable they'll pivot to monetizing the service - and that's clearly going to make it less attractive than the heavily-subsidized version people have gotten used to.
I guess the ideas is to lock the users in to the degree that the increasing monetization is put up with, and slowly enough there's no "sticker shock" of a previously-free service suddenly having a price.
I'm constantly amazed people are surprised by this, isn't it obvious that tying to a loss-leader service isn't sustainable?
But that's clearly not sustainable, it's inevitable they'll pivot to monetizing the service - and that's clearly going to make it less attractive than the heavily-subsidized version people have gotten used to.
I guess the ideas is to lock the users in to the degree that the increasing monetization is put up with, and slowly enough there's no "sticker shock" of a previously-free service suddenly having a price.
I'm constantly amazed people are surprised by this, isn't it obvious that tying to a loss-leader service isn't sustainable?