Comment by anenefan

Oh I think the powers that be at reddit have worked out even converting a small percentage of the lurkers into members will be quite beneficial. Once a member there's a higher likelihood the new member will engage and consume more - thus more ad revenue or eventually choose to move over to ad free subscription.

As for creating a wall though, reddit is very large and has a huge mass of users, but eventually some of the users will move to other areas more tolerant and less interested in capitalising their comments, users which are more interested in sharing their pearls of wisdom or hard gained knowledge with all of the web.

As to a similar situation to Netflix's actions - There's a difference though IMO between a limited amount of choices to consume new tv series and movies vs yet another forum like area ... If one wants to watch a new series or movie, one has to make a choice how that's done ... if an area on the web becomes less than desirable to visit that doesn't have anything unique, there's honestly no absolute need to include it and continue to consume elsewhere, like a tv series that's going down hill fast, for many there's a point they stop and watch something else. So there's no real choice apart from consequential things like evaluating how important a thread from such a place might be that turns up in a search engine if one is looking for answers or whether to engage where a thread from the walled area has been linked, with anything more than superficial banter in such threads outside of the walled site.