What they should do is do it the same as Wikipedia. I'm not sure what Reddit's costs are like, but if they did a donation drive where it was a choice of donating or more ads, I bet the community would chip in.
Yeah, I think they gotta do more than that though. Go straight up like Jimmy Wales and just say we need X dollars, if you want reddit to stay up. Maybe give reddit gold as a bonus to everyone who donates.
The biggest problem with Reddit Gold is it seems like a feature you can live without (especially if you use reddit enhancement suite). They don't emphasize enough that it's a donation to keep the site going.
Wikipedia is shady at best about how much money they actually need from the community. Reddit does not internet to receive people into giving up money. The recent push to giving gold sounds pretty cool.
The userbase would balk. Private subreddits are already a feature. Asking users to pay money for something they currently use for free would tick off power users who have ungodly influence among the users. I think I get what you're talking about, but Reddit is not like Github enough to pull that off.
That might be viable, but I can imagine that wikipedia receives a large portion of it's donations from the charitable perspective that donating to wikipedia equals furthering human knowledge. Or something to that effect.
I would guess their costs are several steps above Wikipedia. Yes, Wikipedia is pretty much ubiquitous, but I know personally that I only visit Wikipedia occasionally (i.e. not every day) and I only visit a few pages. On the other hand, when I was an active redditor, I'd visit hundreds of reddit pages every day.
Tack on the part where bandwidth is more expensive than equivalent amounts of storage, and you've got yourself a reddit that costs a lot more than Wikipedia.
I'm willing to bet Wikipedia uses far more bandwidth than Reddit. Reddit barely hosts any images, it's mostly just all text, plus plenty of sites hotlink Wikipedia images.
This is a good point, reddit has plenty of images but they are generally hosted elsewhere. The images they do host directly are fairly static, and can be cached.
