Since start of the war of attrition with adblockers, the writing is on the wall for eventhubs. Not saying it's going under, but you're straight up saying that your old business model doesn't work.
Of course, introducing a
new business model which inflames even
more people doesn't seem to be the right way to go either.
Thing is that they might make more money using that model than they ever would with ads given the price disparity per conversion (whether it's a membership or a click/impression).
Slightly better than the fox:
Up/down voting isn't strictly a Reddit feature, it's just the first to do it on such a large scale. The problem with it being implemented here as well as the SRK/IPW implementations (through Disqus) is that they just slapped it on and enabled the feature without leading the community on what the use should be.
As a result, they ended up with people upvoting and downvoting for no particular reason (which is fine, in a way). It's not that people should be
forced to vote in a particular way, but if you want it to serve as a metric for something meaningful, you have to take the initiative and prepare your community for it.
The eight minutes that Catalyst used for describing why they need you to disable adblock (or fork over $20) would have been better spent telling the community what they hope to see in the voting, as well as what they would use it for.
Also, (and in the SRK/IPW implementations) they should have made the voting anonymous. Right now, people are really open to retaliation voting (especially on the SRK/IPW implementations).
Personally, I think the Stack Exchange model is the best (disclaimer, I'm a diamond mod on Stack Overflow, so, yeah, I'm biased).
I just hope that they don't try and sell this as a value-add for the $20 subscription. That kind of tech doesn't justify the cost.
Catalyst. I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he's so involved and passionate about what he's doing that he can't see the forest from the trees. It's difficult to accept that your passion isn't shaping up to be what you envisioned, and can lead to a doubling down on existing, ineffective strategies instead of adapting to the market and trying to find ways to come out ahead (even if it means getting out of the game).