Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has hinted that in future some subreddits could be paywalled, as the company seeks to devise...
“I think the existing, altruistic, free version of Reddit will continue to exist and grow and thrive just the way it has,” Huffman said. “But now we will unlock the door for new use cases, new types of subreddits that can be built that may have exclusive content or private areas, things of that nature.”
I think it could be the "digg v4" of reddit. People want to use the most popular free platform. If faced with a paywall on reddit, they'll just go somewhere else. Most likely people will go over to Threads, but maybe some will find Lemmy.
Spikes are not that interesting. In fact, hey can harm more than be useful (server problems during peak, maybe for days, sudden cost increase for maintainer) if its not an organic and slow increase. The longterm conversion rate is much more important.