Reddit, the popular social network known for its “tree of posts” asynchronous commenting system, has announced that it is testing a new feature that will allow community members to interact with each other through Discord-like chat channels.
Reddit is currently experimenting with this new feature on a trial basis, starting with 25 volunteer subreddits with less than 100,000 members. The channels will remain visible on the community navigation bar, enabling members to access them easily and repeatedly.
Giving Moderators More Control
The new feature will give moderators more control over the chat channels, including the ability to choose who can participate in the chat, manage the chat queue, and moderate reported messages in a conversation. The company also plans to introduce additional features for channels, including threading, pinned messages, user mentions with push notifications, and messaging editing for the sender in the future.
Taking cues from its previous chat products such as the discontinued community chat rooms feature, Reddit intends to empower moderators with greater control. The new feature will incorporate a special channel exclusively for moderators to communicate about managing the subreddit, and they will have the freedom to determine whether they wish to enable the feature for their community.
Reddit’s Plans for Chat Channels
Reddit revealed in the r/modnews subreddit that it intends to incorporate additional functionalities to channels, such as threading, pinned messages, user mentions with push notifications, and message editing for the sender, in the future.
Reddit is inviting moderators of subreddits who are interested in experimenting with the chat channels feature for their community to submit applications. This initiative is anticipated to encourage communities to utilize the platform’s internal chat feature rather than depending on external real-time chat servers such as Telegram, Discord, or IRC.
A Step towards Real-time Conversations
The new chat channels feature is a step towards real-time conversations, which is something that many communities on Reddit have been requesting for a long time. Currently, Reddit’s commenting system is an asynchronous one, which means that users can only comment on posts or reply to comments, but they cannot have real-time conversations.
Reddit is not the sole organization providing new ways for communities to facilitate discussions. In the past year, WhatsApp launched its discussion group feature that enables the creation of groups for various purposes, such as school or club-related activities. On the other hand, the developers of Telepath social network have introduced an innovative thread-based technique in their latest app, Wavelength, to enhance group conversations. The app caters to both small groups of friends and extensive semi-public chat rooms.
In conclusion, the new chat channels feature is a significant step forward for Reddit, and it is likely to be welcomed by many communities on the platform. If successful, the feature could become a standard feature of the site, and it could encourage more users to use Reddit as their primary social network.
