INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
If you&d rather spend time chatting with strangers who share a hyper-specific interest instead of keeping up with your co-workers& stale
memes on Slack, Reddit is ready for you
The platform has quietly been working on a chat room feature for months now, and today it expands beyond its early days as a very limited
closed beta.
Plenty of subreddits already make use of a chat room feature, but these live outside of Reddit, usually on Slack or Discord
Given that, it makes sense for Reddit to lure those users back into the engaging on Reddit itself by offering its own chat feature.
I spent
a little time hanging out in the /r/bjj (brazilian jiu jitsu) chat as well as the psychedelics chat affiliated with r/weed to see how things
went across the spectrum, and it was pretty chill — mostly people asking for general advice or seeking answers to specific questions
In a Reddit chat linked to the r/community_chat subreddit — the hub for the new chat feature — redditors discussed if the rooms would
lead to more or less harassment and if the team should add upvotes, downvotes and karma to chat to make it more like Reddit normal threads
Of course, what I saw is probably a far cry from what chat will look like if and when some of its more inflammatory subreddits get their
We&ve reached out to Reddit with questions about if all subreddits, even the ones hidden behind content warnings, will be offered the new
chat functionality.
Chat rooms are meant as a supplement to already active subreddits, not a standalone community, so it basically like
watching a Reddit thread unfold in real time
On the Reddit blog, u/thunderemoji writes about why Reddit is optimistic that chat rooms won&t just be another trolling tool:
I was
initially afraid that most people would bring out the pitchforks and… unkind words
I was pleasantly surprised to find that most people are actually quite nice
The nature of real-time, direct chat seems to be especially disarming
Even when people initially lash out in frustration or to troll, I found that if you talk to them and show them you&re a regular human like
them, they almost always chill out.
Beyond just chilling out, people who are initially harsh or skeptical of new things will actually often
Sometimes they get so excited that they start to show up in unexpected places defending the thing they once strongly opposed in a way that
feels more authentic than anything I could say.
While a few qualitative experiences can only go so far to allay fears, Reddit chat does have
a few things going for it
For one, moderators add chat rooms
If a subreddit mods don&t think they can handle the additional moderation, they don&t have to activate the feature
(A Wired piece on the thinking behind chat explores some of these issues in more depth.)
In the same post, u/thunderemoji adds that Reddit
&made moderation features a major priority for our roadmap early in the process& so that mods would have plenty of tools at their disposal
Those tools include an opt-in process, auto-banning users from chat who are banned from a subreddit, &kick& tools that suspend a user for 1
minutes 1 hour, 1 day or 3 days, the ability to lock a room and freeze all activity, rate limits and more.
To sign up for chat rooms (mods
can add as many as they&d like once approved), a subreddit moderators can add their name to a list that lives here
To find chat rooms to explore, you can check for a link on subreddits you already visit, poke around the sidebar in this post by Reddit
product team or check out /r/SubChats, a dedicated new subreddit collecting active chat rooms that accompany interest and community-specific
