Reddit Brings New Chat Room Feature for Subreddits Like Discord. Reddit announced Thursday that it is testing Discord-like chat channels with select subreddits. With this move, the social network is trying to give more avenues for community members to interact with each other apart from the usual asynchronous commenting system.
The company said it is starting this test with 25 volunteer subreddits — the company didn’t share a list of those subreddits. It specified that participating communities have less than 100,000 members. Reddit said that channels will be persistent on the community navigation bar so members can revisit them frequently.
Reddit Brings New Chat Room Feature for Subreddits Like Discord
The company mentioned that it has learned from previous chat products like the community chat rooms feature, which was discontinued in 2020. In particular, it plans to give more control to moderators. The new feature will have a dedicated channel for moderators to chat about managing the subreddit. Plus, they will be able to decide if they want to enable this feature for the community in the first place.
Additionally, the platform is giving moderators tools like the ability to choose who can participate in the chat, manage the chat queue and moderate reported messages in a conversation.
This feature’s arrival doesn’t mean there weren’t any chat features available on the platform, there are already direct messages and a live chat option, but this new one will offer various tools.
As users know, the Live Chat feature is focused on only one-off posts, and on the other side, the new chat feature gives dedicated spaces to chat on different conversations on specific topics of a subreddit.
This feature’s arrival doesn’t mean there weren’t any chat features available on the platform, there are already direct messages and a live chat option, but this new one will offer various tools.
As users know, the Live Chat feature is focused on only one-off posts, and on the other side, the new chat feature gives dedicated spaces to chat on different conversations on specific topics of a subreddit.
In its initial stage, Reddit only added it to around 25 selected subreddits, and it noted that these subreddits are “small and medium-sized communities” that have less than 100,000 members.
However, they have a future plan to expand chats to other subreddits, but with that, the company also wants to provide better moderation control to mods on those channel chats.
As they revealed in the r/modnews subreddit, mods are going to get features for channels, such as threading, pinned messages, user mentions with push notifications, and messaging editing for the sender in the future.
After this announcement, many people showed their reaction as Reddit copied one more feature from popular Discord.
The company has a future plan to expand chats to other subreddits, but with that, they also want to provide better moderation control to mods on those channel chats. They revealed in the r/modnews subreddit that mods are going to get features for channels such as threading, pinned messages, user mentions with push notifications, and messaging editing for the sender in the future.
After this announcement, many people reacted to Reddit copying one more feature from the popular Discord. However, Reddit’s new Chat Channels feature provides users with more options and tools to engage with other users in dedicated spaces within subreddits.