The community-driven Reddit is a place where people can talk about practically anything.
After beta-testing chat rooms with about 7,000 users, over time, the test has spread across various groups on the platform. And finally, Reddit is making the feature public with a blog post explaining what it hopes to achieve with the feature.
“When we started, we knew that most people didn’t personally know other Redditors, since the core of the Reddit experience is pseudonymous sharing and discussion,” wrote ityoclys, a Reddit product designer who has been taking chat room feedback from users since 2017.
"So we wanted to make sure there was a place for people in the betas to test chat, give feedback, and have a bit of fun. Perhaps most importantly, we wanted to get to know people using chat and learn from them."
With the chat room feature, Reddit users can share their thoughts about posts or anything else with real Redditors, all in real time.
Chats are opt in for subreddits, and initially, not all subreddits have their own chat room, despite the feature is active site-wide.
For subreddits that already have their own chat rooms, they should appear under the 'Recommended Rooms' listing to the left of the window. There is also a list of rooms users have joined. If they are more than one, users can swap between them with a click.
Every user starts with an Reddit's Snoo avatar.
Clicking on the chat bubble should pull up the chat room feature in the lower-right side of the browser.
Clicking on any chat room allows users to view its full name as well as its description. To start chatting, users can simply click on the 'Join Room' button.
And just like the rest of Reddit, the appearance of chat rooms is minimalist to avoid distraction. Much of Reddit are focused on contents shared by other users.
When first launched, Reddit's chat rooms are like the long-lost AOL days where people were logging in to random rooms and connect to strangers.
And when it comes to Reddit and the internet, the chat rooms can be full of spam, racists, as well as those trolls and haters that just want to annoy people.
None of these should be shocking to anyone who has spent their time on the internet. However, Reddit is seeking moderation tools to control how things should go on in conversations. Reddit also promises to take feedback on the feature in an effort to make it better overtime.
"The nature of real-time, direct chat seems to be especially disarming," explained ityoclys.
"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."
Reddit's chat rooms are places where users can communicate in a more casual manner. It's like an alternative to subreddits, but one that doesn't need constant refresh to update.
