Reddit expands chat rooms to more subreddits – TechCrunch



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If you prefer to spend time talking to strangers who share a hyper-specific interest rather than following the same obsolete coworkers on Slack, Reddit is ready for you. The platform has been working quietly on a chat room feature for months and today it extends beyond its debut as a very limited closed beta.

Many subreddits already use an online chat function but outside Reddit, usually on Slack or Discord. Given this, it makes sense for Reddit to attract these users in Reddit itself by offering its own chat feature.

I spent some time hanging out in the discussion / r / bjj (brazilian jiu jitsu) as a psychedelic cat affiliated with r / weed to see how things were going across the spectrum and that It was cold enough – most of the time people ask for general advice or seek answers to specific questions. In a Reddit chat related to sub-directory r / community_chat subreddit – the hub of the new chat feature – the redditors discussed whether the rooms would lead to more or less harassment and if the team should add upvotes, downvotes and karma The normal sons of Reddit. Of course, what I've seen is probably far from what the cat will look like if and when some of its more incendiary subreddits get their hands on the new feature. We contacted Reddit to ask if all subreddits, even those hidden behind the content warnings, will be offered the new chat feature.

Chat rooms are a complement to already active subroutines, not an autonomous community, so it's essentially like watching a thread of Reddit unfold in real time. On the Reddit blog, u / thunderemoji writes why Reddit is optimistic that newsgroups will not be just another trolling tool:

"I first feared that most people get the forks out.I've been pleasantly surprised to find that most people are rather kind.The nature of the live chat in real time seems to be particularly disarming.Even when people are out there take frustration or troll first, I found that if you talk to them and show them that you are an ordinary human like them, they almost always relax

". At first hard or skeptical of new things often will change their minds often. Sometimes they are so excited that they start appearing in unexpected places defending the thing that they once opposed in a way that seems more authentic than anything I could say . "

While some qualitative experiences can only go far fears, the Reddit chat has a few things that lend themselves to it.For example, moderators add chat rooms. subreddit do not do it, they do not think they can handle the extra moderation, they do not need to activate the feature. (An article from Wired on the thought behind the chat explores some of these issues more in depth.)

In the same article, u / thunderemoji adds that Reddit "makes moderation features a top priority for our roadmap early in the process." The mods would have plenty of tools at their disposal. These tools include an opt-in process, automatically prohibiting chat users who are banned from a subreddit, "kick" tools that suspend a user for 1 minute, 1 hour, 1 day or 3 days , the possibility lock a room and freeze all activities, speed limits and more.

To subscribe to discussion forums (mods can add as many as they wish once approved), moderators of a subreddit can add their name to a list. To find chat rooms to explore, you can check a link on the subreddits that you have already visited, take a look at the sidebar in this article by the Reddit Product Team or discover / r / SubChats, a new dedicated subreddit subreddits specific to the community.

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