A few months ago, Reddit introduced person-to-person and group chat capabilities to its platform, and now in recognition of a new problem presented by the fleeing of subreddit communities to third-party platforms such as Discord to engage in community messaging and chat rooms, the social platform is getting ready to introduce in-house community chat rooms to keep users from having to leave.
“We are constantly testing new products and features that improve the Reddit experience and bring community and belonging to everyone in the world,” a Reddit spokesperson announced. “We’ve been working on an exciting feature that extends the capabilities of our chat product — which we launched late last year — to groups of users and communities. We’re testing the new chat product with a small number of communities and will roll the feature out to more users after we collect feedback, make updates and continue to improve the experience […] There are also a bunch of subreddits that are more organically social in nature, and right now they need to leave Reddit to create the experience they want.”
At the moment, Reddit’s testing is only taking place on the website, while having plans to bring it over to the Reddit mobile apps later on. Those who are currently in test groups with access to the new feature can view the chat rooms as both an integrated overlay as well as through a pop-up functionality to open rooms in other windows.
