Reddit Uses Select Subreddits to Experiment with Discord-like Channels to Boost Community Interaction
Syed Imran Haider 
Reddit aims to offer more avenues for its community to interact with each other besides the typical asynchronous commenting system. On April 27, 2023 the company announced that it had begun experimenting with chat channels similar to Discord through select subreddits.
The test will begin with twenty-five volunteer subreddits. Although Reddit did not reveal a listing of those subreddits that would test chat channels, it said active communities comprise less than 100,000 individuals. The community navigation bar will have those channels persistent, allowing members to visit them frequently.
Reddit says previous chat products, including the community chat rooms, have taught them a lesson as they could not continue. The company plans to provide channel moderators with more controls. Moderators will have a choice whether or not they want to activate the feature for the Reddit community. Moderators will get a dedicated channel to talk about handling the subreddit. Furthermore, the platform is willing to introduce moderate tools, including enabling moderators to decide on who can participate in the conversation, supervise the chat queue, and moderate reported messages in a chat.
The Chat Channel Feature
The social network platform announced on r/modnews that it would introduce numerous features for chat channels. They may comprise pinned messages, threading, messaging editing, user mentions, and push notifications. Reddit has also started receiving an application from subreddit moderators who desires to check out the chat channels for their individual community.
According to a Reddit moderator, the company has launched this experiment to offer community members new ways to chat with each other. The message arrived as users repulsed the post with the channels’ announcement. They say everything asynchronous text-based Reddit communities need to flourish is vital to the company. Reddit also wants to offer options to communities and sub-groups that look to interact differently.
Reddit Communities
Many Reddit communities count on external real-time conversation servers, such as Discord, IRS, or Telegram, to help members chat with each other. The company anticipates announcing new chat channels may work like incentivizing the communities to keep going with the platform.
The social media network has used diverse ways to enhance live chats like Reddit Talk or Live Chat posts in the community. Since these live interactions are depreciated Clubhouse clones, many users appreciate how it makes conversation a breeze.
Experts in the tech industry believe that the number of social network sites continually working for innovative ways to enhance live interactions with their active members is almost zero. In that scenario, Reddit is the only tech firm with old and new live interaction ways that keeps digging for new innovative ways for its communities to host, manage, and enjoy conversations over the network.
In 2022, Meta-owned WhatsApp introduced a discussion group feature to help its users organize numerous groups around a club or school. On the other hand, Telepath’s developers have attempted to make group chats suck less with a diverse thread-based perspective in their latest app Wavelength, which works for groups of friends and semi-public chat rooms.
