In 2023, Reddit will roll out new features that will highlight its native video progress. In a blog post, the platform known as the “front page of the internet” revealed its plans for the coming year. Among other developments, Reddit will roll out separate feeds for text and video content.
The new feeds will be titled “Read” and “Watch” respectively. The former hub will look a lot like the current version of Reddit, though the company will tweak its design so that it can display upvoted posts in a “decluttered interface.”
The Watch feed, on the other hand, will look a lot like TikTok. It will scroll infinitely through videos that have been posted to each user’s selected subreddits. In a blog post, Reddit said “video lovers” will be the target audience for Watch.
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“We have an inspiring and enduring mission to bring community, belonging, and empowerment to the world, so we are doubling down on simplifying Reddit – with user satisfaction and international growth top of mind. This means making Reddit easier to use for everyone,” said Reddit Chief Product Officer Pali Bhat in the blog post. “By focusing on the core tenets of Reddit, new and existing users coming to Reddit will be greeted by better experiences and options to discover new and interesting content and communities in uncluttered spaces.”
In order to populate the Watch feed, Reddit will rely on its native video player, which it launched in 2017. Over the past five years, the platform has encouraged its users to shift more of their video uploads to its in-house player, rather than using third-party hosting services like YouTube or Streamable.
Reddit’s recent status update also remarked on the ability to search within individual comment threads. That feature hit the platform in February, so if you want to look through the top post on /r/prequelmemes to find that great Jar-Jar joke you saw, now you can.
Specific rollout dates for the rest of these incoming changes have not yet been revealed. Reddit told users that they should subscribe to the platform’s official subreddit if they want to stay abreast of the upcoming developments.
