If you’ve been online recently you probably know this already: audio-based social media platforms in the style of Clubhouse are all the rage at the moment, with every other social media network looking to get in on the action with their own versions of the platform. Reddit is the latest big name to announce a copy.
Reddit wants to Talk
This Clubhouse duplicate is called “Reddit Talk”, and it’s currently in a trial phase wherein only community moderators can host talks. It’s effectively another audio-based feature but Reddit-flavoured. The feature lets you voice-chat with members of your community. Hosts can create rooms, and other users can join them, listen in on conversation, and offer reactions in the form of emojis (like Facebook’s Fireside).
🎙 Introducing Reddit Talk
I feel incredibly lucky to work with an amazing team to bring voice conversations to Reddit's 100K+ communities.
So how is this product different? 👇 https://t.co/0TOGPT9fW1
— Peter Yang (@petergyang) April 19, 2021
Peter Yang, Reddit’s product manager, explains some nuances to the feature via his Twitter account. Much like with the rest of Reddit, pseudo-anonymity is key here. “Who you are should matter less than what you have to say,” says Yang, hoping that such anonymity will “lead to more authentic conversations around people’s interests.”
In terms of moderation, Yang outlines that Talk will rely on community moderators to keep things civil in chats, which will probably work just fine in the testing phase, but might be a bit harder to manage with a full release. Time will tell. Yang says there are ideas for more quirks to add to the feature, like “Letting communities personalize talks,” and, “Letting people seamlessly transition between audio, text, emojis, and other ways to express themselves”.
This would go a long way towards making it a far more personalized experience in theory, but we’ll wait to see how it turns out. Again, the feature is still going through a trial run, so we’ll have to wait for a full release to judge.
If you’re a community mod, you can sign up to try Reddit Talk out here.
Source: The Next Web