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Hi Mods,
I’m u/ryfi-- a product manager on the Chat team here at Reddit. We’re here to share some updates on an experiment we’re developing called chat channels. To us and to many of you, Reddit is the best place on the internet to have conversations about niche interests, news and events, and everything in between. We’ve been working on ways for Redditors both new and seasoned to have additional ways to communicate with one another - this is where chat channels come in.
Below we go into more detail on what the chat channels experiment is, why we are investing in real-time chat features, and how we are partnering with mods to build it.
Chat Channels
Whether on or off Reddit, we know that many Redditors are chatting with each other. Chat channels are an additional way for users to communicate in a fun and casual way on their favorite subreddits, and for mods to have their own convenient spaces to manage their communities - all without having to leave Reddit. Some examples of how you can use chat channels in your community include:
- connecting with your mod team privately about subreddit plans
- posting or finding tickets to a sold-out concert
- getting real-time support on a math problem
- watching and reacting to the latest drama unfolding in an episode premiere
- discussing breaking news in your town so that others get updates as it happens
Chat channels are embedded in your subreddit so that you can seamlessly switch between chatting and posting and commenting. Channels are also found in the chat module along with your other group and one-to-one chats so that all of your conversations are in one place.
Chat channels inside a subreddit
Chat channels inside your chat tab
What we’ve learned about chat
Oh, we know. We know. We've launched several Chat products in the past...and not in the best ways. So we're taking a different approach (and hopefully better one at that) with chat channels.
Over the past few years, we’ve explored a number of ways to facilitate chat for users who want to connect in a more real-time way. We’ve learned a lot from how our previous attempts fell short and where our current chat products are limited – from lack of sufficient mod tools to a not so simple user experience. We are also taking this opportunity to focus on more niche, smaller communities early on in the process and ensure we are providing an array of tools that all communities, no matter the size, can use. We’re starting with a small set of features and building over time to ensure that we get it right for mods and users before expanding.
Tools, tools, tools…
With these learnings in mind, we’re developing the first prototype of chat channels with a variety of mod tools and safety features. The experience will be available on our native mobile apps first, and will eventually launch on desktop web once the logged-in phase of our improved web experience is complete.
Our first set of chat channels tools and features are:
- mod-only chat channels for mods to connect with one another
- controls to determine which members can participate in chat channels
- the ability to moderate from a specific chat queue to flag and remove content
- in-line chat moderation of reported messages
We’ll also be tackling the following features on the roadmap:
- show mods a users message history
- ability to pin important messages in the channel
- threading and push notifications
- user mentions and push notifications
- edit your own message
Mods can pin a message inside a chat channel
We’re also focusing on establishing our chat infrastructure so that we can eventually launch more tools and features that demand more complexity. This means eventually giving you the ability to leverage your existing automod rules for chat channels, create custom channel roles, and build highly requested tools like slow mode for high volume moments in the future. We have some ambitious ideas and we’ll be learning, developing, and iterating as we go with mod input along the way.
With our powers combined: building with mods
Speaking of mod input, starting Wednesday, April 26th, we’re partnering with 25 small and medium-sized communities (less than 100,000 members) to test chat channels and share their feedback directly with our team. Our goals are to measure positive outcomes in community engagement and identify additional needs for mods to manage successful chats. Once we’ve concluded the first phase of our pilot, we’ll be expanding to invite more communities into the experience!
If you are interested in getting involved in our next phase, check out the program application for criteria and instructions.
We are excited about the explorations ahead! If you have thoughts or questions on these experiments, or if you’d like to share how you would use Chat Channels in your own communities, let us know in the comments below.
Edit: formatting
For our initial pilot, we don’t have ways to share a channel across multiple communities, but that’s a really neat idea. In what circumstances would you want to do this?
Most of the communities I moderate are fairly small, but are on very similar topics and share a large fraction of their users, so it would make things a lot easier and the rooms a lot more lively if we could direct users to the same chatroom. With the old Subreddit Chat feature, we could somewhat effectively do this by putting the chatroom in the largest sub and having the smaller ones put a button in the sidebar that linked to the invite for the main chatroom. If that could be made to work including on the mobile app where direct links to features almost always break, it would probably be good enough, though more integration like this for related or networked communities would be nice.
On bots - what kind of bots are you using now, and how would you like to use them (outside of dev platform) with chat channels?
We're mainly using ours for spam and abuse filtering, and restrictions on Dev Platform wouldn't allow us to ever port our bot there (honestly, we're concerned the API policy changes may shut it down even on the legacy API, but I've asked that on another post, still hoping for a response there). We'd mainly want access to any moderation features, so we could get a feed of messages and delete messages or kick/ban users as needed with our automation. Sending messages would be nice too, and this should be available in both the Dev Platform and off-platform bots using the traditional API.
Appreciate the callout on disallowing images, we’ll dig into that more as well.
I'd appreciate it if this could be taken seriously, as it is a critical safety feature we've been asking for since a few hours after launch when people began abusing it to send our users dick pics and much worse. The only way to stop seeing these is to turn off chat (or stop accepting any invites ever), which is generally the goal of the abuser: the victim turning off chat means they can no longer participate in the community at all, making this a very effective and inescapable form of retaliation.
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When this is rolled out to everyone, will it default to off, or will we have to keep an eye on it to turn it off like the last time around? And will we be able to turn it off from desktop? None of our mods have access to the app.
Will there be a way to use the same channel across multiple communities, and will bots (including our existing one, not just dev platform) be able to moderate it? If we're ever to use this, we especially need a way to disallow images, given how prolifically they're abused in user-to-user chats (still waiting for that safety feature there). We may want to use this someday if it ever reaches desktop in a usable way, and the old Subreddit Chat feature we used was somewhat hindered for our use by its being tied to a single community and inaccessible to bots.