From Instagram’s Reels to Snapchat’s Spotlight, most social media platforms are looking for inspiration from the TikTok boom. Now even Reddit, a discussion-based forum, is making short videos clearer in its iOS app.
According to Reddit, most iOS users should have a button in their app just to the right of the search bar – when tapped it will show a stream of videos in a TikTok-like configuration. When a video is presented (showing the poster that uploaded it and the subreddit it was taken from), users can vote for or negative, comment, give away an award, or share. As with TikTok, users can swipe up to view another video, feed in content from subreddits to which the user has subscribed, as well as related subreddits. For example, if you have subscribed to r / printmaking, you may see content from r / pottery or r / bookbinding.
The videos’ user interface isn’t new – Reddit has experimented over and over with this format last year. Previously, however, this way of watching Reddit videos was only accessible by tapping on a video as you scrolled through your feed – rather than encouraging discovery of other communities, the first recommended videos would come from the same subreddit.
Photo credits: Reddit, screenshots from ProWellTech
“Reddit’s mission is to bring community and belonging to everyone in the world, and then the mission of Reddit’s video team is to bring community through video,” a Reddit spokesperson told ProWellTech of the new addition. “Over the past year, our goal has been to develop a unified video player and design the player’s user interface to meet the expectations of users (new and old) from an in-app video player – especially comments, new content and view, engage and discover communities through videos, ”they stated.
Reddit doesn’t have a timeline for launching the feature for everyone yet, but confirmed that this icon first appeared for some users in late July and has continued to roll out to almost all iOS users. By placing a wider, yet personalized video feed on the home screen, Reddit is signaling a growing curiosity about short videos. In December 2020, Reddit acquired Dubsmash, a TikTok competitor based in Brooklyn via Berlin. The terms of the deals were not disclosed, but so were Facebook and Snap reportedly showed interest on the platform, which reached 1 billion monthly views in January 2020.
Reddit declined to comment on whether its new video player uses an algorithm to encourage discovery of new subreddits based on user activity. However, a Reddit spokesperson confirmed that the company will use Dubsmash’s technology to develop more features, but not for this particular product, they said.
Reddit first launched its native video platform in 2017, which allows users to upload MP4 and MOV files to the site. Then, in August 2019, it started RPAN (Reddit Public Access Network), which enables live streams to selected subreddits – the most popular live streams are advertised across the platform. Reddit currently attracts 50 million active visitors daily and is home to 100,000 active subreddits.