Reddit adds chat room functionality for subreddit communities
Reddit is implementing chat room functionality for the site's subreddit communities in an effort to drive collaboration and traffic.
According to the Reddit development team, the implementation of live chatroom functionality was in order to cultivate community collaboration all within Reddit without needing to defer to third party apps built for collaboration such as Slack. Reddit believes that making it so the collaboration process occurs from start to finish solely on the social bookmarking site will grow their communities and help Reddit's image as a singular social destination.
According to Engadget, the community chat rooms will not have varied rulesets akin to the communities they represent. However, in addition to the standard bans, keyword filtering, locks, and rate limiting to moderate the rooms, there will be an extension-esque programming kit to allow subreddits to develop custom specific features.
It is easy to draw comparisons to the now discontinued AIM service that popularized non-IRC chat rooms (indeed, even the Reddit blog post announcing the feature invites the comparison). However, it is yet to be seen how Reddit's modern implementation of this idea will succeed where its predecessors have failed.
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Reddit (stylized in its logo as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. Registered members submit content to the site such as links, text posts, and images, which are then voted up or down by other members.