Reddit says it wants to “look and feel more lively and in the moment,” so it’s adding new features like voting and comment count animations, typing and reading indicators, and a new comment pill.
The features pretty much do what they say on the tin: offer real-time indications of activity on a given thread, show when people are engaging with those threads, and display a mostly unobtrusive notification when someone posts a new comment to an open thread, respectively.
These changes are supposed to make Reddit seem more “in-the-moment,” the company says, as opposed to a mostly static website that only changes when someone refreshes the page in their browser. That experience was to be expected when the site launched in 2005; now it’s not.
It does seem kind of strange to have real-time information about how many people are reading and responding to a particular thread. These indicators make sense on instant messaging platforms, for example, because they can dissuade people from talking over each other.
Reddit is different. The platform is fundamentally asynchronous—these features won’t change that. But they are part of Reddit’s broader push to compete with other social platforms that have embraced real-time features to convince people to use their services more often.
The company released an update in March that made it clear when Reddit users are online, for example, and it started testing the Clubhouse-like Reddit Talk feature in April. And of course it gave the gift of live-streaming to acoustic guitar players everywhere in August 2019.
Now the core Reddit experience—reading and responding to discussion threads—will gain these pseudo-interactive features to “help redditors connect in real time.” Reddit says the features are rolling out now on the platform’s website as well as the official iOS and Android mobile apps.
