Reddit has rolled out a new chat room feature called “Start Chatting”, to enable group chats for communities.
These built-in messaging feature for subreddits will allow users to engage in group chats with other Reddit users. The social media platform is launching the feature to help community members connect amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
“This past month, as people around the world have been at home under various shelter-in-place restrictions, Redditors have been using chat at phenomenal new levels. Whether it’s about topics related to Covid-19, local news, or just their favorite games and hobbies, people all around the world are looking for others to talk to. Since Reddit is in a unique position to help in this situation, we’ve created a new tool that makes it easier to find other people who want to talk about the same things you do,” reads the official Reddit post announcing the feature.
Redditors can enable group chats from a subreddit by visiting a community and clicking on the ‘Start Chatting’ prompt. The feature will then match users with other members of that community in a small group chat selected at random.
“In our testing, we’ve already seen some interesting use cases for Start Chatting, such as meeting new people within conversation-oriented communities, discussing cliffhangers from the latest episode in our TV show communities, or finding others to game with online. We’re excited to see other use cases emerge as more and more Redditors get access to this feature,” the Reddit post read.
Since the feature enables users to directly message each other, Reddit is taking into consideration potential miscreants that could use the feature negatively.
“Because this feature uses our group chat functionality, our full Trust and Safety infrastructure is hooked up to monitor for abuse and spam. We will continue to watch for bad actors and take appropriate actions. Users are able to report directly to us in their chat experiences as well. These reports do not go to your queues,” said Alex Le, VP of Product at Reddit.
Start Chatting is being rolled out to about 16000 SFW subreddits this week and will become available to more communities in the coming weeks.