The corporate needs customers to have the ability to watch and take heed to conversations.
Reddit is understood for not likely altering a lot about its core options. It even maintains (for now) a 21-year-old model of its website for longtime customers who need every thing to at all times look the identical. However now the corporate is testing whether or not folks need to expertise posts and feedback with out having to learn partitions of textual content.
Reddit is starting to experiment with new audio and video options that make its textual content posts and feedback extra interactive, the corporate tells Engadget. With the check, which is beginning to roll out now on Reddit’s apps and web site, customers can select to take heed to posts or watch them as shortform movies.The corporate describes the check as a “restricted experiment” affecting “a pattern of posts throughout choose communities” on the platform. The brand new audio and video codecs will nonetheless hyperlink again to the unique textual content posts and feedback, which can “stay unchanged,” based on a Reddit spokesperson.
It isn’t but clear how Reddit is figuring out the place to check the brand new format, however the firm could be trying to spotlight posts folks would possibly come throughout in searches that always floor Reddit threads. In a single early instance shared by the corporate, an eight-year-old submit in r/boardgames asking for ideas for street journey video games for adults” has been transformed right into a three-minute video. The clip, which seems to make use of AI-generated voices, narrates the OP’s query and a number of the prime replies. The video is accompanied by textual content of the posts being narrated.
Although Reddit says this early experiment is supposed to grasp if customers suppose these kind of posts are “useful,” the corporate has lately added extra video options elsewhere within the app. In June, the platform launched video feedback, which permit Redditors to submit movies in remark threads that may then be watched in a full-screen participant.
The most recent check is a part of a broader effort from Reddit to attract extra new customers to the platform and hold informal lurkers coming again. CEO Steve Huffman previewed the change final month throughout the firm’s earnings name. “There’s an rising content material kind elsewhere on the web of principally podcasts the place folks learn Reddit content material, and so I feel this model of like listened-to or spoken-Reddit will be actually participating as properly,” he stated.
Replace, August 17, 2026, 5:45PM ET: This submit was up to date so as to add particulars about how this experiment is displaying up on Reddit, and so as to add that the function will probably be rolling out on the corporate’s web site and apps.
