Reddit Chief Product Officer Pali Bhat Shares Road Map for Remainder of 2022

Reddit chief product officer Pali Bhat shared a comprehensive overview of updates and improvements to the platform that are in the works for the rest of 2022. Bhat wrote in a blog post, “Let me start with my motivation for joining Reddit—all of you. Everyone who works at Reddit, including me, has the distinct privilege of serving an incredibly passionate and thoughtful community of people. People who engage in authentic and meaningful conversations, whether it’s in communities like r/astrophotography or r/cricket (two of my favorites) or places like r/AskReddit, r/CasualUK, r/Eldenring, r/StarTrekMemes, or the open canvas and incredible diversity of r/place. Together, these global communities have made Reddit the human face of the Internet. In my view, that's the magic of Reddit. And my team's mission is to do everything we can to ensure that the authentic, meaningful conversations that make Reddit what it is, continue to flourish as we bring Reddit to more people around the world. To make that happen, this year, the Reddit product team is focusing on empowering Redditors and their communities. We’re prioritizing work around five key pillars—making Reddit simple, universal, performant, excellent and relevant—these pillars will help us make Reddit super for all of you.” On the simplicity front, Bhat said Reddit will focus on better curation of communities, new live spaces for events such as Ask Me Anything sessions and livestreams, and making it easier for Redditors to explore posts and curated recommendations so they can discover communities on the platform. Ways to make posting easier that Reddit is working on include highlighting a community’s post requirements to provide clarity on what is and isn’t allowed and unifying post types on the platform so Redditors can embed image galleries or polls in text posts. Reddit is working to make its platform available in more languages, joining the current list of English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal) and Spanish (Mexico and Spain). The company is working with local teams to help connect users with relevant local content and build related communities, including partnering with local moderators to build experiences that are authentic to their communities and cultures and ensuring that its safety operations and machine learning efforts take into account the cultural nuances and differences of each new location. On the back end, Reddit has begun unifying its mobile and web clients to make them faster, clean up user experience debt and upgrade the underlying technology to a modern technology stack. For Redditors who prefer using the older web platform, referred to as Old Reddit, it will continue to be supported with updated safety features and bug fixes, but new features such as Reddit Talk will not be added to that experience. Bhat said 60% of actions by moderators still take place on Old Reddit. Speaking of Reddit Talk, the company is focusing on improving the audio, letting moderators add approved hosts and enabling individuals to host Reddit Talk sessions outside of communities, directly from their profiles. Reddit is also working on improving and expanding chat functionality, including teaming up with moderators on building out live chat posts within communities. Bug and performance issues to support different video resolutions, reduce buffering time and improve video caching are on the docket, as well. Bhat acknowledged that Reddit’s video player remains a work in progress, and he said the company will focus on the back end to ensure that videos and images load quicker and seamlessly. Features being crafted for the video player include better comment integration and gesture parity, and Bhat added, “One solution we’re looking into is making a swipe right navigation that takes you to a video’s comments, where you can watch a thumbnail version of the video while joining the discussion about it.” On the community front, Reddit will incorporate more signals, both negative and positive, into its algorithms and explore more ways for Redditors to provide direct feedback, such as telling Reddit to show them less or more of something. For moderators, Reddit will focus on real-time detection and systems to help the platform catch more content that violates its policies, such as spam and vote manipulation, and it will develop more features to enable users to manage their safety, such as the option of muting communities they aren’t interested in and new tools to more easily filter out unwanted content. To protect moderators from harassment, the company is exploring tiered engagement permissions with features including crowd control and approved users, along with ways to better identify and handle ban evasions. Reporting coverage is being expanded to make the process easier and more efficient, and the platform’s in-house tools are being streamlined to enable its agents to quickly and accurately make more informed decisions. Bhat addressed third-party developers, explaining, “There are a lot of passionate developers making great tools that Redditors and moderators use on the platform every day. Supporting and working with these developers will only make Reddit more extensible and make using Reddit better for everyone. This year, we’re exploring ways to support the creativity of third-party developers as they expand on the Reddit experience, while safeguarding the security and privacy of people on the platform.” Finally, Reddit is working on more ways for users to customize their avatars, such as by creating their own gear or better representing their contributions to the platform. Bhat concluded, “As I wrap this up, I want to say that this year is an exciting year for Reddit. We have an opportunity to bring Reddit to more people, and there’s a significant amount of responsibility in evolving a platform that’s become a home to so many people and communities. As stewards of this platform built and loved by all of you, we take that responsibility seriously—but it’s really you, the Reddit community, who will determine what Reddit is and what it will be.”

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Reddit Chief Product Officer Pali Bhat Shares Road Map for Remainder of 2022

The 5 key pillars are making the platform simple, universal, performant, excellent, relevant

David Cohen

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