Reddit is taking a small “evolutionary step” today, with the launch of multireddits in beta.
Of course, reddit users know that you’ve been able to construct multireddits (pages of multiple subreddits) for years. That involves chaining together a bunch of subreddits in a custom URL, for instance “reddit.com/r/atheism+space+mildlyinteresting+cats” and so on. With the launch of multireddits, reddit wants to make them “as ubiquitous and powerful as subreddits” – basically making them easier to find and share.
Here’s what reddit has to say in a blog post:
If subreddits give you the power to create your own reddit community, then multireddits give you the power to create your own public reddit front pages, each with their own selections of subreddits. We have reached the point where one front page can’t do reddit justice. So let’s make 9000! This functionality has been around for years in the form of creating custom URLs like /r/space+nasa+astronomy, but the goal is to make these distinct slices of reddit as ubiquitous and powerful as subreddits. In the process of curating and sharing these different front pages, there lies the potential to breathe life into smaller, more specific communities, because you can now participate in an order of magnitude more of them.
You can check out all the multireddit talk over at r/multibeta – but only if you’re a reddit gold member.
Reddit has been working on the project for about 6 months, and today they’re finally letting more users in on the fun.
“We can’t do this alone. It is our hope to directly involve the community in building and exploring these new tools for structuring and browsing reddit. What we have been working on is only version 0 of multireddits. There are tons of missing features and missed opportunities that will be evident in the first release. And as we hack our way towards version 1, there will be many more betas to take part in.”
Reddit knows it’s huge, and with that comes an inevitable logjam of information. Multireddits will help users sort through it all and develop communities that they really care about. Reddit says that they had 71 million unique visitors last month, who participated in 5,487 active subreddits.