It took roughly 24 hours for Reddit to rethink its latest move and ultimately roll back the new chat room feature it debuted earlier this week.
In a statement issued to The Verge, Reddit confirmed that it has indeed disabled the Start Chatting feature in order to reassess its rollout plan and evolve the product to meet the needs of its community. The spokesperson added that issues and concerns voiced by users and moderators over the last 24 hours led to the decision.
In announcing the new feature, Alex Le, Reddit’s VP of product and community, said many users – including some that don’t always share feedback in comment threads – were using the feature and enjoying it. “My humble request is that you please try the feature out and consider the potential it has to help like-minded people connect with one another,” he added.
Reddit has experimented with private group messaging in the past. The platform tested community-wide chat rooms in 2018, but it wasn’t a huge success; most of them weren’t particularly active, and many had their share of jerks and spammers that you’d expect from a quasi-anonymous online community. Whether this new iteration sees greater success may depend on if Reddit can effectively moderate chat rooms’ content while still letting users feel comfortable expressing themselves.
