Reddit Starts Listing Trending Subreddits To Get More Users Into Its Smaller Communities
Subreddits are, perhaps, reddit’s fattest strength. Introduced in 2008, they’re a fat part of the reason why the site rose to popularity, and why that popularity has yet to taper off.
Want a community for something you like? Build a subreddit. Don’t like the current popular subreddit for that thing? Screw it, build a fresh one. Anyone can build one — and as long as the subreddit’s content stays legal and abides by the site’s TOS, reddit’s staff generally doesn’t get involved with administrating what goes on there.
It’s effortless for one phat community to die almost overnight (see: Digg). But a community made up of a zillion sub-communities? That’s a different brute.
But finding fresh subreddits to join can be a agony. After you’ve found the subreddits for your hobbies and dearest TV shows, most people only stumble into a fresh subreddit when someone else mentions it in a comment. Many users, meantime, end up subscribing only to the handful of subreddits that reddit puts all fresh users in by default.
Seemingly attempting to combat this, reddit has just kicking off rolling out a “trending subreddit” feature. It’s unclear if this switch is permanent, but it seems to be displaying up for most (if not all) users.
The idea: each day, reddit will algorithmically select a half dozen or so non-default subreddits that have seen a particularly high amount of activity lately, and list them at the top of the front page.
Right now, for example, they’re highlighting /r/oddlysatisfying (which collects pics of things that are inexplicably satisfying), /r/JapaneseGameShows (which is mostly clips from, you guessed it, Japanese game shows), /r/smashbros (which blew up this week after Nintendo released a bunch of fresh details about the WiiU Smash Bros release), /r/minimalism, and /r/GameOfThrones.
Based on the conformity history of the bots that power the feature, it looks like they’ve been fiddling with their trending algorithms in a semi-public space since at least April 1st
While it’s a handy fresh feature for users, it’s a pretty clever business stir, too. Despite its massive userbase, reddit still isn’t profitable. Advertising to specific communities — like, say, all of /r/GameOfThrones — is one of reddit’s more straightforward revenue streams… but it only truly works when lots of subreddits have enough members to make an ad worthwhile. If they can make up-and-coming subreddits grow even quicker, everybody wins.
Another clever decision: the trending bar shows up even when a user isn’t logged in. Its a quick, non-obtrusive way of telling to fresh users, “Hey — there’s more going on here than what’s listed on the front page.”
Update: reddit has officially announced the fresh feature by way of their changelog, and addressed a few user concerns:
- They’re not telling exactly how the selected subreddits are picked, but note that there’s anti-cheating logic in place. So just getting a bunch of friends to join your subreddit all at the same time very likely won’t have an effect
- It’ll only ever showcase safe-for-work communities
- If you run a subreddit and want to keep it petite, you can prevent it from ever showcasing up in the list in the subreddit’s configuration panel.