Did you know that last month Reddit had over 71 million unique visitors or that it’s quickly closing in on 5 billion pageviews? That’s unfathomably huge for a site that just celebrated its 8th birthday, right? Also there are an increasing number of different subreddits to post to, which currently stands at approximately 5,487. Reddit started out as a singularly close-knit community. Eventually this community grew to the point where its members began to differ on what they really wanted to see. Thus subreddits were born, which gave everyone the unique ability to create an entirely new Reddit community and experience focused on whatever topics they most cared about, like one of my favorites r/pics, a collection of funny and amazing pics from all across the web. These subreddits can also be used to create and organize movements while spawning new ideas.
According to Reddit:
Scale can be the life blood of a diverse and vibrant community, but it can also be its worst enemy. The evolution of reddit is a story of walking this line carefully. Being big isn’t inherently bad; it’s a challenge for sure, but it also presents huge opportunities for us to make our collective voices heard and to share ever more specific, meaningful communities.
As the Reddit community continues to grow exponentially, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to organize and follow all the subreddit threads you’d like to. So Reddit has introduced multireddits, which gives you the power to create your own public front pages, each with its own selections of subreddits.
Reddit’s reasoning behind the move:
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.
The new feature is in beta, currently open only to Reddit gold users, and available at r/multibeta. Also, you can get one month of Reddit gold to try this out for free, just by sending those good folks a postcard. Reddit will also be releasing the beta code via open source “whenever reasonable” and you can follow the Reddit open source project here.
Future sailors of the Interweb, sail on!
Are you on Reddit? Are you interested in creating your own multireddits?
You can also check out our new socialhumor multireddit here 🙂
