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Reddit Becomes a Video Host

posted by martyb on Sunday August 20 2017, @02:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-always-wanted-to-be-a-VJ dept.

takyon writes:

Reddit will allow video uploads on certain subreddits:

Social news site Reddit today [August 17] announced the official launch of its video hosting feature, meaning users of certain pre-approved communities can now upload video directly to the site. The feature is already in place as part of a beta testing phase the company began conducting in late June with around 200 existing subreddits. Reddit says it's now ready to expand the feature to other communities, and that those interested can work directly with site moderators and the company's video team to enable the feature.

"We wanted to make sure we controlled the video experience, so we built this from the ground up with our in-house team," says Emon Motamedi, Reddit's product manager for video. "One of the big motivations of doing this was bringing more cohesion around the content and conversations."

Motamedi points to how most videos on Reddit are just YouTube links, or videos chopped up into GIFs hosted by third-party tools like Gfycat. This is usually a cumbersome process, and it's unfriendly to less media savvy internet users. A bigger problem is that it fractures discussion between where the content is hosted and where a user wants to discuss. Usually, Motamedi says, "you go to YouTube to watch the video and you come back to Reddit to comment." That's not ideal. "Because our platform has the best comments on the internet and because it's such a big use case for our users, we wanted to build that in-house," he adds.

The "anti-evil" team will have their work cut out for them.

Also at Reddit's blog and Ars Technica.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @01:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @01:44PM (#556669)

    i thought the green place failed and that videos were a large part of that.

    But... uh I think I can see that the average redditor is not the average user of fine textual presentation.

    I rarely find something there, but often I find the same unanswered questions I had getting worse than 'enthusiast' answers.

    I guess the gems in the rough make it worth it, but really, if it takes more time to watch the answer than to read it, I am going to seek other answers. Videos have their place... but usually once a site starts embedding video content, the people that are smart and concise have fled and the executives will move forward with ad revenue generation from this new type of content. Everyone will be encouraged to help the monetization, because video ads pay far better than static photos and text...