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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @01:45PM (2 children)
This is definitely not the problem. Adding support for automatic inline embedding of YouTube links would be trivial. You can play/close/interact with the video inline with minimal development effort. See here [voat.co] for an example on Voat which is based on the Reddit interface. Same thing with images. And this has 0 server overhead. Reddit's UI is just poorly done and more geared towards commercialization (e.g. trending things popping up in the bottom right) than optimizing the user experience.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 20 2017, @01:59PM (1 child)
Reddit Enhancement Suite also adds support for embedded YouTube IIRC, and non-embeddable YouTube videos (an option for the uploader) are a tiny minority on YouTube. Reddit's "you go to YouTube to watch the video and you come back to Reddit to comment" explanation doesn't make any sense.
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(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday August 22 2017, @12:21AM
A third party extension doesn't invalidate the argument. If anything it supports it: clearly there is motivation to streamline the viewing process and a workaround exists in modern browsers.