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Reddit Becomes a Video Host

Accepted submission by takyon at 2017-08-19 18:47:57
Techonomics

Reddit will allow video uploads [theverge.com] on certain subreddits:

Social news site Reddit today 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 [redditblog.com] and Ars Technica [arstechnica.com].


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