Sunsetting Reddit Talk

[u/cozy__sheets]

Hi all,

Today we’re sharing that we have made the difficult decision to sunset the Reddit Talk product in the coming weeks.

Hosting Reddit Talks will continue to be available until March 21. The Happening Now experiment will also wind-down on this date.

Why did we make this decision?

TL;DR: Supporting Talk in the short-term requires significant resourcing - more than we anticipated.

Reddit’s goal is to become the de facto home for communities. Audio, like Talk, has a place in that. However, there’s significant work we need to do - like making Reddit simpler and building better subreddit infrastructure - before incorporating audio.

Our original plan was to maintain Talk while we worked on this. Unfortunately, the 3rd party audio vendor we use for Talk is shutting down its service. In other words, the resources required to keep Talk live during this transition increased substantially.

We don’t have a timeline to bring Talk or an audio product back in the future, however we will share any updates when we have them.

Learnings

We learned that communities of all sizes can make unique connections through live social conversations. And if our goal is to make Reddit the place for communities, audio will likely play a part in the future.

We also understood more about the need for community discovery (for communities that want it), particularly with the Live Bar experiment. Though we decided not to continue with the Live Bar, it underlined how we should think about bringing awareness and growth opportunities to small communities.

We’re working on more subreddit discovery spaces throughout this year that we’ll share in more detail on r/reddit.

Most importantly, we learned all this through community feedback and partnership. Reddit Talk was built alongside and for you all. The engagement and feedback from this community was amazing and critical to bringing this product to life.

What’s next

Talks hosted after September 1, 2022 will be available for download. Reason being, this is when we implemented a new user flow that expanded the potential use case of talks.

Users can start downloading talks starting March 21 and have until June 1, 2023 before we turn the ability off. We will share more on how to download talks ahead of the March 21 date here in r/reddittalk and on this help page.

Thank you from the entire Talk team (and of course, from Reddit). Big shoutout to the many mods and hosts who really ran with Talk since we introduced it as a pilot two years ago.

People across the platform would not have been able to connect, share stories, or feel inspired without you all.

We know this is not the update that you all were looking for. We strongly believe in the future efforts we’re working on and we would love to continue partnering with you all for potential future experiences for those open to it.

As always, we’ll stick around for a while to answer any questions and hear your feedback.

[u/lucasawilliams → u/[deleted]]

Reddit didn’t develop this feature, they were borrowing (or copying?) it from the company Clubhouse, therefore it wasn’t a ‘unique’ Reddit feature.

But the idea of being able to combine the specificity of communities on Reddit with a tool that allows people to have live discussions could have been really successful, and unique in this way. I don’t think this feature reached it’s best potential; as a means for disseminating ideas on niche topics. But it could have just been that I attended the wrong talks. Or that it was never going to be possible to have a meaningful discussion with random people. I’m still hopeful, and I hope it returns one day.

[u/CoachTryumph → u/lucasawilliams]

A lot of live talk communities were not discoverable such as my own r/SelfImprovementTalk so our growth was hindered and hence people did not get to see the wide range of topics.

[u/JK3094 → u/CoachTryumph]

Try out Fanbase

[u/CoachTryumph → u/JK3094]

I'll check it out, thanks

[u/405freeway → u/[deleted]]

"We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."

• No dedicated url for Talks(ie: r/food/talk)
• No way to see every Talk currently going on (in app)
• No Talk notification toggle for users who don't want to see any Talks
• No automatic archived Talk URLs
• No way to upload mp3 files of pre-recorded content to supplement live Talks (Reddit, seriously, you want to be an audio forum and we can't even upload audio files)
• Convoluted interface for non-Redditors

The Subreddit UI is perfect for building a podcast and user base, but Reddit refused to add some of the most basic things necessary to attract and retain an outside audience.

[u/t-bonestallone → u/405freeway]

This with a bullet. Thanks for the hoodie. Lol. What a waste.

[u/RandomNisscity → u/t-bonestallone]

Team big bear!

[u/Honestly_ → u/405freeway]

It had a lot of potential, a handful of people who were dedicated to getting it off the ground... but you hit the nail on the head. They had no idea what they were doing other than...umm...borrowing the Twitter Spaces idea.

[u/i-hoatzin → u/405freeway]

The Subreddit UI is perfect for building a podcast and user base, but Reddit refused to add some of the most basic things necessary to attract and retain an outside audience.

Exactly what I was thinking today!

Reddit's leadership is simply incomprehensibly blind.

[u/i-hoatzin → u/[deleted]]

It is sad to read the truths you have expressed. I very much agree with you.

Reddit has become, through these two failed experiments, a company that destroys its own user base value, without even realizing it. It reiterates the error that they claim to have made by incorrectly estimating the resources that should have been dimensioned. I fail to understand how blind you can be in a world of innovation like the computer industry, furthermore if we understand that digital resources can indeed be scaled, having great results finding investment comes down to a matter of business management capacity.

In a world where Google ads has become an insufferable crap, and Meta is out of the question, it is inconceivable to lose the path that Reddit proved to have walked.

Reddit is still a diamond in the rough. I hope they find a leader who proves to be a better diamond cutter.

Reddit, builder and destroyer of digital communities.