(u/ityoclys)

TL;DR: Your feedback helped us reshape the direction of chat on Reddit from one-to-one chat to private group chats and eventually to community-based chat rooms (and your jokes helped me get through many a long day). Chat rooms are now in beta and being released to more subreddits daily. Check out r/subchats or this post if you’d like to see how it works!

Guess what? Chicken butt! (More on that later.) For now, hi! I’m u/ityoclys, but if you’re one of the 7,000 or so people who messaged the admins with your feedback on Chat, you may remember me better as u/reddit_chat_feedback.

Most people still don’t know about Reddit Chat, so, for context, over the past year we’ve been beta testing a few new chat features with a small group of you. When we started, we knew that most people didn’t personally know other redditors, since the core of the Reddit experience is pseudonymous sharing and discussion, so we wanted to make sure there was a place for people in the betas to test chat, give feedback, and have a bit of fun. Perhaps most importantly, we wanted to get to know people using chat and learn from them.

To do this, we made a new user, u/reddit_chat_feedback, and added it to the top of everyone’s chat contacts list. Kind of like Tom from Myspace. For some reason…I’m the one who volunteered to respond to all the early testers who chatted us up (or as many as I could keep up with). Turns out, that was a lot. So far I’ve chatted with more than 7,000 people one on one. It’s been fun, and I’d like to share some of the things we learned.

This is my life now.

TIL: chatting with strangers on the internet isn’t so scary

If you haven’t used AOL in a while, the idea of chatting with people who feel uninhibited and disguised behind bizarre usernames might give you pause. This may seem especially true when you consider using chat as a feedback channel on a platform like Reddit, which is widely known for its passionate and vocal communities. I was initially afraid that most people would bring out the pitchforks and… unkind words. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most people are actually quite nice. The nature of real-time, direct chat seems to be especially disarming. Even when people initially lash out in frustration or to troll, I found that if you talk to them and show them you’re a regular human like them, they almost always chill out.

Beyond just chilling out, people who are initially harsh or skeptical of new things will actually often change their minds. Sometimes they get so excited that they start to show up in unexpected places defending the thing they once strongly opposed in a way that feels more authentic than anything I could say.

TLDR (again): don’t be afraid. Listen to people and talk to them, and everything will (usually) be fine.

People are good.

TIL: people will give you excellent and actionable feedback, if you’re willing to listen

Chat as a feedback mechanism has been incredibly valuable. It’s been a great way to gauge general sentiment as we introduce the new products and features we’re building, but it’s also allowed the community to share direct feedback and poke holes in our ideas that directly impact our product roadmaps. I’m a product designer. I take pride in bringing clarity to our product and engineering ideas, but I also recognize that one person or even an entire team working on something new will never match the insights that a community of passionate people can find. Being the voice of u/reddit_chat_feedback has dramatically reinforced that framework — both for myself and my team.

Listing everything we learned about chat via chat would result in a novella, but here are a few common themes that surfaced through chat feedback, and how we adapted to them:

Redditors like cats. I do too. In fact I have two, and they’re very cute.

One of the most impactful (and common) learnings from testing chat was that, on Reddit, it makes more sense for chat to serve a group dedicated to a specific topic than it does for one-on-one communication. This is a bit obvious in retrospect, but initially came as a surprise given so many of the chat platforms out there connect people who already know each other IRL. People on Reddit don’t usually know each other IRL (that’s kind of the point), which means they aren’t sure who to chat with without a common interest, and 1:1 communication can feel a bit random and unnatural. This understanding came to shape our roadmap in a big way: we shifted our team’s focus to building subreddit-based chat rooms before giving access to Direct chat to all Redditors.

No one wants Reddit to become [insert generic social media platform here]. This is good. Neither do we! Personally, I like a lot of social sites on the internet, but one of the things I enjoy most about Reddit is the freedom that it gives people to express themselves without worrying that their grandparents will judge them.

Large group chat rooms need powerful, easy-to-use moderation features. We were pretty sure this was true, but the validation we received via chat feedback was strong. That said, we made moderation features a major priority for our roadmap early in the process.

People want to discover and share awesome subreddits. When you get to know someone in a real time context, sometimes it becomes easier for you to understand their tastes, and share stuff you think they’d like. For instance, I learned about r/pigifs , r/fairiesridingcorgis , and r/specializedtools .

Yes, cat in French is chat.

TIL: the internet is full of funny, witty, and weird people (jk I already knew that)

Ok so I didn’t exactly learn about this via chat feedback, but I thought you might like to experience some of the funnier things I’ve experienced so far in chat. Like the first time u/reddit_chat_feedback reached the front page. And the second time (one day later). Thanks r/madlads! Or the time I recited the alphabet with someone from A to AZ (yes we cycled through the alphabet at least twice over a few days). Or the time someone sent me the entire script to Star Wars Episode 3 (we added a max message length after that one…). Or the time I learned about snails. Anyway here you go.

Snails: the more you learn.

TIL: how to make it to the front page

Some very mad lads tricked me at and then tricked me again one point. My chat inbox was absolute madness for at least a week. But it was fun to be referenced on the front page.

Chicken butt.

Got ’em.

We want to keep learning

Using u/reddit_chat_feedback as a way to get to know and learn from Redditors has been fun and incredibly insightful. We can’t thank everyone who has talked with us and given feedback enough. But we’d like to hear more. If you want to talk about chat on Reddit, share a cat fact, or tell us about a niche subreddit, please get in touch!

I’ll end with a cat fact: did you know that a group of cats is called a clowder. It’s true. I learned it on Reddit.

By the way, should also check out the new community based chat rooms in beta, if you haven’t already. It’s a great way to discuss topics you’re interested in with people you don’t know in real life. I’m in a bunch of them, and I’d love to chat with you.