Ever wish you could say something to a Redditor that doesn’t quite translate over text? Well, the wait’s almost over now that Reddit Talk is on the way, Reddit’s new live audio conversation feature.
The new feature was announced today on Reddit (via Engadget). There’s already a waitlist for it on the announcement thread, in case you’re a moderator who wants to be able to interact via a live voice call with your community. It’s worth noting that only mods will be able to start Reddit Talks during the feature’s testing phase, though Reddit has plans to expand the ability to host talks to “other trusted community members.”
Reddit Talk is testing its customization features so hosts can choose different emojis and background colors for the sake of variety and community-specific flair. However, only time will tell what the full extent of said customization options really is.
As is mentioned in the Reddit Talk announcement thread, this feature has the potential to play a big part in how the site handles Ask Me Anythings (AMAs), which are sessions where someone of importance — relative to a given community — is asked questions by the community and answers them candidly. Reddit’s AMAs vary from hosting major celebrities to adult film stars to random folks with interesting experiences to share, so which of them will remain in standard text form will be interesting to see.
One concern raised by /u/Crashdoom in the Reddit Talk announcement thread is that if any important AMAs happen via Reddit Talk, will someone have to voluntarily transcribe what’s said to preserve the conversation, given that one of Reddit’s main appeals is its “forever” quality that’s made possible by the site’s textual nature? Reddit’s product lead for creators /u/signal mentions that “Once a talk ends, the Reddit post for the talk will exist (with upvote counts and comments) but users won’t be able to listen to the conversation.” Hence, the question of how dialogues will be preserved remains up in the air.
It remains to be seen how Reddit Talk will shake out, as well as whether it’ll be competitive with Discord’s Stage channels feature, or Clubhouse, the app that started the whole live audio chat frenzy in the first place.
