TikTok is the new social media craze. People are spending hours scrolling through endless feeds of short videos and losing hours on social media. Reddit has joined the trend.
Reddit is best known for its online bulletin board. It's also a great alternative to traditional internet forums. Reddit added a video feed button to the right side of the search bar in the iOS mobile application. TechCrunch says that this feature is still being slowly rolled out to all iOS users. However, it should be available to most users by now. To verify, I downloaded Reddit for the first-time to confirm and it was there.
Credit: Reddit screenshot
Clicking that button will bring you to a rolling feed of videos uploaded directly from the site. This means that if someone links to a YouTube video in a subreddit they follow, it won't show here. However, if someone uploads a video directly from their computer, or ripped from another source, it may. While browsing Reddit's video stream, I noticed TikToks' signature watermark as well as everything. Reddit allows you to do all of the usual interactions such as commenting, upvote and downvote. While you watch these videos, scroll down to see more of your favorite subreddits and those that Reddit considers similar.
Video delivery algorithms are based on subreddits. Mine gave me videos that were at most in the orbit of various sports and video games. I refer to r/Cats as I was following it and it gave me a video from the r/Dogs subreddit. Close but not quite. Similar to the Minecraft video I received, I only followed r/Rainbow6 which is a video game that is clearly not Minecraft. Reddit's algorithm may not be as good as TikTok's, but it will take some time.
Reddit's Android application doesn't appear to have the feature yet. Or at least, it didn't work on my particular Android phone. Mashable was told by a Reddit spokesperson that the feature is still in an experimental phase. However, they did not provide any further details.
Although this is a minor development, it makes Reddit's iOS application much more accessible than ever before. You can browse Reddit's iOS apps in the same way you did before and not have to use the video feed button. Reddit isn’t often associated with trend-chasing like other social networks. However, recent experiments such as voice chatting suggest that this could be changing. Reddit has so many content options that you may find something you won't find on TikTok.
Reddit's old-school simplicity compared to other sites like Facebook or Twitter may be disappointed by this news. However, if the goal of the app is to keep users staring at it as much as possible, it might work. Remember to eat and go to the bathroom every now, then.
