Remember chat rooms? Reddit has now started rolling out a similar feature it calls “Start Chatting” to almost 16,000 SFW subreddits and will be expanding in the coming weeks. The feature randomly groups interested redditors into small group chats.
“As people around the world have been at home under various shelter-in-place restrictions, redditors have been using chat at phenomenal new levels. Whether it’s about topics related to COVID-19, local news, or just their favorite games and hobbies, people all around the world are looking for others to talk to. Since Reddit is in a unique position to help in this situation, we’ve created a new tool that makes it easier to find other people who want to talk about the same things you do.”, wrote the company in a blog post announcing the feature.
Start Chatting chat rooms consist of a total of seven participants in each group. If you’re interested to join a group, all you have to do is visit your favorite “safe for work” subreddit and click on the Start Chatting button. You’ll see the button in the new Reddit interface and the official mobile app.
What makes Shart Chatting feature stand out is that it bonds people with similar interests together. “We’ve already seen some interesting use cases for Start Chatting, such as meeting new people within conversation-oriented communities, discussing cliffhangers from the latest episode in our TV show communities, or finding others to game with online.”, says Reddit.
In case you’re not willing to be part of a chat room that has a person who you’re not interested to chat with, you may simply block them, leave the chat room and Reddit won’t group you with the same person again.
