Announced back in December, Reddit’s official Android app is going into beta form today. However it’s a closed beta, so only a select few that signed up to be a beta tester will be able to check out the app, at least for now. Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman put together a post in r/announcements over on Reddit today. Basically giving users a outlook on what the company is planning for 2016 and how they are looking to improve the site. Mentioned in there is the fact that they need to look to the future, and obviously the future is mobile. So their Android app goes into beta today, and the iOS app was mentioned as following “it out soon”.
In addition to the Android app being put into beta as of today, Huffman also touched on a transparency report. As you’d expect, Reddit also gets asked by law enforcement for access to data. Having said that, Reddit will begin putting out transparency reports in March. As they believe being transparent with its users is very important. We couldn’t agree more. He also talked about how they cleaned up and banned a number of communities on Reddit which were violating their terms of service, and other policies.
There’s plenty more that the company is looking to do to “modernize” the site. Including getting rid of shadow banning. And instead are moving to suspending accounts. Which accounts cannot be suspended by subreddit moderators, only by reddit admins. This means many less people should be getting banned for frivolous reasons. Something that has been a pretty big complaint of the website in recent years. The shadow ban first came into existence to help fight bots and spammers. As they don’t know they are banned, so they don’t create another account to spam anymore. When you think about it, it’s actually genius. However, Reddit has stated that this was not a great idea for dealing with humans.
Reddit has plenty of plans for 2016, and things are just getting started over there. After the CEO shake-up last summer, there appears to be lots of changes happening as well. Both good and bad.