A few months into Jason Lee’s new job at Reddit, the office was buzzing with excitement. It was April 2017 and Reddit had just launched r/place, a collaborative project that invited more than 100,000 communities on Reddit to contribute to a great mosaic of the internet. Redditors would land on a random tile on the canvas, which they could then change to any color they wanted.

Lee, a product manager who hadn't used Reddit much before joining its staff, watched in awe. The mosaic morphed from a scattering of weird blobs (and, OK, a distinctly phallic shape) to a patchwork of everything Redditors loved: a pixelated rendition of the Mona Lisa, the logo for Stranger Things, the Swedish flag, and hundreds of other symbols, smashed into one great digital quilt. “It all clicked for me,” says Lee, “what strangers can do when they band together.”

But Lee and other Reddit staffers also noticed something else. As communities fought to colonize the canvas, they started planning in their own subreddits, and then off Reddit altogether. It took coordination for communities to make their mark on the 1000 x 1000 canvas, but Reddit didn't have any way to support those fast-paced conversations. You could leave a comment on a thread, but in order to see the replies in real time, you'd have to constantly refresh the page—an impractical and inelegant way to get anything done. So moderators redirected their communities to Google Docs or Google Sheets, using the color picker to replicate the r/place map; others huddled on Slack or, oddly, even Facebook Messenger to plan their conquests.

The experiment proved something to Lee and other members of the product team: When strangers come together on Reddit, beautiful things can emerge. But Redditors needed new ways to come together, a new medium to talk outside of the community-based posts and threads. Some communities already had well-established chats on third-party apps, like Slack and Discord and even Internet Relay Chat. Why couldn't they have those same conversations on Reddit?

Since then, Lee has been the lead product manager on a new feature that will make that possible: old-school, real-time, type-and-go chatrooms on Reddit. The company has been testing the feature with a small group of communities and plans to roll out to the rest of Reddit at the end of this month. Think of it like a community center for a subreddit: It creates a space to talk without pretense, to bring discussions beyond the comment threads, or simply hang out with strangers online.

The company imagines community chat becoming an integral part of the Reddit experience. The question is whether it can stick—and whether a throwback to a simpler time on the web can withstand the internet in 2018.

A Room of One's Own

When Lee and the product team began thinking about chat, they took stock of the other chat applications on the market. There was Slack (for work), Discord (for gaming), and Facebook Messenger (for friends). Redditors had used all of those—both as places for moderators to hold discussions and as relaxed social spaces for communities. But Reddit wasn't really like any of those platforms. No one knows who you are on Reddit; you come there to mingle with strangers who share something in common—whether that’s an interest in conspiracy theories or a fascination with bread stapled to trees. (Yes, really.) That felt more like the chat platforms of the early 90s, like Internet Relay Chat or AOL chat rooms.

In those early days of the internet, chatrooms served a specific purpose: They turned surfing the web into a social act. In chatrooms, people forged web communities with their own slang and netiquette. “People felt like they were pioneers creating community homesteads on the electronic frontier, as Howard Rheingold described it,” says John Suler, the author of Psychology of the Digital Age and the founder of the field of cyberpsychology. Joe Schober, AOL’s chief architect, likened those early chatrooms to “frontier towns.”

Reddit

Reddit’s chat feature hopes to reintroduce some of that early web spirit. Chatrooms will be organized by subreddit; only moderators will be able to create them. In beta testing, some have organized around super specific topics (like a room in r/BabyBumps for expectant mothers in their first trimester) while others let the conversation meander (like r/mildlyinteresting’s General Chat: “Ya know it’s general.”)