Reddit has announced that it will be winding up its live audio product “Talk” in the coming weeks. The Clubhouse-inspired product has not even seen it’s second year anniversary, considering that it was launched in April 2021.
Reddit Talk was not the only would-be Clubhouse competitor which emerged in the pandemic world. We also got the likes of Facebook’s Live Audio Rooms and Twitter Spaces.
Now the third party provider supporting Talk is shutting down, and Reddit does not have enough resources to keep the live audio chat service going.
So the company won’t be keeping Talk alive while it makes site-wide improvements, as originally intended. The folks working behind the scenes at the content aggregation website are reluctant to provide any probable release window for a Clubhouse-like product, beyond promising relevant updates whenever possible.
Reddit Talk will stay open until March 21, 2023. “Talks” hosted anytime after September 1, 2022, will be available for download between March 21 and June 1, this year.
Additionally, the “Happening Now” page which throws up real-time popular conversations, and active Live Chats and Reddit Talks happening in subreddits users follow, is also being given the boot on March 21.
Apart from announcing the shuttering of Talk, Reddit’s Chief Product Officer, Pali Bhat, touched on some changes that have arrived/are arriving in order to make the website simpler for audiences to navigate and use.
Content-aware feeds that split text and video posts into “Read” and “Watch” queues are in the making. The ability to search within comments was rolled out in February. And the overall user interface will be getting a more decluttered look.
