Reddit beta-launches a "News" tab on iOS
Reddit has beta-launched a dedicated news section on iOS. The new "News" tab on the platform features content from news-based communities on Reddit. Basically, the tab offers a scannable list of top stories and an active comments section. Users can filter news by broader categories (sports) or specific topics (football). The feature will be released to Reddit's website this summer.
Finding appropriate subreddits where news is often discussed
First, Reddit looked at the most-clicked posts by domain in news-focused subreddits and came up with a list of 1,000 popular media publishers. In turn, this list was then used to identify the subreddits that were engaging with news the most. To clarify, Reddit isn't limiting stories under the News tab to those 1,000 domains; it was just a means to identify appropriate subreddits.
Community requirements to feature in the News tab
The chosen subreddits must have active moderation, must abide by Reddit's content policies and guidelines for healthy communities, and must accurately reflect the news article title in the post title. The selected communities discuss various new topics including business, science, sports, gaming, entertainment, and tech. While a majority of the posts are link posts, some sports stories are permitted to have video posts.
Redditors are already pushing back against the change
The feedback ranges from "this seems kind of useless" to "this site is such a joke" to "this is controlling the bubble" to "this sounds like a sales pitch to someone who has never used Reddit" to "this is another Facebook-style change nobody asked for."
Not particularly enthused about the News
One of the major concerns of Redditors is that the new feature will make Reddit yet another social media platform that is ripe for the generation and propagation of fake news. Another concern is that the feature is highly dependent on the community. More upvotes don't necessarily mean something is news and group biases might unfairly highlight one angle of a story more.
