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Remember how Reddit announced yesterday that it would introduce built-in subreddit chat rooms? Yes, it doesn’t matter.
Alex Le, vice president of products and community for Reddit, said in multiple comments Thursday that the feature has been “100% reversed.” He told him that the platform “made several mistakes” in the process of launching the feature (called “Start chat”) and apologized for the confusion the launch caused. One bug in particular caused the button to appear in all subreddits, even if it didn’t do anything by clicking or tapping it.
“If you discard the banner in 3 communities where the feature is active on the desktop web or Android, the little button you are seeing appears in all communities. But most importantly, for all support communities, the button doesn’t Nothing. Your users could never log into chats for this feature, even in the rare event that they saw the button, “Le wrote.” We are actively fixing this now. The feature is rolled back in a few hours and the button will be removed. ” .
The announcement comes after large numbers of Redditors protested the introduction of the “Start Chatting” button in their communities. Initially, Reddit said the feature would be deployed in about 50 percent of SFW subreddits to start with and that companies “particularly vulnerable to abuse” would not be included.
“As moderators, we are unpaid volunteers who work to build a community that reflects our values and vision.”
However, the subreddit moderators did not have the opportunity to opt out and were not supervised to manage the chat rooms, according to the rules of their community, and the responsibility fell to the Reddit administrators themselves. Several moderators protested and criticized Reddit’s approach for putting subreddits at risk, especially those that give voice to victims of sexual assault and other vulnerable communities, potentially opening chat features to trolls and those eager to commit fraud or abuse.
“As moderators, we are unpaid volunteers who work to build a community that reflects our values and vision,” wrote a r / AskHistorians moderator in a message to Reddit administrators. “In the past, site administrators have always promised us control over that community’s settings, and despite the missteps at the points, it’s a promise we’ve trusted. We clearly made a mistake in doing so, as this has broken that trust in a much worse way than any previous unwanted features the Administrators have imposed on us. ”
A moderator for r / personalfinance and r / Debt also requested that both subreddits be removed: “We already have major issues with scammers using chat and PM to scam people who are already in financial crisis and we can’t even get Reddit to ban them. people after repeated reports (not that it is difficult for someone to change accounts, as it takes weeks or months for reports to be examined). Even our unofficial IRC chat room is better moderated than anything possible on Reddit. ”
He stated that Reddit received very positive feedback from the first tests of the chat room feature. “Note that many users use the feature and enjoy it, and these people are not always the ones who share their comments in the comment threads,” Le wrote.
His comment also notes that Reddit plans to alter the Start Chat interface to make the feature more distinct from its affiliate subreddit, and will allow moderators to remove the button from their communities.
Reddit confirmed to The edge that disabled the function. “Given the issues and concerns expressed by our users and moderators during the past 24 hours, we have made the decision to disable Start Chat so that we can reevaluate our deployment plan and develop the product to meet the needs of our community,” said Reddit. spokesperson says.
Update April 30, 5:29 p.m. ET: Added Reddit confirmation and statement regarding removal of chat room feature.
