Browse the Future of reddit: Re-Introducing Multireddits

This post is about a new reddit feature, multireddits. If you'd like to join the gold beta test, head to /r/multibeta for more info.

reddit is vast.

Unfathomably, mindbogglingly vast. There were over 71 million unique visitors last month. Yesterday, there were 5,487 active subreddits. We'll probably hit 5 billion pageviews a month later this year. How did this happen!?

Scale can be the life blood of a diverse and vibrant community, but it can also be its worst enemy. The evolution of reddit is a story of walking this line carefully. Being big isn't inherently bad; it's a challenge for sure, but it also presents huge opportunities for us to make our collective voices heard and to share ever more specific, meaningful communities.

Yesterday was reddit's 8th birthday – the anniversary of Alexis and Steve's accounts being created in the database. At its start, reddit was a singularly close-knit and focused community. This community grew to the point that its members had differing desires for what it should be. Then subreddits were born, which gave everyone the ability to create an entirely new reddit community with whatever focus they wished.

However, as reddit continues to grow, it's becoming more difficult to organize and keep track of all the subreddits you're interested in. It's getting to be time to take another evolutionary step for reddit as it stands today. Multireddits (or "multis") are a tiny first move in that direction.

If subreddits give you the power to create your own reddit community, then multireddits give you the power to create your own public reddit front pages, each with their own selections of subreddits. We have reached the point where one front page can't do reddit justice. So let's make 9000! This functionality has been around for years in the form of creating custom URLs like /r/space+nasa+astronomy, but the goal is to make these distinct slices of reddit as ubiquitous and powerful as subreddits. In the process of curating and sharing these different front pages, there lies the potential to breathe life into smaller, more specific communities, because you can now participate in an order of magnitude more of them.

Getting there will be a long road ahead, and it's one we've only just embarked on. The first step is simply making it easier to create and share your own custom reddit front pages. For the past 6 months, we have been building this, and it is now available to to try out in /r/multibeta.

We can't do this alone. It is our hope to directly involve the community in building and exploring these new tools for structuring and browsing reddit. What we have been working on is only version 0 of multireddits. There are tons of missing features and missed opportunities that will be evident in the first release. And as we hack our way towards version 1, there will be many more betas to take part in.

Currently, the beta is open to all reddit gold users, and we hope you'll support us in testing these new features and giving us feedback. Gold users get early access to our limited beta server resources, and help ensure that we can keep building reddit by and for the community. You don't have to pay to try out multis though; just send us a postcard.

We'll also be releasing our beta code as open source whenever reasonable (just like the rest of the site), so if you want to see how it works or fix a bug, follow the reddit open source project.

If this excites you as much as me, come join us in /r/multibeta. It's a future party in there, and you're invited.