Every Redditor knows that the best thing about Reddit is bearing witness to the weird and sometimes brilliant things the community itself comes up with — and the company is aware of that, too.
Reddit is announcing today that it will open a waiting list for developers who want to build software for the platform using the company’s up-to-date toolkit. The company plans to combine the up-to-date toolkit with a catalog of third-party software extensions that both moderators and Redditors can browse from to create their own Reddit environment.
The up-to-date portal will offer tools and other resources that will enable developers to create software extensions to enhance the social network’s existing features. Many popular tools developed by third-party developers are already ubiquitous on the platform, running silently in the background of subreddits and appearing automatically paste the text of your tweetstranslate the post into another language or send users reminders at a specific time when prompted.
“As we enable greater user interface customization, we expect Redditors and moderators to tailor their communities to suit their unique needs and tastes,” Reddit Chief Product Officer Pali Bhat told TechCrunch.
In addition to providing useful benefits that make your Reddit experience more convenient, extensions can also provide some indispensable tools. Some bots are already increasing accessibility for users with visual impairments and offering moderators a more comprehensive set of tools to keep communities safe and sound and compliant. Others are more fanciful, such as: the infamous Yoda bots that divert comments to Yoda-like syntax — or less capricious, in the case of Reddit’s rampant spell-checker bots, which ping users for misspelled words.
Reddit will open the waiting list Join the beta version of its development platform today and anyone can sign up to gain access to the up-to-date toolkit, which includes a studio for creating and testing automated tools on your desktop. The company plans to keep the initial beta size of the developer portal modest and plans to learn from observations with an eye to security over time. Reddit’s up-to-date custom software portal will be rolled out to everyone next year.
“We will be working on a lot of experiments, mostly in the ‘apps’ and ‘automation tools’ categories, where the apps can be integrated directly into the Reddit UI and the automation tools are more like traditional bots,” Bhat told TechCrunch. ”… We will start compact at first, but over time we want to give developers a lot of flexibility and scope.”
With its developer portal, Reddit wants to lend a hand developers get out of the silos they get stuck in. The company notes that developers cope with “limited resources and ad hoc support” by creating tools tailored to the communities they know. With the up-to-date beta version of the platform for developers, Reddit wants to offer them not only more tools to create, but also a centralized space to share resources and collect what they ultimately produce.
Reddit also knows that different communities want pliant and personalized ways to interact depending on their specific norms. Adding more support for third-party developers will make it easier for moderators and users to customize their experiences on largely text-based social networks.
“Our vision is to have a portal where users and moderators can choose what tools they want to use in their communities, making the user experience simpler and more meaningful,” Bhat told TechCrunch.
In addition to encouraging the community to create more bots, Reddit is making other investments in automation. In June, the company announced it would buy Spell, a platform for running machine learning experiments that would otherwise be too resource-intensive. The following month, Reddit announced plans to acquire MeaningCloud, a natural language processing company. These acquisitions will be integrated with Reddit’s existing systems, including personalized recommendations, discovery, advertising, and security.
Reddit buys machine learning platform Spell
Reddit acquires natural language processing company MeaningCloud