Reddit rolls out its front page-changing multireddit feature to the public

Community news sharing site Reddit just rolled out its new multireddit feature to all users, the company informed VentureBeat today.

The move is significant because it’s probably the biggest (or at least most drastic) change to the site’s front page of popularly aggregated content in several years. And since Reddit brings in 4.6 billion page views and 70 million unique visitors every month, any change to its front page is a pretty big deal.

On Reddit, people submit links or discussion threads to specific categories called subreddits, and it then aggregates the most popular submissions (by votes, comments, page views, and so on) to a front page. Back in May, the site rolled out a new multireddit feature that groups a collection of subreddits together and displays only the most popular stories on a main page. However, it restricted the feature to those paying for Reddit’s premium Reddit Gold monthly subscription membership.

The new feature should be available to all users as soon as they log into their Reddit account today.

As VentureBeat previously noted, the new multireddit feature should help diversify what people are looking at on Reddit, while inviting people to take a more active roll in what they see on the site every day.

When you log in, a new side bar greets you on the left side of the screen that invites you to start creating your own multireddits. Each multireddit will get its own tab within that side bar, which Reddit has already done by suggesting a few (like RedditPets, which is a collection of all the popular animal subreddits). Also, a new sidebar tab shows you see all the subreddits combined (aka Everything) as well as a tab for all the submissions you’ve saved.

Users can determine whether the multireddits they create are public or private, which means they’re sharable with friends. I’m guessing that’s part of Reddit’s strategy — to have the best multireddits shared among its users. In a discussion thread, Reddit developer Max Goodman (aka chromakode) said the team is also working on a multireddits recommendation feature, too.

While the multireddit feature is a big change to the front page, it isn’t the only one the site has made recently. Last week, Reddit altered the default subreddits for people who weren’t logged into the site — with the biggest changes being the removal of both the /r/politics and /r/atheism subreddits.