Last month, a select number of iOS users began seeing a news tab on their Reddit app as part of the social news aggregator's alpha test for the new feature. After rolling out enhancements to the feature's alpha version and gathering feedback from the early adopters, Reddit is now releasing the news tab into beta.
The news tab sits in the leftmost portion of the top of the Reddit app's window. It contains posts pulled by communities from a host of subreddits that share and engage with news the most. The goal is to help those who have subscribed to a lot of subreddits easily search for news without digging through loads of posts, some of which might not be newsworthy.
The tab is split into several news topics such as politics, science, and sports, among others, and provides users the ability to choose the topics they find most interesting to them.
Reddit noted last month that when it selected the subreddits to include in the news tab, the team "looked at the most-clicked posts by domain, limited the list of domains to media and publishers and ended up with a list of ~1000 domains." It's worth noting that the domain list does not serve to filter content in the tab, but only aids in picking the initial batch of subreddits.
Additionally, there are rules that apply to communities featured in the news tab: they must obey Reddit's content policies and guidelines for healthy communities, maintain an active moderation, and keep the post title and article title consistent.
Reddit says it plans to grow the roster of communities featured in the news tab in the third quarter of this year and roll out the news tab to desktop users later this summer.
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