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Reddit is beginning to test the first of its own add-ons built through its Developer Platform. The company’s first add-ons, available to a small number of subreddits and only to mods, will include tools for mods to more easily monitor and remove comment threads; ban spammers and remove their content; and for sports-focused subreddits, create posts that are live scoreboards, spokesperson Courtney Geesey-Dorr tells The Verge.
Reddit announced the Developer Platform in August 2022 as a way for developers to more easily host and develop things like apps, bots, and mod tools for Reddit. At the time, Reddit opened up a waitlist for interested developers, and although the platform is still in closed beta, Geesey-Dorr says a “handful” of moderators and bot developers have already built moderation tools that are being tested in select communities.
Geesey-Dorr declined to share a date for when the Developer Platform will be generally available but says that this beta test of its tools “will serve as a way to gather learnings, test out different functionalities of how a post add-on will be used, and stress test the platform’s stability before opening it up to more communities and moderators.” The company’s vision is that add-ons will eventually be available to all Reddit users.
Geesey-Dorr says Reddit’s scoreboard add-on will be available first with “soccer league communities” and that Reddit is in conversations with “an additional handful” of other subreddits. The company is also prototyping other add-ons, like variations on polls and countdown timer posts, that it will “likely” start testing over “the next couple months,” according to Geesey-Dorr.
Reddit’s first Developer Platform add-ons are arriving near the end of what’s been a tumultuous year for the company. Earlier this year, after it became clear that the costs of the company’s usage-based API pricing would be too expensive for the developers of some third-party apps, many users protested and some subreddits went dark. The protests have largely ended and many third-party apps are now gone, but some apps have lived on by offering subscriptions.
Reddit also got rid of its old Gold awards system in favor of a new “Contributor Program” that lets you turn Reddit Gold into real money. It also sunset its blockchain-based Community Points product, though it’s still investing in its NFT avatars.
