Reddit now lets certain communities upload movie directly to the site – The Edge
Reddit now lets certain communities upload movie directly to the site
Social news site Reddit today announced the official launch of its movie hosting feature, meaning users of certain pre-approved communities can now upload movie directly to the site. The feature is already in place as part of a beta testing phase the company began conducting in late June with around two hundred existing subreddits. Reddit says it’s now ready to expand the feature to other communities, and that those interested can work directly with site moderators and the company’s movie team to enable the feature.
“We desired to make sure we managed the movie practice, so we built this from the ground up with our in-house team,” says Emon Motamedi, Reddit’s product manager for movie. “One of the big motivations of doing this was bringing more cohesion around the content and conversations.”
Motamedi points to how most movies on Reddit are just YouTube links, or movies chopped up into GIFs hosted by third-party instruments like Gfycat. This is usually a cumbersome process, and it’s unfriendly to less media savvy internet users. A thicker problem is that it fractures discussion inbetween where the content is hosted and where a user wants to discuss. Usually, Motamedi says, “you go to YouTube to witness the movie and you come back to Reddit to comment.” That’s not ideal. “Because our platform has the best comments on the internet and because it’s such a big use case for our users, we dreamed to build that in-house,” he adds.
Reddit’s movie implement, which will work both through its mobile app and on desktop, will also have a built-in GIF creation contraption. “This speaks to a Reddit philosophy of providing creators the contraptions to flourish and getting out of the way,” Motamedi says. “Say they record a longer adorable movie of their dog playing. [A user] can post that entire movie to a subreddit, but also go back to the edit flow, create a gif, and post it to another subreddit.”
The objective, Motamedi adds, is to let users tailor movies and GIFs to specific Reddit communities instead of just putting content on a third-party site and linking it, or attempting to reach a massive, anonymous audience on a platform like YouTube. “It’s a way to democratize the movie creation process,” he says. “Right now, on other sites, a lot of movies are made with a objective of speaking to a large base of subscribers and helping build those subscribers.” With Reddit movie, the company hopes it will be mostly original content with a specific theme or subject matter, be it a movie game highlight or lovely pet GIF. The boundaries in place at launch will be 15-minute movies with a 1GB file size, with GIFs no longer than one minute.
On the topic of moderation, Reddit says it’s taking all the lessons it has learned from introducing photo hosting earlier this year, as well as adopting policies the team has found successful on other movie hosting sites. To that end, Reddit says three different teams will work together to cut down on violations like posting copyrighted content and uploading movie that violates its online safety guidelines. One is the community team that works with subreddit moderators to keep behavior within specific communities in line. The 2nd is a trust and safety team that works exclusively to enforce Reddit’s site-wide rules.
The third team is what Alex Le, Reddit’s vice president of product, calls the “anti-evil” team. “They build contraptions software and models to predict manhandle where it might happen and make sure we can be inoculated against future issues and be ahead of them when possible,” Le says. The most significant factor here, however, will be which subreddits are granted the capability to host movies. “When it comes to the actual communities, we’ve been deliberate to roll it out to distinct communities,” Le says.
As for how that process will evolve in the future, when movie becomes more commonplace on Reddit, Motamedia says the company is weighing its options. Reddit is considering an application process or some sort of systemized auto-enrolling treatment that involves careful input from the trust and safety team. For now, the company has a list of subreddits its ready to bring into the movie program on a rolling basis.
