The website Imgur has long been the unofficial partner for Reddit when it comes to media uploads. When you check out the pictures and GIFs on your favorite subreddit, it's almost guaranteed that they are hosted on Imgur. But this week, Reddit has announced the launch of its own native media upload option, with support for images up to 20MB and GIFs up to 100MB, which are then hosted on the site itself.
Reddit, "the front page of the internet" as the site boasts, has finally caught up to just about every major social media platform this week by introducing embeddable threads. You know when you're on a website and come across a tweet, Instagram photo, or YouTube video in the middle of the page, and clicking on it takes you directly to that content on said social network? Well, now the same thing can be done with Reddit posts.
Like it or not, and some might indeed not, Reddit has become the hub of anything and everything that happens on the Internet, as well as some outside of it. It has supplanted the likes of the notorious Slashdot, boasting of a 200 million strong user base. Given its strong ties to tech and how fast it gets whiff of trends, it's a bit puzzling that Reddit doesn't have an official Android app. That, however, changes today as Reddit proudly launches its own Android app, built in-house and designed with Android users in mind.
Reddit, as great as it can be, is packed full of trolls and other annoying folks who can ruin the experience. That’s a common issue across the Internet, but one fueled by Reddit’s utter simplicity — harassing someone is as simple as making a throwaway account and sending someone foul messages. To deal with this, the company has unveiled a new “user block” feature that allows Redditors to block other Reddit users.
Reddit has released its 2015 Transparency Report, the followup to its 2014 report with updated numbers on government requests and more. Says Reddit, it aims to show users a couple different types of data, namely the number and variety of requests it gets for user information and content removal, as well as how many requests it gets that it is legally required to act on. It seems this time around, Reddit may have received a National Security Letter, as well.
Reddit announced last month that it was creating its own official Android app, giving users on the platform a solid option for browsing the website. Despite its Alien Blue acquisition a couple years ago, Reddit is also working on a new iOS app, something it will be putting into beta soon. Today’s all about Android, though, with the service announcing that the Android app entered beta today.
Yesterday the Oculus Rift VR headset was made available for pre-order for the first time in its final, consumer-ready form. The device cost is a cool $599 USD, a couple hundred more than the most recent developer unit. This is in contrast, it's now clear, with what many people assumed Oculus founder Luckey Palmer meant when he said the final consumer unit would cost somewhere in the "ballpark" of the cost of the dev kit.
Reddit has had an official client app on iOS for some time now, following its acquisition of Alien Blue in late 2014, but Android users have been stuck resorting to third-party apps or the mobile version of the website. Thankfully that situation is coming to an end soon. The company has announced that it's now working on an official Reddit app for Android, and it's already allowing users to sign up for beta testing via online survey.
The Turkish government seems to be continuing it crusade against internet platforms that enable the public to freely communicate, with the latest victim being Reddit. The entire site has been blocked in the country, with officials saying it violates Internet Law 5651, and users losing access sometime late Friday night. The law allows the government to ban websites found hosting "scandalous" content, including piracy, drugs, adult material, or criticism of Mustafa Ataturk, the nation's first president. However, it's not hard to imagine the law being used to censor criticism and free speech.
Reddit has decided to do away with shadowbans and replace them with suspensions, the company announced this evening. Shadowbans, for those unfamiliar, is a punishment for those who break the rules; users who have been shadowbanned can still post, but only they can see their content. In substitution, Reddit has introduced a new type of account restriction, one that “increase transparency when handling users who violate Reddit’s content policy."
Social aggregator Reddit has revealed it is launching its own news site, Upvoted, that will focus on presenting interesting news and media that surfaces from Reddit's own communities. The site is set to go live later today, and, most interestingly, will not allow any comments from readers or up/downvotes, as is the common practice on Reddit proper. As Wired reports, Upvoted will seem similar to most other news sites, presenting everything from stories, pictures/videos, infographics, and more, from a variety of categories including lifestyle, science, politics, technology, and sports.
If you spend any time on Reddit, you’ve likely seen the Russia drama unfold. Though the entire thing has been confusing, the timeline goes something like this: a Redditor published a post on growing drugs in Russian, and Russia didn’t like that. Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media watchdog, made a post on a Russian social network (more or less) asking that someone with contacts “with the Reddit administration” ask them to “check their email for messages” the agency has sent. If Reddit didn’t respond, Roskomnadzor said it may end up having local ISPs block access to the website.