Reddit has announced that it will shut down Reddit Talk, its live audio chat feature, on March 21. In an announcement post, the company says it made the decision because “supporting Talk in the short term requires a significant amount of resources, more than we anticipated.” The company will also be shutting down its “Happening Now” page, which exists to help you find active conversations and live chats.
Talk was announced in April 2021, a time when the Clubhouse audio chat room app seemed like a big deal and other social networks were quick to copy its features. The reason it’s being canceled now is apparently that the third-party audio provider Reddit used for the service is also being shut down. According to his post, the company doesn’t want to deal with that while also trying to simplify its core platform and improve infrastructure, an effort that chief product officer Pali Bhat just discussed at Decoder.
Starting March 21, users will be able to download files from Talks that were hosted after September 1, 2022, and will have until June 1 to do so. The company says there will be more details on the download closer to the closing date.
While Reddit says audio has a place in its goal of “becoming the de facto home for communities,” it doesn’t provide any sort of timeline for when audio features or even Talk will reappear.
News of the shutdown comes as Reddit is rolling out other features to help compete with video platforms like TikTok. That includes working on separate video and text sources, allowing people to focus on one form of content.
