Reddit Now Lets You Livestream. What Could Go Wrong?

On Friday, a series of cryptic posts began to appear on r/pan, a Reddit community that seemed to materialize out of nowhere. “On public-access television, anyone can be a star,” read one post, a GIF with text overlaid on a grainy background. “Today we live in a society where many choose to have a televised voice.”

What was r/pan? No one knew, but Redditors began speculating right away. “Wth is this? Someone explain??” one user commented. “Reddit giving us a dick tickling tease here,” offered another. One user, u/Infinade, got to work sleuthing and stumbled upon a subdomain with the phrase “reddit-service-streaming-backend.” Reddit, it seemed, was planning to launch some kind of streaming service. With a little more digging around the source code in the Reddit app, u/Infinade could even see what it would look like.

Today, so can everyone else. Head to Reddit’s front page and you’ll find the all-new Reddit Public Access Network, where you can see warm-blooded Redditors giving a rare glimpse of the other side of the screen. This is Reddit’s first taste of live video, and as such, RPAN is a limited-time experiment, set to run from 9 am to 5 pm through the end of this week. Consider it another “dick tickling tease” for when Reddit launches livestreaming for real in the coming months.

For most of its 14-year history, Reddit has been a text-only platform. What began as a link-sharing service quickly grew into a destination for online discussion, where communities big and small formed to talk about everything from r/worldpolitics to r/rarepuppers. Even as Reddit introduced support for photos and video, leading to the formation of communities like r/cursedimages, text has remained central to Reddit’s identity.

But in 2019, it’s hard to be a platform without live video. Twitter has Periscope, Google has YouTube Live, Amazon has Twitch. When he introduced Facebook Live in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg described it as “having a TV camera in your pocket,” an idea that seduced both users and advertisers. For Reddit, which has been on a path toward modernizing its platform since co-founder Steve Huffman rejoined the company four years ago, livestreaming felt like an obvious next step.

“We know that our users are familiar with streaming across their internet experience, because they’re seeing it on other platforms,” says Alex Le, Reddit’s VP of product. “It’s become an expectation that a platform should offer this.”

Arielle Pardes covers personal technology, social media, and culture for WIRED.

Exactly how to bring live video to Reddit remained a question. Should it look more like YouTube, or Twitch, or something else entirely? Eventually, the team decided to start with something temporary, using the team’s best guess for what might work and offering a lot of leeway to course-correct if things go wrong.