Reddit Adds New Real-time Features, including a live upvote count

Reddit, the American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website where registered members submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members has in recent times been adding new features and design.

The major and first redesign in a decade took place in early April 2018 where the website was redesigned with a menu on the left corner that replaced the navigation bar. The menu was able to open up to display links to feeds, subreddits you follow, and user profiles. Users were able to choose to view Reddit in three modes: “classic view” which looks more like the Reddit we know today, “card view,” which vaguely resembles Facebook, or “compact view,” for more densely packed information.

Now, Reddit is introducing some big changes by adding new real-time interactive features. Perhaps the biggest update in this launch is that the number of upvotes, downvotes, and comments will go up or down as they happen. That could give you a more accurate idea of the popularity of a post as you’re reading – This could also be a disadvantage as people could misuse it by hitting an upvote or downvote in response to seeing others do the same.

Another change is the typing and reading indicators. The Reading indicator will show the number of people reading a post when there are more than two people looking at it. While the typing indicator will pop up when two or more users are typing a comment. And when new top-level comments come in, Reddit will show a comment pill-shaped notification. When you tap that notification, the comments on a post will be sorted by new so you can view what’s been added most recently.

You can get an idea of how these new features work in this GIF:

These new features have started rolling out globally across desktop and mobile, but they’ll only be available on the newer Reddit design. If you use the old Reddit, you won’t have access to them. You just need to change your UI to the new Reddit design to explore all these features.