The most important part of Reddit has been and likely always will be the comments section. In my short time on the social media service, I’ve found that, unlike some other social media services like Instagram and TikTok (which might soon be facing a ban in the United States), the comments section is truly the lifeblood of the platform.
Today, the comments section is getting a major upgrade. In a blog post, the company announced a number of upgrades to comments for the Reddit iOS and Android app, including unifying navigation, faster load times, and more context when digging through comments.
Comments are getting faster and easier to navigate
The first upgrade is faster load times, Reddit says that it will now load comments much faster than before (likely by preloading some) and that, when you tap the comments button on a post, you’ll get taken right to the top comments instead of the post getting in the way first.
Comments now load faster than ever, ensuring the conversation is ready for redditors before they even navigate to the page. If a redditor clicks on the comments button in the feed, they’ll go directly to the top of the comments, making it easier to get to the heart of the discussion.
Another upgrade comes to how you navigate comments. The company is now unifying swipe navigation so you can “simply swipe up for conversations, swipe left for new content.”
Conversations can’t flow easily if the way to get to them differs by post type. To create a more seamless flow across all post types on Reddit, redditors will now see a unified media player, immersive transitions, and consistent gestures. Simply swipe up for conversations, swipe left for new content.
The last upgrade is the context bar that’s “stickied” to the top of the screen when you jump into the comments section. This not only makes it easy to remember what post you’re looking at comments for but also to easily jump back to the post. You can also easily view media from the post by tapping on the image or video displayed on the right-hand side of the context bar.
When a redditor taps on the comments button on a post in feed, they’ll go directly to the top of the comments versus scrolling through the post page to reach the comments. If someone wants to revisit the original context of the post, we’ve introduced a context bar that’s stickied on the top of the page, allowing redditors to return to the post or dive into the content with a single tap.
If someone wants to take a closer look at media from their feed before getting into the comments — a single tap on the image or video gets them where they want to go.
Give us URLs in the context bar, you cowards
All of these upgrades are great, but there’s one thing missing from this new context bar. While a lot of posts on Reddit contain media like photos and videos, a lot of them actually contain links to articles and other websites.
I’d for those links to be displayed as a rich URL in the same place that images and videos are in the context bar so it’s easy to tap on the link from the comments section. Tapping back to the original post and then launching the built-in browser is one step that could have been eliminated with this feature so, hopefully, Reddit will add that as well in the future.
Despite that smart gripe, this is a great update that will make engaging with conversations much easier on the app. The update is rolling out today for both iOS and Android, so keep an eye out!
