For the first time in three years, Reddit is making its second attempt at launching its own Reddit mobile app, but this time, the website that calls itself "the front page of the Internet" is focusing its efforts on one of its most popular features.
Reddit is famous for its Ask Me Anything (AMA) interviews, which allow users to field questions to politicians, celebrities and other prominent persons. The AMA subreddit is found on /r/IAmA, as in "I am a...," and is one of the default subreddits new users are subscribed to. Reddit says AMA has at least six million subscribers, not including casual web browsers who are not logged in to a Reddit account. In the past AMA has hosted interviews with persons such as "Game of Thrones" actor Peter Dinklage, astronaut Edwin Aldrin and even President Obama.
Ellen Pao, senior vice president of mobile at Reddit, says the app is Reddit's way of making Reddit easier to understand for new users without alienating its current user base of 133 million monthly visitors. The simple and clean user interface is a far cry from Reddit's desktop interface, which can feel crowded and unnavigable to new users. The app also makes it easier for users to browse through the different AMA categories, including business, journalism, crime, food and entertainment, to name a few. It also maintains the democratic voting system that allows users to vote a post up or down to push the most helpful posts to the top and suss out the trolls and spammers, which is good news for loyal Reddit users.
"We want to make it easier for new users to join Reddit and experience all the awesome content," says Pao in an interview with Variety. "That's part of the overall goal of becoming a more mature company."
In 2011, Reddit introduced its first official app to provide access to the whole Reddit website but later dropped the effort after user complaints of massive glitches in the app. Since then, third-party apps that provided Reddit access, namely Allen Blue for iOS and BaconReader for Android, became the app of choice for most Reddit users. However, with Internet usage increasingly growing mobile and 40% of its new users accessing from their mobile devices, Reddit finally decided it has to try again.
"We've found in the last year or so a huge uptick in people accessing Reddit from the mobile web, and we want to give those folks a great experience," says Pao.
The new app, called the Official Reddit AMA app, is only available for iOS at the moment, but Android users can expect their own version of the app later in the week.
