Reddit Updates: Improved Search, Subreddit Forking & more

After a series of relevance tests and changes to infrastructure, Reddit has now launched the revamped Search, along with a slate of new updates including a new way to create subreddits called Forking.

Along with the revamped Search and Subreddit Forking, a few other updates from Reddit include the option for users to opt-out of followers by changing their settings, users on the web can now view and manage their followers, push notifications and email notifications for new followers are now back on, and Reddit is now also available in the Microsoft Store.

Improved Search

Search has gone through some front-ends changes and the newly developed Reddit Search includes a number of changes, the most prominent of them being the default search within a community will now only show results from within that community, instead of the whole of Reddit.

The UI for the web has been updated and now includes simplified tabs on search result pages - Posts, Communities, and People. The platform has now also added a new safe search toggle on the search results pages of users who have confirmed that they’re over 18, and these users will be able to whether or not they want to see NSFW (Not Safe for Work) results. Users under 18 will continue to not see NSFW content anywhere on the platform.

Also Read: Reddit valued at 10 Bn USD after securing new round of funding

Subreddit Forking

Posts on Reddit generate thousands of comments (or more) and more frequently than not, these comments generate tons of engagement, giving birth to a new sub, For instance, r/cursedcomments, the description of this community is self-explanatory it was conceived by comments on posts.

Similarly, r/thirdsentenceworse was born out of r/twosentencehorror. r/twosentencehorror is a community where users post horror stories that start and end in two sentences only, and more often than not the community adds their own addition n the comments, and when that third sentence ups the ante, and turns the horror into a traumatic terror, it goes up in r/thirdsentenceworse.

Reddit is now making it easier for these subreddits to sprout when they gain enough traction that they end up 'forking' and spawning their very own subreddit. When one such incident occurs users will see a call-to-action prompt that encourages them to create the new subreddit.

This prompt will only be accessible to the OP (creator of the post) and the top 5 commenters within the thread. The visibility of this prompt also depends on the dynamic threshold for engagement subjective to each subreddit’s size, which the posts and comments must surpass in order to trigger this call to action prompt. Reddit has also built in a frequency cap to prevent one user from spamming the creation of multiple subreddits.