Reddit’s new geotagging feature could change the platform for the better

As with other global social platforms like Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter, Reddit has just added support for geotagging posts, so you can let people know where you took that photo of a double rainbow.

The feature was built in partnership with Foursquare, and it’s opt-in only, which means you won’t be forced to add a location tag to your post if you don’t want to.

It’s an interesting move for the Conde Nast-owned company, as a majority of its users enjoy interacting with the various communities on Reddit with a certain degree of anonymity and privacy not seen on other large platforms: you don’t have to enter your real name and email address, or connect a social network account to post content and comment on things. Geotagging will kinda-sorta give away your location, thus eroding a wee bit of the privacy users enjoy – but then again, you can choose to only disclose the city you’re in and not give up your exact coordinates.

Remember when I said geotagging *could* make the platform better? It isn’t yet as useful as it could be. For starters, I’d like to be able to see all the posts shared from a particular location across all subreddits, as well as a filtered list of only the subreddits I’m subscribed to, and the ones I moderate. That’d certainly give people interesting insights into what sorts of content originate from different places in the world.

Similarly, I’d like to be able to see all my own Reddit posts on a global map, so I can see what I’ve posted from home, and what I’ve shared with my communities while traveling across the globe. Instagram had a Photo Map feature that worked like this, but it was sadly killed off because it wasn’t used by a lot of people. It was arguably one of the most interesting things about that platform, and as more folks take to Redditing on mobile devices, it’d be nice to look up posts by location.

Hopefully the platform’s geotagging efforts will mature to support functionality like this in the future. If you’d like to try tagging your posts, you’ll need the official Reddit app for Android or iOS; it isn’t yet available on desktop.