Reddit launches multireddits in beta, lets gold members combine subreddits to create their own front pages

Reddit today announced it is launching multireddits, a feature that lets you build your own front pages by combining multiple subreddits. If you’re a Gold member, you can check out the beta now at /r/multibeta.

Multireddits, or multis for short, have been around for years, but only in the form of custom URLs (like /r/space+nasa+astronomy). Now Reddit says it wants to make multis “as ubiquitous and powerful as subreddits.” The company says it has spent the past six months working on making multis easier to create and share, and it hopes they will be key to ensuring the community continues to thrive.

In the company’s own words:

If subreddits give you the power to create your own reddit community, then multireddits give you the power to create your own public reddit front pages, each with their own selections of subreddits. In the process of curating and sharing these different front pages, there lies the potential to breathe life into smaller, more specific communities, because you can now participate in an order of magnitude more of them.

Reddit says subreddits played a massive role in giving its users the ability to create an entirely new community with whatever focus they wanted. Yet all this growth has made it difficult to organize and keep track of all the subreddits each user is interested in – the company hopes multis will help address this issue.

Again, multis are still in beta. Reddit admits there are missing features and opportunities in this first release, but it plans “many more betas” and to eventually open source the code on GitHub. The plan is to make it as easy as possible for the site’s users to help shape the new feature.

Reddit today also revealed some interesting figures regarding its growth. A day after its eighth birthday, there were 5,487 active subreddits. In May, the site saw over 71 million unique visitors. Later this year, the company is expecting to surpass 5 billion pageviews per month.

Clearly Reddit hopes multis can push it onwards to 10,000 subreddits, 100 million unique visitors, and 10 billion pageviews per month. We’ll keep you posted if and when those milestones are reached.

See also – Reddit’s impressive 2012 stats: 37 billion page views, 400 million uniques and 30 million posts

Top Image Credit: Eastop