Reddit is launching a product reviews hub that gathers discussions from across its communities into pages for individual products. The company says the tool will use AI to organize comments and highlight their context, building on the platform’s growing role in shoppers’ research.
Reddit Reviews will initially cover 10,000 products across electronics, health and beauty, home and garden, and fashion and apparel. Each page can show relevant comments, pros and cons, and an overall sentiment rating, such as positive, mixed or negative. Users will be able to filter discussions by product features — including headphone noise cancellation — and browse category pages for similar items, with filters for price and other attributes.
Some pages will link to retailers. Reddit says it will not receive a share of sales through those links, and merchants cannot pay to be included in the reviews hub. The company describes the feature as a way to surface “the nuance, context, and connection to the original conversation” in discussions where people share their experiences with products.
Product research is already a significant part of Reddit’s activity. The company told The Verge in August that 40 percent of conversations on the platform were commercial in nature. Shoppers use both broad communities and specialized subreddits, including r/BuyItForLife and r/PetiteFashionAdvice, to seek recommendations.
The new pages formalize that use of Reddit and put the platform in more direct competition with product-review publishers such as Wirecutter and news outlets that publish reviews, including The Verge. The popularity of recommendations has also attracted marketers: moderators have told The Verge they found brands trying to seed positive comments and sentiment. Reddit said earlier this year it was changing its spam detection to target “highly subtle, coordinated patterns of fake behavior and artificial hype.”
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first!