Reddit said on Wednesday that Reddit Talk, a live audio product, will be discontinued on March 21—two years after it was first introduced.
Before adding audio to its platform, the business claimed that “significant work” must be done.
This effectively means that Reddit is refocusing its efforts on creating better search and a feed for discovering videos in the vein of TikTok.
Reddit receives more than 500 million monthly visits, according to Bali Bhat, chief product officer of the social network, who was recently interviewed on the Decoder podcast.
Yet with these additional capabilities, the business hopes to expand the platform’s user base.
“Our original plan was to maintain Talk while we worked on this. Unfortunately, the 3rd party audio vendor we use for Talk is shutting down its service. In other words, the resources required to keep Talk live during this transition increased substantially,” Reddit stated in a post.
Users can download talks until June 1 if they were hosted after September 22. Reddit Talk will be accessible until March 21.
The “Happening Now” website, which let users see what was happening in real-time chats, is also being shut down by the firm as part of this sunset.
Every platform scrambled to create a clone of Clubhouse after its ascent to success. But, the popularity has declined over the past year, and businesses are reevaluating their objectives.
Reddit is not the only website that has reconsidered its approach to live audio.
A creator fund for in-the-moment dialogues was shut down by Spotify last year, and numerous shows were cancelled. Amazon fired staff in October at Amp, an app it had developed to promote live radio.