Reddit may be about to launch its own standalone news site, called Upvoted

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One of the Internet’s most infamous social communities, Reddit, is launching its own standalone news website — called Upvoted — on Tuesday, according to Wired.

It’s fair to say that the company has had its fair share of problems lately — it’s still not long out from big changes to its top leadership, with former chief executive Ellen Pao only just resigning in July. It’s also trying to tackle issues like racism, and has laid out new restrictions that some have called confusing. All of this, ultimately, is about navigating the tricky road to growth while maintaining a happy and loyal community.

Reddit has always been good at “surfacing interesting stuff from the Internet,” as the Wired report says. This new site definitely presents an opportunity for the company to take all that community-curated content and offer it up in a more newsy way, filtering it through an independent editorial team expected to consist of 10 writers creating up to 20 stories per day — and eventually even more.

Right now, news on Reddit is all about links listed in a threaded layout within subreddits that take you out to other sites. This certainly isn’t going to attract the mainstream news junkies who are turning to shiny media-rich platforms like BuzzFeed and the newly launched Apple News for their quick news fixes.

Reddit is an excellent indicator of what news is trending online, and that could count for a lot when making editorial calls. Upvoted’s dedicated editorial team will be able to work on crafting news that appeals to not only Reddit readers, but the wider Internet community, as well, based on that very Reddit news barometer, if you will.

Here’s more from Wired on what we can expect to see:

In the works for the past year, the site looks and feels much like any other news site out there. It will have stories, infographics, illustrations, videos, and podcasts. It will include articles on news, sports, animals, and lifestyle issues. It will have its own website, upvoted.com, and a dedicated editorial team creating original stories. But, unlike other news sites, it will be a part of Reddit. And, very much unlike Reddit, it won’t allow comments on the site at all. (Nor, despite its name, will it have any kind of “upvoting” system.)

The site will also quite literally tie back to Reddit. Each story on Upvoted will indicate who the original poster for the story was and its original Reddit thread. The new Upvoted story will then be added to a Reddit forum made for this kind of content (/r/upvoted), where readers will be able to comment or upvote stories. Chang says that Upvoted content won’t get preferential treatment on Reddit itself, though it may be advertised on the site to help raise awareness.

At time of writing, Upvoted is still marked as private and inaccessible without a log in. Assuming it will indeed launch Tuesday, we can expect that to change in the coming hours.

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