To give users a greater say over what they see and don’t see on the site, Reddit is launching a new “community muting” function. Over the next few weeks, you’ll be able to access the new functionality on Reddit’s mobile apps. In the upcoming months, Reddit will bring the capability to its desktop platform.
When you mute an entire community, you won’t receive any further notifications or see any posts from that community in your Home feed or Popular posts. A user can silence as many as one thousand communities at once. Reddit emphasizes that muting a community does not prevent you from viewing, posting, or commenting in that community; rather, it simply prevents you from receiving notifications about new activity in that community. You can unmute a community at any moment from your Settings page, where you can also modify your notification and other options for communities.
After introducing muting on the desktop, Reddit aims to expand the feature to additional feeds, including the All and Discover sections. The firm claims it introduced the option to mute comments as part of a bigger push to offer users more agency over their time on Reddit.
Putting a mute on a group can be done in three different ways. The settings menu (accessible by clicking the ellipses (…) in the top right of a community page) and the three dots menu (accessible by clicking the ellipses (…) in the top right of your Popular and Home feeds) will allow you to make these changes.
The business claims that users can create a more filtered experience through muting, but that this does not negate the need for users to report anything that violates its regulations.
For those who don’t want to see certain types of posts in their popular or home feeds, this new function is a great addition to the platform. Given that Reddit hinted at the rollout some months ago, the introduction of the new functionality is not exactly shocking. Reddit claimed at the time that it was working on a solution to user complaints about community muting so that users may have greater say over what appeared in their feeds.
