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The Internet

Reddit Is Testing Country-Specific Home Pages That Highlight 'Geo Popular' Content (ndtv.com) 49

Reader joshtops writes: Reddit is exploring a new way to make its front page more relevant to its readers. The social aggregation and discussion website is testing tailored home pages based on a reader's location in select places, Gadgets 360 spotted. The company has confirmed to us that it is indeed testing "geo popular" home pages. As part of the test, readers in Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, and United Kingdom could see a banner when they visit Reddit.com informing them of the new home page. It's unclear if registered and signed in users are also a part of the experiment. Testing from India, in one case we found several stories from r/India and r/cricket (no surprise given the sport's popularity in the country) subreddits populate the home page. Reddit is also letting people switch the home page to any of the aforementioned country's home pages. Users also have the option to switch to the global -- universal -- home page. In a statement, a Reddit spokesperson told Gadgets 360, "We've been testing new geo-based popular feeds as a way to surface more relevant content to users based on their location," reserving any timeframe for when -- and if -- Reddit plans to roll-out this feature to all its users. "We'll be adjusting as we receive feedback from users," the spokesperson added, reaffirming that users will be "able to toggle locations to see popular posts in other geographical areas or globally."
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Reddit Is Testing Country-Specific Home Pages That Highlight 'Geo Popular' Content

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    "The front page of the internet" no more.

    "The front page of your market segment."

    There it is.

    • Reddit already customizes their home page. I subscribe to /r/rtlsdr and I get articles from that small subreddit on my main page. This change seems to be just like an automatic subscription to /r/australia and /r/melbourne which I can turn off if I like.

    • The front page of my Internet is an RSS viewer. It has been for some time and will be for some time.

  • They should add support for IPV6 first.
  • Eh, I already have this.

    Everywhere has it's own sub and I'm subscribed to my town's sub. So I get local news. But it's labeled as such.

    In general I'd say leave this sort of homepage tweaking up to the user. Power to the people and all that.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      But do you use bookmarks to read these subscribed subReddits or something? My home page's top monthlies show random every XX minutes.

  • I wonder what Christmas Island [wikipedia.org] specific content would end up looking like. A bit of a stretch?
  • Reddit is where clickbait goes when it's been very, very bad. Nope and nope.
  • It's a misleading measure of what is "popular".

    If it is deemed "controversial", or simply against the interests of admins, it's excluded.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I absolutely hate this "feature" on news sites. When I visit an american paper I want to see what the americans are reading, not some shitty watered down version of my own country's news.

  • by Koen Lefever ( 2543028 ) on Friday July 14, 2017 @02:26PM (#54810831)
    I'm in Belgium.
    • by CodeHog ( 666724 )
      Watch your language! //42 + 1 = 44 for very large values of 1.
    • You got a population of 11 million people. You will do fine. Unless its per commune/county, in which case... yeah, it will such for anywhere not central.
      Or you will just get shitty French export, being Mini France already.
      I also wonder if it will be a segregated horror show for Norway/Sweden/Denmark, of it will be segregated into their capitals and large cities.

  • by SmaryJerry ( 2759091 ) on Friday July 14, 2017 @03:26PM (#54811135)
    Just more bad news for reddit. It used to be open and free and now it's only good if you ignore the main pages and go directly to a subreddit.
    • Yeah I didn't understand why reddit was interesting until I started diving deep. This is sure to make it more difficult for people to be talking about the same thing. Which is the entire fucking point of reddit!

  • This is 100% decoy news. I've accumulated numerous incidents over the years where my Reddit content was clearly customized for me in the creepiest of ways. I would bet my life that there are major ML/AI shenanigans happening behind the scenes with our collective private data. De-anonymizing a user and experimenting on them is serious business.
  • Is what we call the "beginning of the end".

    Every "front page of the Internet" we've ever had fails once they start overcomplicating things. Unfortunately they haven't yet reached the "death throes", but I've got popcorn ready for when they do.

  • People who go to reddit want to see what's popular on reddit.

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