How the Discover Tab works
The aforementioned compass icon is nestled right between the app’s home button and the plus icon that lets you create a post (it’s not available on the web). Tap it and you’ll see an array of photo and video posts Reddit thinks you’ll enjoy based on communities you’re a part of or have spent a lot of time lurking. “We’re ushering in a new era of discovery on Reddit, with images and video top of mind,” Reddit’s director of product for content and communities, Jason Costa, said in a statement that coincided with the feature’s late-February rollout. “We’re making discovering relevant content and communities more intuitive.” It’s also a way to put potentially interesting posts in front of people who may have turned off various recommendation settings (tap your profile icon, then Settings, and your username to see them). So even if you’ve disabled Reddit’s ability to slide recommended posts into your home feed and told it not to use your IP address or interactions with partner sites and apps to suggest content, the Discover Tab will still work.
How to use Reddit’s Discover Tab
The unfiltered Discover Tab is a scrollable amalgamation of suggested posts, each with the subreddit name displayed on top. Tap one and it’ll take you to that community, where you can scroll through to see if you feel like joining. If you do, tap the blue “join” icon, depending on where you are on the page), and you’re in. You can keep going through these filters but you’ll eventually reach the end, as the app appears to display only 25 at a time. That’s no problem: swipe down from the top of your screen to refresh the whole Discover Tab. Now, if you like your Discover Tab like you prefer your selfies—filtered—look to the top of your screen. Below the search box and the icons for your profile and the main menu, you’ll see topic suggestions in bubbles—scroll to the right to see more. Tap one to turn the more general feed into one tailored specifically to the topic you touched, and scroll down to see if anything interests you.
How to improve the Discover Tab
Feedback is important, whether you’re a website valued at more than $10 billion or a 7-year-old scrawling the worst self-portrait your teacher has ever seen. This is why Reddit has built response mechanisms into the Discover Tab so you can tell them whether their recommendations are good or bad. To find them, press and hold on any item in the feed to open a menu with the following options:
