Reddit chat rooms are here. As if you didn’t spend enough of your 9-to-5 workday browsing /r/aww, /r/explainlikeimfive, /r/bestof, or /r/SubredditDrama, you can now share your thoughts about posts (and life) with real Redditors in real time! Mashing the F5 key to refresh a static comments page is so last year.
That said, it’s certainly possible that your favourite subreddit doesn’t have a chat room. Though the feature is now active site-wide, moderators have to opt in by dropping their subreddit’s name into this giant comment thread.
Even then, it seems that chat rooms are still rolling out to everyone, as there are definitely some subreddits I frequent in that “chat room request thread” that don’t have chat rooms just yet.
Worry not; if you have an itch to converse with internet strangers, there are plenty of ways to find interesting chat rooms right now.
Just pull up chat
When you load Reddit — assuming you haven’t opted out of the site’s newest design — you should see a bunch of icons in the upper-right corner of your screen, right near your Reddit username.
Click on the one that looks like a chat bubble with three dots in it, which should pull up Reddit’s new chat room feature in the lower-right portion of your browser.
Subreddits that have chat rooms (and, yes, a subreddit can have more than one chat room) should appear under the “Recommended Rooms” listing to the left of the window. Click on any chat room to view its full name — if its truncated in the sidebar — as well as its description. Click join room to start chatting.
Visit your favourite subreddits to see if chat is enabled
If you’re browsing one of the subreddits you check on a daily (or near-daily) basis, you’ll probably notice if the moderators sticky a big “we have a chat room” post to the top of the page. Otherwise, you can check to see if a subreddit has an active chat room by scrolling down a bit and looking at its right-hand sidebar. Any chat rooms, if they exist, should appear there.
Use Reddit chat to find new chat rooms
Pull up Reddit’s chat interface — via this handy link — and scroll to the bottom of the left sidebar. You should have a number of default rooms from “/r/community_chat”. Look for the “Recommend Me a Room” room. Join it if you’d like to see chat room suggestions from the Reddit community. And you can, of course, ask if anyone knows if a chat room exists for that obscure topic that you can’t get enough of.
There’s a subreddit for everything
Naturally, someone has already created a subreddit that people can use to find other subreddits with active chat rooms. Just visit /r/SubChats to search for new places to talk to people with shared interests. While I recommend just sorting by “Top” to get a quick sense of the real gems, there are plenty of other interesting rooms you might just want to jump into head-first.
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Comcast_Xfinity: If you’re having issues with Comcast — a road we’ve all been down at some point in our lives, no doubt — commiserate with other Comcast users here.
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316Cats: I don’t really get the name, but this chat room is designed for people who want to “share GIFs and pictures of cats”. What more does one need?
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BuildaPCSales: If you’re looking to upgrade your desktop PC or build a brand-new one, this subreddit — and chat room — can help you get the most for your budget.
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GameofThrones: This chat room won’t matter much now, but it’ll kick into a frenzy, I bet, as we inch closer to the series’ final season. (Come hang out with your fellow members of Team Varys.)
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MovieDetails: If you’re the kind of person that noticed when that stormtrooper hit his head on the Death Star door, this chat room is for you.
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Weed: That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
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CasualConversation: Keep it chill and have regular, interesting conversations with adults who aren’t crazy — one hopes.
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PlayStation, Gamecube, NES, N64: We’re waiting on you, Nintendo Switch, Xbox and PC gaming fans. It’s time to get chatty already.
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