Reddit Public Access Network

» see reddit.com/rpan as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The first version of RPAN ran from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, Pacific time. Set against Turkey that is a window opening at seven at night and closing at three in the morning, which tells you fairly precisely who the experiment was built around. I was thirty five and in Ankara, with a working day that ended well before the stream list filled up, so most of RPAN happened while I was asleep.

Reddit announced it on 19 August 2019 as a five day test. The idea was borrowed directly from public-access television: anybody may broadcast, and the audience decides what rises. Streams were ranked by upvote and downvote exactly the way posts were, and you moved between them by swiping sideways.

It was supposed to end that Friday. It did not. RPAN became a permanent feature with a home at r/pan, then a desktop app of its own, then a small cast of regulars who streamed to a schedule nobody at Reddit had set.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the five day pilot ~

The launch confused people, which is itself a decent record of what Reddit was attempting. A static image appeared at the top of the front page with no explanation attached, and somebody went to r/OutOfTheLoop to ask what it was. That question collected over four thousand points inside a day.

The limits were the interesting design decision. Broadcasts were short, so nothing could become a channel you left running in another tab. Streams carried chat and paid awards, so a room could pay its broadcaster in the site's own currency. On 28 January 2021 Reddit raised the cap permanently to three hours, which was the point where the thing stopped looking like a stunt.

~ the vote decided the channel ~

Twitch sorts by concurrent viewers and YouTube by watch time, and both of those reward whoever is already winning. RPAN sorted by upvote, which meant a stream with nine people watching could be pushed to the top by nine people who liked it. The programming that came out of this was closer to somebody pointing a camera at their fish tank than to anything a network would commission.

RPAN Studio, released on 1 July 2020, was a fork of OBS, the open-source broadcaster that everybody already used, with Reddit's streaming endpoint wired into it. It worked, and it meant the barrier to going live on Reddit was a download rather than a production setup.

~ what reddit cleared out ~

RPAN went off on 15 November 2022. Reddit made little of the announcement and named no replacement, which is the usual shape when a feature costs real money in bandwidth and returns a community instead of a number.

Four months later, in March 2023, Reddit shut Reddit Talk, its audio room product, which already has a grave here. The company spent 2019 through 2022 building live formats and most of 2023 clearing them out again.

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