Reddit finally expands GIF replies beyond paid subscriptions

By Anita George July 13, 2022

If you’d rather reply to Reddit posts with fun GIFs, the popular social media platform’s latest update is for you.

On Wednesday, online GIF database Giphy announced a new partnership with Reddit that includes an expansion of Reddit’s GIFs in comments feature to all users. The newly expanded feature includes a searchable “moderated library of GIFs” from Giphy, from which Reddit users can now choose GIFs to be added to a comment they’re composing.

Mobile product screenshot showing how to add a Giphy GIF to a Reddit comment. — GIPHY

While the Giphy partnership does technically open Reddit’s GIF replies feature to all users starting today, there are some caveats with that:

The new Giphy-powered GIF replies feature is currently only available for SFW (safe for work) subreddits and subreddits that aren’t quarantined.
Furthermore, the expanded GIF replies feature is only available for eligible subreddits if their moderators have opted-in to use it. That is to say, if your subreddit existed before the launch of this feature, then your moderators have to opt-in to it to make it available for use in that subreddit.
If your subreddit was started after the launch of the feature, the expanded GIF replies feature should already be enabled, but moderators can still disable it later.

In the past, your options for commenting with a GIF were a bit limited: You could only access it via Powerups (paid subscriptions for subreddits that can be applied to unlock a perk in that subreddit, such as GIF replies) or you had to post a link to a GIF, which had to be opened to view the GIF itself, usually in another browser tab. So it looks like this latest feature expansion is a step towards making GIF replies to Reddit posts easier to use.

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