Reddit Inc. today announced some major changes to its platform, including a new Discover Tab, that should make life easier for its users.

In the past, users looked for communities, or so-called subreddits, by seeing what’s popular on the platform or by searching various topics. The problem with finding new things to read is that Reddit has more than 100,000 communities. Finding something new can be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Now, if users hit the Discover Tab, content will appear to them based on topics they’ve looked at before. So if they’re reading a lot of cooking posts or traveling posts, the tab will bring up new content in the form of photos, GIFs or videos, content they might not have necessarily found with old-fashioned searches.

For those new to the platform, the tab will just show the most popular kinds of content that people are looking at. The company hasn’t had an update as big as this in two years and, according to Reddit, this was one of the most asked-for tools by its community.

“We’re ushering in a new era of discovery on Reddit, with images and video top of mind,” said Jason Costa, director of product for content and communities at Reddit. “We’re making discovering relevant content and communities more intuitive with the Discover Tab.”

Users can just hit the new compass icon on the bottom bar to start discovering, and they can use a filter system to have the tab bring up whatever kind of topics they want. There’s also a feedback tool so users can tell Reddit if the content they see is actually related to their search query.

Using Reddit can be a messy business even with such a tab, but to make the app more in line with regular social media platforms, there is now a way for people to organize their life on Reddit. Once someone knows what communities they want to see, they can add them to the new “Community and Profile Drawers.”

Photo: Brett Jordan/Unsplash