Reddit’s looking to make a bigger push on its Reddit Talk audio social experiment ‘Nurture Audio Talent’, with a new Host Program to help it find and nurture top conversational talent in the app.

As outlined in the visual above, Reddit is inviting regular Reddit Talk hosts to take part in the program with the lure of rewards like:

• Your talks being promoted to relevant audiences at the top of Reddit, and being promoted on Reddit’s own social media channels
• Exclusive Reddit swag, including Reddit hoodies and mics, and a special talk trophy for your Reddit profile
• Exclusive access to the Reddit Talks community, where you can chat with other hosts and the Reddit Talk product team

In order to qualify for these perks, hosts will need to run at least 4 talks every 30 days (12 total) between June 15 and September 15, 2022. The program is open to anyone who has access to Reddit Talk, while users can also apply for access here.

Launched last April, in the midst of the brief, Clubhouse-led audio social boom, Reddit Talk enables selected users to host audio group chats within their communities, in order to enhance connection and increase engagement.

Reddit has since made various enhancements to the option, including an updated, Stories-like feed of live chats in progress, within the subreddits that you follow, along the top bar of the app.

Reddit also now enables users to tune into Talks via desktop, expanding access to more users.

It’s hard to tell whether audio social elements will be a lasting, valuable consideration for social platforms, with much of the initial hype now dying out, and the growth of existing tools like Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces slowing significantly over recent months. Meta has also effectively abandoned its audio rooms experiments, as part of broader cost-cutting measures.

Still, there is clear value there for some people and communities, and on Reddit, it could arguably be even more valuable than in dedicated audio social apps, because the content that you see is highlighted based on the communities that you’ve already joined.

Part of the difficulty that Clubhouse and Spaces have found is that showcasing personally relevant room matches to each user is a challenge, because their algorithm matching systems are either not advanced enough or they don’t have enough data on each user to show them the right content at any given time.

Reddit effectively side-steps this issue by only highlighting the chats from the communities that you follow, which could help to increase engagement.

Reddit says that the aim of this new program is to ‘find and reward great audio hosts on Reddit’.

“We’ve already seen communities host amazing talks that range from casual hangouts (r/wallstreetbets, r/dadjokes, r/amitheasshole) to live audio AMAs ( r/cryptocurrency with Kevin O Leary, r/relationship_advice with Kerry Cohen, r/movies with Jackass crew).”

It’s now looking to invest in the next stage of audio content, which, as noted, could be a good compliment for Reddit specifically, even if it flames out in other applications.

You can read more about the Reddit Talk Host Program here.