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Reddit updates its toolbar feature for the first time in 4 years

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This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Reddit toolbar, version 2.0, the first revision in years. Credit: Reddit
When Digg joined Facebook and StumbleUpon last month in the pantheon of social sites that followed users to outside Web pages, all of a sudden it seemed every other social destination was deploying a frame toolbar.

Tsk, those Johnny-come-latelys. You might not have known, but Reddit, the underdog social news site from Conde Nast, has had a similar toolbar for four years.

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But don’t worry, even some avid users of the site had no idea it was there. That’s because, unlike those from its social media brethren, the Reddit toolbar is an opt-in feature, buried away in the preferences menu. Plus, it was lacking the visual polish and channel-surfing features that Digg and StumbleUpon have.

But today Reddit is rolling out the first major update to its toolbar in years. It adds all the expected features -- the ability to ...

... give a positive or negative vote to a story, see a link’s current point value and leave a comment.

A new feature, called Serendipity, lets users channel surf the site to access random pages that other users have enjoyed. Spurred by the popularity of the flagship ‘stumble’ button on StumbleUpon, Digg added something similar, called Random, to its toolbar last month.

Let the mindless page-bouncing begin!

-- Mark Milian

Corrected, 3:19 p.m.: The original version said the Reddit toolbar has a button that points to the developer’s user profile. In fact, the button links to the profile of whoever is currently browsing (i.e., your own).

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