Reddit says that it is shutting down Reddit Talk, its audio chat feature that was designed in the midst of Clubhouse's huge popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Reddit Talk will officially shut down on 21 March 2023, just two years after it was first launched. In the place of Reddit Talk, it's thought that the company is now going to focus its energies on fixing something it has long needed to fix - search.

Reddit confirmed that Reddit Talk is shutting down, saying that users will be able to download all of their past talks until 1 June. But even then, they'll only be able to download talks that happened after 1 September. Reddit says that's because that's the date that it "implemented a new user flow that expanded the potential use case of talks."

“Our original plan was to maintain Talk while we worked on this. Unfortunately, the 3rd party audio vendor we use for Talk is shutting down its service. In other words, the resources required to keep Talk live during this transition increased substantially,” Reddit said in its announcement post.

Reddit isn't the only company to have jumped on the Clubhouse bandwagon, although some have had more success than others. Twitter was quick to follow Clubhouse's lead, while even Spotify decided that it wanted to get in on the act as well. But ultimately, both of those companies were always a better fit for live voice chat than Reddit ever was, and with "significant work" required to get audio working properly on the platform it makes sense that Reddit is calling time now.

This doesn't mean that there won't ever be live chat on Reddit again. Far from it, with the company saying that there could still be a part to play in its future.

"We learned that communities of all sizes can make unique connections through live social conversations," Reddit's post says. "And if our goal is to make Reddit the place for communities, audio will likely play a part in the future."