Tonight I was lucky enough to be invited in to try out the new Reddit "Create Your Own Reddit" beta feature that I discussed a few days ago. After playing around with it for just an hour or so it's very clear that as long as we're not completely inundated by new Reddits that dilute the power of the original version, this is going to be a great new aspect of the site.

Already popping up like crazy are sub-reddits for topics such as: robotics, math, Obama, NSFW, LOLcats, music, photography, Apple, Microsoft and yes, Ron Paul. Dozens exist already with more popping up every few minutes. Some of these new Reddits already have 50+ subscribers while many hover at 1 (their creator). With so many coming, it's certainly going to be hard to distinguish between all of them; perhaps we're going to need a 'hot' and 'new' menu area just for new Reddits.

Creating your own Reddit is as easy as entering in the name you'll want to appear in the url as reddit.com/r/NAME. Then you pick a full name for your Reddit, enter a description of what stories it's supposed to contain, you select a language, and finally select the type. As I talked about a few days ago, you can either have a fully 'public' Reddit that anyone can see and submit content to, a 'restricted' Reddit which anyone can see but only select users can submit to, and a 'private' Reddit which only select users can both see and submit to.

Once you create your own Reddit there is an easy-to-use manage area where you can edit your settings as well as add moderators/contributors, ban users, and filter spam. The 'stats' area still exists in the toolbar, but it is still just for overall Reddit stats, it would be great to be able to see the karma stats for these new sub-Reddits. It would also be great to be able to create your own Reddit logo.

For my test Reddit I went ahead and created a restricted 'Elite Tech News' Reddit now found at http://reddit.com/r/l33t. As I wrote about a couple days ago, I thought a platform such as this would be perfect for testing what Dave Winer wrote about wanting to create a few months ago - a kind of "Elite Digg". While I'm still not sure if something inclusive like this can work better than the current Digg, Reddit, Techmeme, Readburner, etc, here is a potential chance to test it out.

If anyone is interested in being a contributor, shoot me an email (find my address at the top of the site). I'll set the requirement for entry (sorry if this sounds too elitist, but for such a thing to work there has to be some determining factor for entry - again, anyone will be able to see the submissions and vote on them) that you must have had an article on Techmeme at some point in the past year.

As the Reddit Blog noted a few days ago, this new 'create your own Reddit' should only be in closed beta testing for a short period of time before it's open to everyone. It certainly already seems ready to go - and fits in nicely with the regular Reddit site as you can easily subscribe and unsubscribe to these new user-created Reddits just as you could with the previous sub-Reddits. It will be very interesting to see what user-created Reddits become popular - besides obviously, the Ron Paul one.