Avatars for chat rooms

Anyone using the chat has a contact called u/reddit_chat_feedback, a virtual chat “user” that serves as a feedback hotline.If you've ever wanted to make out with a virtual pal in a virtual world, your time has come.

In the cat chat room, I asked people what kinds of songs they sang to their pets, revealing that my calico happens to have a dinnertime tune. “Even when people initially lash out in frustration or to troll, I found that if you talk to them and show them you’re a regular human like them, they almost always chill out.” Chat will continue to roll out to new communities daily, and Reddit promises to continue to take feedback on the feature in an effort to improve it.

Rawr, a messaging app released Thursday in Apple's App Store, offers the twist of letting you create a 3D avatar.

You choose one of the app's generic avatars and then spice it up by customizing the body, face, mouth, ears, clothes and other features.

I joined a number of chat rooms, and found that most of them weren’t that active — some barely had any chatter at all.

More popular rooms had people shooting the shit, sharing their lives and dreams, and joking.