Missing News tab on your Reddit app? It's a new design experiment & sadly there's no way to opt out

If you’ve opened up your Reddit app lately and noticed that the News tab just vanished into thin air, you’re not alone in wondering what the hell happened. Turns out this isn’t some random bug or your phone acting up. Reddit’s deliberately running this test on some users, and here’s the fun part: you can’t escape it right now.

People are losing their minds about this and posting about it on different subreddits. Here’s a screenshot someone shared noting the missing News tab.

One person started a whole thread in r/help, basically saying they depend on the News tab every morning and now they’re stuck with just “For You” and “Popular,” which honestly don’t hit the same.

The replies came flooding in fast. Someone said they’re barely using the app anymore without it, another person talked about how it completely messed up their morning routine of catching quick news updates. A few people even said this might push them to jump ship to X or other news apps entirely. You can tell this really struck a nerve with people who count on Reddit for their daily news fix with community commentary mixed in.

A Reddit admin did show up to explain what’s happening. Basically, if you’re using the iOS or Android app and your News feed disappeared, congrats! You’re part of their “small-scale test.” There’s no way to escape it right now, but they claim they’re tweaking things and might pull people out of the experiment later. They said they’d pass along the feedback, which is nice and all, but doesn’t help people who feel like unwilling guinea pigs. One commenter made a good point: why not just ask for volunteers instead of randomly forcing this on people?

This whole thing makes more sense when you look at Reddit’s bigger plans. Last week, CEO Steve Huffman talked about turning Reddit into a search engine. He wants to compete with Google by highlighting all the detailed conversations and knowledge buried in Reddit threads. They’re planning to merge regular search with their AI tool called Reddit Answers, putting search front and center when you open the app. Since “Reddit” is already one of the most googled terms, they figure they can steal some of that traffic.

Huffman mentioned that most people find Reddit through searches anyway, even when they start somewhere else. The News tab removal probably fits into this search-focused redesign. Maybe they want people actively searching for content instead of passively scrolling through feeds. But right now, it just feels like they’re taking away something people actually liked.

If you’re one of the unlucky ones, your best bet is complaining loudly in the help forums. More angry voices might speed things up. For now, you can still get news by searching r/news or r/worldnews directly, but it’s clunky compared to having a dedicated tab.