Reddit’s Steve Huffman: Online platforms ‘can’t just sit on their hands’

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1:34We couldn't say, hey, just everything goes. I was watching it die. Like we were there watching it eat itself. This was 2015. Steve Huffman, one of Reddit's co-founders, had just returned as CEO after watching the site he built from scratch struggle to survive. When I came back to the company, employees, they wouldn't wear our swag in public because they didn't like what was going on and what was being written about Reddit. But then I would ask them, I was like, okay, if this is so difficult for you, why are you here? Like, why do you work here? And they'd say, because I love Reddit. Because I love what it does for people.

2:14Because I know that 99 % of Reddit is amazing and there's nothing else like it. And Reddit has changed my life. and that's what I'm fighting to protect. I was like, great. Then let's protect that. And so that's what we got to work on.

2:37Steve Huffman co-founded Reddit with his college roommate when he was just 21 years old. In the nearly two decades since, he and the site have both grown up a lot. Earlier this year, Reddit, often referred to as the front page of the internet, had its IPO. It was valued at$6.5 billion.

3:00You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three-bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it. This is Masters of Scale.

3:35I'm Reid Hoffman, your host. I was eager to talk to Steve Hoffman about Reddit's unconventional business. But first, I wanted to talk to him about the scale of Reddit's impact on our digital culture. Steve, I've been looking forward to this for months. Welcome to Masters of Scale. Thank you. Excited and honored to be here. How do you think about Reddit's role on the internet and the online ecosystem? And what are the things that it's for and is an essential part of and part of the internet treasure of? And what is it not for? The saying I say a lot is that Reddit is people. The idea of Reddit is that it both reveals people and empowers people.

4:20And that was one of the important ideas that was in our mind, you know, back in 2005 when we started Reddit. And it's still one of the ideas we come back to often. You know, we start from a principle of free expression or free speech. But there's, I think, also a parallel principle, which I think is really important, which is this kind of idea of like decorum. How are you speaking? How are you treating others? Separating behavior and beliefs. And so we try to spend a lot more time on behavior than we do on beliefs. And so that gets us into our content policy. So when we started right in 2005, there basically was no content policy.

4:59We thought everything should be allowed. Who are we to say what's not allowed? Easy to take a position like that when this really wasn't any bad behavior on the platform. Maybe some spam here or there, but we just didn't have difficult decisions to make. now our policy is much more robust and constantly evolving so no hate harassment bullying no spam nothing illegal no inciting or glorifying violence no involuntary sexualization nothing involving kids there's a lot of kind of sub rules and things like that but we've I think had to adapt as we look at like how are people using the platform maybe in ways we didn't intend and adapting that while still trying to preserve the core idea that people should be able to converse and debate and argue and talk about more or less whatever they'd like.

5:43I think, you know, probably the most common brand for internet discourse is it's uncivil. You know, that there's a lot of polarization, you know, hate speech, et cetera. What are the things you do to try to encourage the positive aspirations of human discourse? Okay. It's a great question. And I think I have a couple ways of thinking about it. So first is the general way when we think about people and how people behave. When two people are together in person, they generally get along. Even the far left and the far right, like to take extremes in the United States right now, chances are in their day-to-day life, the vast majority of what they're going through or would talk about, they have in common, right?

6:32Maybe they're parents, maybe they're sports fans, maybe they watch the same TV shows or movies. That's just one, I think, just fact. It's like people generally get along when they're together in person. So on Reddit, every conversation you have is in the context of a community. You're not just yelling into the ether. Communities have rules. They have written rules. They have unwritten rules. So this kind of idea of decorum, there's a social pressure to behave according to the rules of that community, right? If you don't, you'll be downvoted and you'll be silenced by your peers, which by the way, getting feedback from your peers like that is way more powerful than getting feedback from the company or the man.

7:15When your friends tell you, hey, you're being rude, that's very different from your parents telling you being rude or the government, right? What things would you kind of suggest as things to do to kind of improve online interaction culture? I think a lot of it comes down to incentives. And so if you look at the incentives of social media, a lot of it is about there's a strong attachment to your real world identity and status. And so people are saying things, I think, not necessarily because they believe them, but because they want to be perceived as believing them in the real world. And they want to be accepted by other people who they perceive to believe these things.

8:05There's a kind of a showmanship or performative aspect to it. And I think what happens is there's this kind of drift to the extremes. Reddit has the upvote. Reddit also has the downvote. And so that's where a community can reject behaviors or whatever they don't like. I think this is really powerful because if you're extreme or polarizing, chances are you'll get just as many downs as you do ups. And so it kind of cancels out. Whereas I think elsewhere on the internet, you just get a lot of ups because it can be, you know, more attention grabbing or emotional or whatever. And so on Reddit, the controversial stuff sits at zero points, right?

8:50ups minus downs. And so we get a kind of a better outcome there. It's humans behaving more humanly. And I think that's really powerful. And they don't get credit for it. The only thing they get is a little bit of karma on Reddit, which, you know, I guess is worth more than zero, but you can't take it with you. You know, as CEO, what do you look at as like a dashboard for, you know, what's going on with Reddit? I mean, obviously there's questions around, you know, revenue and engagement, all kinds of stuff. And, you know, that's interesting too, but I was kind of, I'm curious if there's anything else that's kind of very Reddit-ish about your dashboard.

9:28Oh, that's interesting. So look, there are dashboards with, you know, revenue and users. And of course there's another layer of metrics that we really care about, you know, number of advertisers from this company's and retention, you know, customer retention and new user retention, and all these things. But for better or for worse, I use the Reddit app a lot. And so I've been working on Reddit for 19 years. A lot of how I think about Reddit comes not from the numbers, but from the feel of using the app. I feel like my intuition is constantly being refined. And that's what I take to the team. It's like, hey, I think I see an issue here.

10:12and so from a kind of product development point of view i think we went through a phase at reddit which i think a lot of startups go through where they actually put their intuition aside and they only look at numbers i think it's really hard if not impossible to run any company or system from a spreadsheet and i think there's a little bit of this kind of false ideal about well we're going to be so scientific and disciplined, put metrics on everything and test everything. But you lose some of the most important information, which is like, is it working? Is it good? How does it feel? Do I enjoy this?

10:52Do I see other people enjoying it? And so for the last couple of years, I've actually been working really hard to give the team permission to listen to their gut more. Honestly, I think the company is getting much better at it. But that has been a real piece of work over the last couple of years. No, I couldn't agree more that it's kind of a combination of, it's kind of like combination art and science, combination of intuition and data, you know, and hitting both is what's actually, in fact, very important. Right. Looking solely at data, I think at best you can optimize to a local maximum. To do something new, you have to have some vision for the future.

11:34And then you have to take a few swings at it. of course you'll be wrong along the way. But to get there, you have to make a few leaps. Now, and then there's the other side of that, which is you do want to test your intuition and see, okay, I have this belief, this hypothesis, if we build it this way, users will like it. And so we build it, and then you have to wait a little bit to see, do they like it? And there's a really important step, I think, in there, which is, do I like it? And I know we've built stuff at Reddit over the years where we didn't like it, but we pressed on. And so like, for example, we used to be very aggressive on mobile web when you come from search, external search, about getting you to like log in.

12:23And it's like, yeah, I made the numbers work, but we all hated it. And then our users hated it. Even our investors hated it. And so it didn't pass the first test, which is like, we didn't like it. So how do we build better towards a shared context where we have increased trust in information, in kind of like what is the state of the world? What is something we should build bridges versus polarization? What do you think the techniques we should do to try to build in that direction? The mistake I think we continue to make is at kind of all different levels. I see people do it. I see companies do it.

13:11I see the media do it. I see government do it. Is they keep trying to take more control. I don't like what people are saying or I don't like what I'm hearing or I don't like the way this conversation is going. Therefore, I need to take more control. Hold on even tighter. I think the solution is to resist that urge because that control, that manicuring the message, kind of pushing people into the desired outcome is what creates that sense of distrust. That sense of I am being manipulated. I am being controlled. I am being constrained.

13:51You know, I'm thinking around the discourse that's had around, you know, vaccines, which, you know, frequently got idiotic, you know, or things, some online discourse, you know, QAnon, etc. What are the things you think are key for making those approaches that still, that aren't exerting control, but are building trust and shared reality? Transparency. Yep. I think in that era, and honestly, we still do, I think, like we lacked transparency. I think broadly, I think for a leader to be credible, they have to share the bad news along with the good news. Because anytime somebody is telling you only good news, you know there's something missing because there's always trade-offs.

14:39And I think as a general rule of thumb, the more kind of emotional they are, the more suspect the message should be. But I sense there's always this fear, and this is one of the things that drives me nuts, is this distrust of people. Oh, people can't handle the truth. That creates more distrust. Yeah, no, you have to give trust in order to get it. Which that structure of that sentence, I think, is really important. You have to give trust to get it. If you want people to behave like adults, you have to treat them like adults. If you want to have good friends, you have to be a good friend. That sentence structure, I just clued on to it because it's just one of the things I use a lot in my day-to-day life.

15:31Reddit is not a generative AI company, but Reddit's name does come up a lot in conversations about the business of AI. That's because it's such a rich and dynamic trove of data, so many human interactions that could be used to train large language models. And indeed, Reddit has struck deals with Google and OpenAI. So I wanted to talk to Steve about both the opportunities and threats to his business from generative AI. At the minimum, I think we can all agree, Large language models are incredible at text and words. So I think LLMs across the board are going to revolutionize and hopefully reduce the amount of time we spend doing this drudgery like word processing.

16:22So that's very exciting. So I think a tremendous amount of opportunity there. The other interesting dynamic with Reddit is, of course, our corpus has been used as a training set for all of the major LLMs. We're getting closer to the with our permission part. That's been a little bit of a journey. But I'd say taking the business relationships out of it or the IP conversation out of it, I'm very proud that Reddit has played a role in the development of these technologies. That's part of our validation of our belief in the open internet, which is we'd like these things to be accessible and used to advance the state of the art.

17:02So that part is interesting. Now, of course, part that I think is general across IP holders is we can't give it away for free because that undermines the IP creation incentives, the IP creation business. So whether you're talking about content on Reddit or newspapers or books or music or movies, there's a lot of human thought and work went into the creation of that IP. And AI, one of the things we've learned with these models, they need to be continually training, kind of absorbing new human intelligence, right? You can't have artificial intelligence without human intelligence. And so I think practically there's an ecosystem, there's a balance here that's really important, which is if the human intelligence isn't compensated fairly, then the AI will eventually lose access to it.

17:56It'll dry up. There'll be no incentive to create new art, music, words, whatever it is. And so I do think there needs to be a balance there. I guess that's the big picture. Small picture, or much easier to explain, which is, hey, you're building these huge for-profit companies. You are enriching yourself. In what world is it fair to basically take or steal resources from somebody else to enrich yourself with no compensation? And so that is an issue. And I think that's probably those two aspects of are you eliminating human creativity and are you committing business malpractice by just taking all of the content you can find without permission and using it to enrich yourselves?

18:40Now, there's another aspect of it for Reddit, which is, let's say we answer the business questions, which we have with a couple of folks, Google and OpenAI being the two big ones. We still have other constraints, which is protecting user privacy, deletions. You can delete stuff off of Reddit. We want to make sure those requests are forwarded on. We don't want any company to use Reddit content to reverse engineer the identity of our users or to use it to better target ads against them. That's not what we're trying to do. So again, that's kind of like the business thing, can you use Reddit data to make search engines better and make search experience better, but continue, for example, to send traffic to Reddit, which has been the balance or kind of the relationship between us and search engines for a very long time.

19:28So, you know, I think we're getting there. Certainly, I've gotten there with a couple, and I think we're in a good place, and we'll kind of see where things, you know, land with everybody else. Still ahead, I talk with Steve about Reddit's scale journey and how becoming a public company has changed things.

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21:21So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash mos and get up to three months free. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more at our YouTube channel. All right, so let's go to the Reddit scale story. Let's start with the origin story. So Alexis, my co-founder, college roommate at the time, he and I applied to Y Combinator. Y Combinator is an incubator for startups that's been the starting point for many successful companies. This was the first batch of Y Combinator in 2005. We applied with a different idea. It was ordering food from cell phones.

22:06Good idea, I think. Would we have made it successful? Probably not. Probably a little ahead of our times and probably a little ahead of our skills. But Paul and Jessica, so Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston at Y Combinator liked us. So after rejecting us on the food idea, they basically invited us back to work on something else. Paul had half this idea, which is he really liked Delicious. Delicious was just a website back then, social bookmarking. and he liked the dynamic. There's this kind of side effect on Delicious where if people were bookmarking the same page over and over, you could see what were the most popular things bookmark on Delicious.

22:43It was called Delicious slash popular. And then I had the other half of the idea, which was Slashdot. I loved Slashdot. Slashdot's still around, Slashdot.org. It was kind of headlines on the surface chosen by editors, though. But what was really amazing about Slashdot was the community that existed in the comments about any particular headline. and Slashdot's constrained to tech. What if there was no editors and it wasn't constrained to tech? And so it was kind of a delicious Slashdot, but make both of them better. That was the idea for Reddit. Honestly, I think we, I mean, that's pretty much what we built.

23:19But for 19 years, we've been iterating on this and tweaking it and kind of following our users and adding features. Like for example, the most important feature we ever built was for users to create their own communities. We didn't build that until 2008. almost three years later. And then there was a sale to Condé Nast. What happened there? Condé Nast or Advance. Advance is really the parrot company. I'll use those words interchangeably. When they came along wanting to buy Reddit, they're kind of scratching a couple of itches. One was I felt like as well, that's fulfilling the prophecy. That was what was supposed to happen.

23:57We build this thing and now we get to sell it. And then two, we were a really small team in that era. And I mean, it was all I could do to keep the site online. It felt like the bottom could fall out any minute. Now, that was incorrect. I just didn't know what product market fit looked like. The fact that this thing was growing, despite us hanging on by our fingernails, the thing was actually probably far more powerful than I realized. But I was like, well, we better find safety before we run out of a runway here. That said, look, Advance were really great owners. They never really meddled. The powers that be at Advance who did the acquisition, who are still involved with Reddit today, they love Reddit.

24:49And so we got to continue working on Reddit, continue to evolve it, continue to evolve it, kind of following our own intuition. I and Alexis and some others would end up leaving when our acquisition contracts expired. But Kanye and As were great stewards of Reddit, and then they eventually realized that Reddit needs to be independent. So they spun it out. And so, you know, all things considered, I think this, I mean, how can I say different at this, from where I'm sitting today. Things worked out really well. But I think as with many decisions, we were very much living kind of in the present in that era.

25:31So, you know, as part of the kind of the Steve narrative hero journey, you know, you kind of covered a little bit of why you left. What's the return look like? Yeah. So I left. I left because I wanted to run my own company. And so I no longer owned read it. I was an employee. So I started a different company, Hipmunk, with another friend, Adam Goldstein. Fun company, fun product, bad business. Hipmunk was a travel-focused search tool Steve started in 2010.

26:06It was a great product, by the way. You know, if we had just built that product, we'd built a product in the summer. We had just built that product and run it as a small company and then maybe sold that or licensed that, that would have been a good business. Instead, you know, raised a bunch of money, raised a bunch more money, that's not that. Anyway, lessons learned. It's hard to be small in Silicon Valley. So while I was gone, like I still used Reddit every day, still thought about Reddit. I could never turn that part of my brain off. Reddit spun out, became independent, but also started going through crises.

26:42And what I later learned when I came back is the strategy at Reddit was don't change anything. But I mean, I can see from the outside, it's like, right, it's got to change a few things, right? They definitely need a content policy. We've got these troll subreddits who are just wreaking havoc and the product's not evolving. And so, you know, ultimately I came back to the company with a mission to help Reddit live up to its potential. Are there any kind of set of principles or ways of thinking about that or what the lessons of scale were there? Oh, gosh. So, look, I could start with quickly, you know, what didn't change?

27:18We believed in community. We still do. We believe in the agency of people. We are aspirational about people. We believe we should follow our users, right? They create the content. They rank the content. They create the subreddits. They self-organize. They set the tone. But then we also learned whether you can't sit on your hands. I talk about free speech as the founding principle of this country. And for a country, it's essential. Democracy cannot exist without free speech. And I think that's a great place to start. A lot of our thinking about how Reddit works, again, we go to the real world. And so a lot of things we look at, we look at to democracies, in particular to democracy in the U.S.