Reddit CEO Steve Huffman on LLMs, fighting the bots, and why it’s good that you can't get famous on Reddit

0:10Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore Media, where we are talking to all of the most interesting and important people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tani. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore. And with me, as always, is our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. Ben, when was the last time you were on Reddit? Definitely this morning. I'm traveling and I wanted to check out a restaurant. Yeah, that's actually my experience with Reddit. I feel like I solicit it for information when I don't know a better place to go, don't know maybe a local media organization to kind of rely on.

0:46And also when I'm having issues with my car. Nobody ever taught me how to use a car. And it's really, really good at explaining very basic information. But of course, the reason why I wanted to ask is because our guest on the show this week is Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman. Steve's a really interesting guy and someone, Ben, that you've known for quite some time, actually. Yeah, I first met Steve a few years ago when he came back to Reddit. Steve co-founded Reddit 21 years ago and then returned. As the company moved through this funny process, it started, it was acquired by Condé Nast. Condé Nast let it go wild for a bit, then took it public, and then faced a kind of takeover by its own community.

1:24And Steve was brought in to kind of bring the hammer down and right the ship, which he did pretty effectively and is now running a company that, shockingly, is right in the center of the whole AI revolution. It seems like one of the things that has actually changed the company, LLM's trained on it, and essentially it's now regurgitating and spitting out a lot of the information that people are getting when they're, you know, querying, essentially, ChatGPT, right? Yeah, I think the language of LLMs is largely the language of Reddit. I mean, in the end, we're all Redditors now. Well, we want to ask, obviously, about how Steve feels about LLM's training on the information shared by Redditors.

2:03We want to ask about this interesting transition that Reddit has gone through from, you know, kind of this sometimes dark and not so safe for workplace to this platform that is incredibly ad friendly. Of course, Reddit's business has grown tremendously over the last several years as it's built up its advertising business. And we also want to ask about how he thinks about the fact that people trust, in some cases, random Reddit users more now than they trust members of the media, such as you and I, Ben, which to me is a little depressing. Yeah, I don't know. The way I think about it, like Reddit used to be the worst place on the Internet.

2:36Now it's kind of the best place on the Internet. That's partly Reddit getting better and partly everything else getting worse. Well, we have to take a short break, but we'll be right back with Steve Huffman after this.

3:16Thank you. Frontier CMO from Think with Google, wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.

3:32Well, thank you so much for joining us, Steve. Yeah, great to see you. My pleasure. And I think today, June 22nd, you have spent exactly half your life at Reddit. Is that right? I think that's right. So we started Reddit in 2005, and we launched Reddit June 22nd, 2005. I was 21. And so today is Reddit's 21st birthday. And I'm 42. So it's been half my life on this thing. You have this kind of thousand yard stare as you say that. You know, I've tried to reflect on this so many times, but Reddit has been bigger than I ever imagined it would be since August 2005. And so ever since that moment, I feel like I'm just on the ride.

4:20Everything's been bonus. That's like a very positive and open-hearted way to see what I've always thought of as one of the quite difficult CEO jobs in the world. I just wanted to, I was sort of Googling your Reddit handle, Spaz, just this morning. And the first thing that pops up from like a year ago is a user asking, what's the thing about you slash spes? I see so much people insulting that user and I pretty much don't know the reason. What is the reason? We've all forgotten why we hate me. I mean, look, there are reasons. I think the most, you'd have to ask the users, but certainly when we made the API change, the pricing change three years ago, that was actually three years ago, like this week.

5:06Right, cutting off outside apps basically, making them pay. Making the heavy users pay. Yes, that was upsetting. And then I inadvertently stirred the pot more than was necessary. So people didn't like Spiz for a while. But if we can go deep for a sec, you're actually touching on something. It was like a transformative moment in my life, which was when I came back to Reddit in 2015. So I had been gone for about five years. I remember being so stressed. and I just wanted to be happy. And so I had this idea that the opposite of stress was happiness. And then I read a famous book, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

5:50And the idea of that book is you need to find the purpose in your life, basically. And I remember in that moment, I realized that my job at Reddit is stressful because it's interesting. and that's actually a real privilege and an honor to get to have such an interesting job even if it's really stressful yeah and so then i became very grateful for all of the stress and then ironically or not maybe not ironically or not coincidentally i became much happier so yeah it's a maybe a tough job or a stressful job and and and over the years i've done better and worse jobs at it. But it's also just such a gift.

6:31And I'm so thankful to have it. Before we got here, I was as I was walking sweatily down the cross set, I was watching your, your TED talk, we were talking about, you know, how Reddit was like a city. That's the kind of the analogy that you used and that you wanted that it was more of a community than some other platforms, which are more like stages, right? That was a that was the comparison that you used. I'm kind of curious how you think about when you guys are talking about people kind of bullying you on Reddit, Spez, or making light fun. How do you think about that within the frame of trying to create this kind of healthy community, which Reddit has become known for in some ways?

7:14A corner of the internet that has become less toxic than my corners of choice, X, Twitter, various places like that. That is a big question. I think we could spend all day on this because I think sometimes what feels like almost a conflict in values. So we started Reddit as a place where users get to decide what they talk about. So one of our kind of founding principles, although we didn't articulate it this way back then, was consenting adults should be able to talk about whatever they want. We were coming from a place of humility, which is like we're not getting in the way of these conversations.

7:54And so historically, Reddit has really taken this point of view of empowering people, empowering our users. And then sometimes they do things that are like not nice. Right. They're not nice to each other or not nice to somebody else or they create these bad communities or this or that. And so we'll have this conflict of our value around free speech and free expression. And then maybe our intuition of this doesn't feel right or this isn't our preference. But then the point of Reddit was that we who run Reddit don't have preferences. But that's really kind of our safety story. For the first decade of Reddit, we didn't really have a safety team.

8:34We literally didn't have a safety team. when we really didn't have policies because it's almost antithetical to Reddit. It's like, well, just people do what they want. And this was a humble point of view. Like, who are we to decide what people can and can't talk about? But then we'd see these bad behaviors emerge, bad content, bad communities. And so we spent the longest time debating this conflict in values. You know, more speech, less safety, more safety, less speech. Like, how do we reconcile this? and the way we think about it now is we start with speech, with openness, with the deference to people, but then at the end of the day, we're building a place that people have to want to be.

9:18And so I think of it like the difference between laws and decorum, right? There's some amount of decorum that's really important. But one of the most challenging moderation things that we have on Reddit is how do we moderate spes? Right. Cause people can get really, really mad at me, you know, on any other user, we call it harassment, but then I'm like, well, if we, if we're moderating that harassment of me, then, then it's just going to spiral. And so what I've learned over and over again is some, some decisions are just hard and they're always hard. And there's a line and we can't always perfectly articulate the line.

9:53Do you moderate yourself a little bit looser than you would, you know, somebody else, in a way. Oh, for sure. Like, well, so I don't moderate myself. Or no, I mean, you read Reddit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't do it. I was like, I don't want my hands on this. Yeah. A very common diagram on Reddit is fucks best. That is generally allowed. Right. It's like, if we ban that, then like what's left? Right. So that'd be an empty website. But there is a line beyond that where, you know, it's what's the tone that we want? Yeah. Right. What sort of behaviors are acceptable on this community platform? But I do ask the team, take a generally light touch.

10:37But we still want to have some sense of this is a community, this is a place people want to be. It's not easy. There's so much anger at tech CEOs and at CEOs and at the leadership class these days. And so like maybe it's sort of reassuring that the CEO of Reddit is the person who has the single worst experience on Reddit. Oh, I don't have the worst experience. Those would be the spammers. No, I mean, I love Reddit. Well, the thing is, like, even when people are angry, users or people, they might be emotional, but they're generally not irrational. Like there's something they're saying. Like they're saying, fucks bez.

11:17Are they still mad about the API thing? Maybe. Did they have a legit reason to be mad about the API thing? Yes. Like there's information there. We can't hide from it. So I always tell the team, whether it's users or maybe there's a bad piece about us in the press, like totally unfair or exaggerated or this or that. Off the rails podcast interview. It happens. It's like find the truth in what they're saying. There's something in there. And I don't care if you don't like the message or the messenger. There might be something for us to respond to. Deal with that. Yeah. You know, to kind of shift gears a little bit here, you guys are really central players in the AI story.

12:03It's obviously a big topic here. You have deals with big major AI players. A lot of the content that you create is, you know, being regurgitated and spit back out at me in a good way. mostly. And I'm kind of curious, how much of the content do you think and the answers that come out of Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT, how much of that is Reddit? A lot. We don't know for sure. And they don't tell us. But it's a lot. One data point I have is open ai's last public research paper um which i think was for gpt2 or three said that reddit was about a third of their training set now things have evolved beyond there but it's it's a significant amount because at the end of the day people are on reddit talking about everything in a very natural literally natural like how do people speak yeah versus like being in a book or Wikipedia article.

13:08And then the coverage is like just the whole human experience. Because people go on Reddit for their hobbies, their interests, their passions, to talk about current events, to talk about, you know, it's a joke, but it's not a joke, right? Their rash, right? Whatever they're going through, you know. So it's all there. And so to the extent that people go online wanting to know about the world, of course, there's going to be a lot of Reddit. How do you think about your relationship with these huge, you know, these Frontier Labs? I think you're in business with OpenAI and with Google. You're suing Anthropic.

13:45How much of Reddit's long-term business is as a sort of word dealer to Frontier Labs? Well, our core business is a platform for community and conversation. And our core business model is ads. Yeah. So on the side, we have the formal relationships with Google and OpenAI. I do think there are growing opportunities in using Reddit as an intelligence platform rather than a conversational platform. But the community and conversation, that's Reddit. The things we can do to extend that are on the side, I think, are bonuses. but there's I mean we're learning so much about how to do that in the best way you know we have to be very considerate about user privacy as well but the fact of the matter is you can understand a lot of the world through Reddit and even before this whole AI conversation started the reason Reddit was so open is like we were born of the open internet like we believed before Before Reddit was a business, information wants to be free.

15:01And so that's just a part of our ethos. So we've maybe been forced to evolve on a new internet where the internet is less free. So where does a free platform like Reddit fit into that? I think that's been the path we've been trying to navigate. Given Reddit's kind of unique value in the AI training world, is there any logic to you're making a deal with just one company? There is logic to it. So I'd rather have relationships with everybody. I think it would be better for our business. It'd be more resilient. And I think it would be better for the ecosystem. I'd say those are general business principles that I have.

15:40But in this space, we don't want one AI winner. Right. We don't want one search winner. I think that that's bad for the internet. And that would just be not only like the reasoning you use for why any monopoly is bad, but I think in AI in particular, the technology is so powerful, but also so new and not yet understood that we need more players, not less. I'm curious, did Reddit kind of intentionally become a feeder to these kind of AI systems or was this something that happened on accident? It was not intentional on our part. And I don't think it was an accident on the companies who used our data to create these models without our permission, which there is not an LLM on earth who didn't do that.

16:31I mean, obviously theft, bad. We don't like it. But in some ways, people seem happy that Reddit is feeding some information back to them, you know, that they feel like is is good and, you know, it is better and is filling some gaps that news media and other places, you know, weren't providing. Oh, I think Reddit being in the models makes the models better. Yeah. And I'm proud that Reddit has been a part of the advancement of humanity. What happened is these companies went from research, basically public research, which we're supportive of. I mean, we still give our data away to universities. We're not like precious about it or we haven't been historically.

17:10We've been forced to become more protective of it because we're being taken advantage of. And so now our point of view is commercial use requires commercial terms. Yeah. But if you're doing something for free for the good of humanity, we're open to supporting. Now we have to be careful because there's a whole now industry around laundering data. But there's a different world where we would just give it away. We no longer live in that world. And I think people are taking it, using it to enrich themselves and lying about it. So now we need to protect our data. And so that's resulted in some formal agreements.

17:46It's resulted in some lawsuits. And it's resulted in us having to lock down access to Reddit in various ways that, you know, we wouldn't have considered back in the past. Well, we have a lot more that we want to get to with Steve, but we have to take a short break. So we'll be right back after this. Thank you.

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20:17Shifting gears here a little bit. We're here in Cannes, Lion, obviously. It's kind of the biggest week in advertising. Reddit's ad business has grown really significantly over the last several years. You were talking earlier about the community safety and how you thought about that. When you guys started thinking differently about community safety, was that the moment that the ad business changed as well? What's behind the several years of growth in advertising revenue? There's a couple of things. So having a better posture on safety was for sure a driving force behind the growth of our ads business.

20:54You know, 10 years ago, when we talked to customers, the first and last question they'd ask about is brand safety. Advertisers are sensitive to where their ads show up and what their ads show up next to. We spent the next few years evolving our policies, building out the safety team, getting good at enforcing it. Now it's a topic that very rarely comes up. If it does, it's in passing because we've gotten so good at it. That topic of conversation is like a home field advantage for us. I think Reddit's moderation has come along so far. Also driving the growth is just Reddit's growth. Reddit as a platform is much more diverse than it used to be.

21:32There was a time where our user base was basically all 20-something dudes, like 10 million clones of Steve. And now the platform is balanced, male, female. Now, the age range on Reddit is much wider, but you'll see 70 and 80 year olds on Reddit. The topic surface area is much, much wider. Now, at this point, we've got to this point where every brand's customers are on Reddit, probably talking about your brand or at least your space. So we've just found ourselves in a position where we're just relevant to most brands. I think, can you explain why did the user base change so much? What happened?

22:16I think it's simple. It's hard to do, but it's simple to explain. Reddit is for everyone. Communities are a natural byproduct of people. If you don't get in the way and there are multiple people in the same space, they will over time create community. That's all Reddit is. It's just a natural reflection of what people do. And they will talk about things that are interesting to them. They will look for a laugh. They will give and receive advice. It's just what human beings do. And so the design of our platform is to just let people be people. And as a result, Reddit just kind of grows and expands.

22:53So your specific question is, you know, why was Reddit demographically narrow in the past? Demographically Steve in the past. Yes. And why is it broadened now in the present? Well, we were doing things that limited. For example, our UI, I have this theory, our UI was so bad in the past, it appealed to a demographic that is a high pay tolerance for bad UIs. What is that demographic? Gamers. Video gamers have terrible UIs. So people who play games are comfortable with Reddit. Okay, we have all dudes. Every time we made Reddit easier to use and easier on the eyes, we grew a little bit. Every time we made Reddit a little safer.

23:37And by safer, I mean the odds of you opening Reddit and seeing something that makes you think, this isn't for me. Every time we got better at that, we grew a little bit. And there's a cycle where as we grow a little bit, we get new users. Those users create communities for themselves. Within those communities, there's content that attracts new users. And so every time, this is why our whole strategy right now, if you listen to any of my earnings calls for the last two years, somebody will ask, what's your strategy for growth? And I say, make Reddit better. And that's literally, we'll make it faster, easier to use, safer, easier to find communities you like.

24:16Every time we do that, we just grow. And at times where we've plateaued, it's because our product has hit a quality plateau. A few months ago, we were talking with Adam Masseri, CEO of Instagram. And we were asking him about what he's doing to cut down on the AI slop that's on the platform. He had a really interesting answer. He said that he cared somewhat about whether the slop was AI slop, but he cared more about slop on the platform than whether it was a human being or a robot that was creating it, which I thought was really interesting. I'm curious, you guys are taking steps to try to limit bots, AI creating content on the platform.

24:56What are those steps? How are you trying to make it so that Reddit isn't swamped by bots creating content that then gets regurgitated and spit back out at us through any of these LLMs that we're using? So before there was AI slop, there was slop. As in AI is just a new tool for spammers or inauthentic behavior, but we kind of reduce everything. We just call it spam. Content that shouldn't be on Reddit or it's on Reddit in this like automated or mechanical way. So it's always been a problem. We've always put a lot of effort into it. Now it's just a new a new front in an old war. So almost all questions of moderation have multiple answers for Reddit.

25:39There's what is Reddit doing, like Reddit Inc. So we're getting better and better at identifying bots, about identifying and banning inauthentic behavior, about devaluing it. So making sure that spam doesn't get views, that karma farming is less and less effective. That's when a a spammer, a future spammer posts a legitimate post to build up reputation so that they can spam us later. So, you know, unwinding that and get better and better at that. So there's all these technology problems there. But then another side, there's, with all questions of moderation on Reddit, there's the user side. And so what we're going through on Reddit, and I think more broadly just in society, is a rejection of AI content.

26:24LLMs were so neat a couple of years ago. look, this thing can write a thousand words on any topic. But then you read it and you're like, this is garbage. It's like garbage. It's like inane. And I think the more you read AI content, the more you start to pick up on its ways of writing and ways of spending a lot of words to say nothing. And so I think we as a society, and you see this play out on Reddit, are developing our own immune system. So when users detect AI slop, they just download it. Now, the most common AI slop on Reddit actually isn't a bot. It's a normal user who uses AI to write a post and then they paste it in the Reddit.

27:15Right, is that allowed? It's allowed. It's allowed from like - Because a lot of people write that way now. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we can't ban that. That's just how people are going to write. but the communities are rejecting it. So if you're lazy, the post, like the commenters, the community will reject it. And we want to empower them to reject it for sure. So I think my sense is where this goes over the next year. This is a combination of two things. Society broadly and on Reddit will continue to reject obviously AI generated content. And so if it's generated, it will be have to, it'd have to be so good that people believe it's additive.