Reddit's model for a better internet | Steve Huffman

0:03TED: You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. The internet was made by humans for humans, right? We've never had more tools to connect with each other online than we do today, and yet people have never felt more alone. And the internet, it seems like it's never felt more inhuman. The purpose of the internet was to connect people. And the internet has indeed connected billions of people. But being connected and the feeling of connection are two different things. That's co-founder and CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, sharing a contradiction he's been grappling with.

0:47TED: Steve started Reddit at 21 with no plan for the future of the internet or even for himself. 20 years later, he thinks it's time we had one. In this talk, he makes the case that social media and the internet are not the same thing and that the model most of us have been living inside might be the problem. The more automated and summarized and sanitized and manicured that the rest of the internet becomes, the more we need places for people to be people, for people to be humans. Stick around after the talk, we caught up with TED Tech curator Bilal Sidhu, who's shared a few thoughts and takeaways on Steve's work for us to consider.

1:26TED: That's all coming up right after a short break.

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4:19And now, our TED Talk of the day. So I'm Steve Huffman, and today I want to start with a question. Are humans going extinct on the internet? I'll cut to the chase. My answer is no. But the internet is becoming more automated and more optimized for attention. And people feel more alone. And the purpose of the Internet was to connect people. And the Internet has indeed connected billions of people. But being connected and the feeling of connection are two different things. And so if we want to maintain our humanity on the Internet, we are going to have to build it intentionally. And I want to introduce an idea, which is the stage versus the city.

5:08But first, a little bit of context. So a few of us started Reddit in 2005, 20 years ago. We were kids. I was 21. We didn't have a plan for the future of the Internet. We didn't have a plan for ourselves. The idea was very simple. We wanted a place where people could share links from around the web and talk about them and submit links and talk about them. They did. In fact, one of the first inside jokes on Reddit was, I didn't read the article, but... And then, you know, a thousand words about the article they didn't read. But from these conversations emerged communities. First one, then a couple, then a dozen, then thousands and hundreds of thousands.

5:49The communities sometimes are interesting, helpful, funny, weird. Sometimes all of these things. I left in 2009. I was gone for five years. And when I came back, the platform was in a different place. It was at a low point. Among many reasons, the most important was there was no policies. There was no guardrails about what behavior was acceptable or not. And so while communities are created naturally, they emerge naturally when people are together, a platform, a system where many communities can coexist in a healthy and sustainable way and thrive, that has to happen on purpose. And that's what we've been working on.

6:34A few years ago, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic. 73 % of people surveyed said technology contributes to that loneliness, which is not great if you run an internet technology company. But at the same time, people are spending more and more time at in-person events. So in the most chronically online era, people are seeking out in-person connection. So the question isn't, do people want connection? The question is, how do we deliver it? and how do we deliver it on the internet intentionally? So what would a more human internet look like? Well, let's set a little context here.

7:17If you were born after the year 2000, you have never experienced the internet without social media. Social media and the internet are different things. Social media is a distinct format that is unnatural, and it causes people to have to perform. Social media, the analogy I use is the stage. There's a spotlight. There's an audience. There's a performer. There's someone or something trying to get your attention. And so this environment creates performers. Imagine going to a wedding with an open bar and an open mic and everybody taking turns vying for attention. It's kind of annoying. As is social media.

8:04The currency of social media is engagement. It doesn't matter if it's positive or negative, just that somebody got your attention. And so what this causes is it causes people to say things they don't even believe to get that attention. And they very rarely say things they actually believe. So it's fitting that the Oxford word of the year last year was rage bait. And now with AI, you can take the human out of the loop entirely and create this content without people at all. So we sacrificed our humanity by saying things we don't believe and then sacrificed it again by adding AI into the mix. Merriam-Webster's word of the year in 2025 was slop.

8:45And so we sacrificed our humanity multiple times. Let me provide to you another perspective, another metaphor, which is the city. Cities are an inseparable concept from humanity. What is a city? A city is a place where people live, they work, they play, they go shopping, they eat. And cities naturally subdivide into neighborhoods. And those neighborhoods have distinct cultures and vibes. This is the model we use for Reddit. On Reddit, you can support, you can share a few laughs, you can learn about things. There's coffee shops, there's sports bars, there's a few weird basements. But the communities on Reddit are like the neighborhoods.

9:31They're naturally forming, and they have their distinct cultures and values and vibes. And we think this model is a better model for the Internet. The only city I know where everybody wants to be famous is L.A. In general, the stage creates celebrities, the city creates citizens. The stage concentrates attention. In the city, it's distributed. On the stage, people are competing for the spotlight. In the city, people are just with one another, talking, hanging out, sharing a few laughs. On the stage, people are working. Literally, on social media, people are working to become rich and famous. You can't become rich and famous on Reddit.

10:20I'm sorry. The stage uses likes and algorithms to decide what to put in front of you. On Reddit, we use the upvote and the downvote. The upvote, you understand, the downvote is very important. This is where communities enforce their values, define their culture, enforce the unwritten rules. Communities have values. Stages do not. I want to walk you through some of these neighborhoods or communities on Reddit. One of them we call Mom for a Minute. These are all real examples, by the way. Mom for a Minute is a place where you can go if you need a mom for a minute, or you want to be a mom for a minute, if you need a little support or a hug or maybe some honest feedback.

11:06This example, somebody took a break, went back to school after five years and got into their dream med school and posted that. Hey, mom, I got into my dream med school today. And the reply, there was many of them, was, that is so awesome, you did it. Congratulations, and don't forget to take a little time for yourself. I'd invite you all to be, you know, a mom for a minute, if it suits you. Another community is called Bald. Woo! Community is present with us today. Bald is for people who are thinking about shaving their head and finally committing to being bald. It's a support community. It's a community about self-esteem and identity.

11:45This guy posted here, my mom is balding because of chemo. So I thought I'd join her. You can imagine the responses here, how supportive people were. Those responses made it back to the mom, who was overjoyed and said, this is probably the most supportive community on Reddit. I would also invite you all to be bald for a minute. Finally, another example. Am I the asshole? Don't answer that. Am I the asshole is one of the largest communities on Reddit. 100 million people visited this last year alone. It's where people pose moral questions. And they're not all high stakes. For example, would I be an asshole if I uninvited my mother-in-law to my baby shower?

12:28The context here in the small print is, she's kind of mean to me, she makes these snarky jokes. Some people asked for more information. A few people said you're not the asshole, but the overwhelming consensus was, you are the asshole. The specific feedback was, this is a nuclear-level response to a small issue. or you have a husband problem, not a mother-in-law problem. Okay, so we post the same prompt to an AI chatbot, and it said, you are not the asshole. You are brave. That's not petty, M-dash. That's protective.

13:08So, okay, no judgment here, but what do we get in a world where you strip out humanity and the moral advice is constantly gassing people up and affirming them. On Reddit, you get tough love, but that is what a community is and that's where the values come from. And we believe this is essential. We've been doing this 20 years. We've seen a few things. Some of our observations. The first is we get to see how people behave when nobody's watching. Reddit is public, but it feels private. And what we see is that people are neighborly, the way they are in a city. We see that people aren't just good, they're actually overwhelmingly good.

13:56When you strip away all the incentives of social media, we see that people just want to be helpful and interesting and funny, which is a very different perspective than I think one might get if their view of humanity is through the lens of social media. We see that self-governance works amazingly well. What we say at Reddit is the only thing that scales with people is people. So all of our communities, they write their own rules on Reddit. Far and away, the most common rule within Reddit communities is some form of be civil. AI doesn't have values. Well, actually, it does. But those values are programmed in.

14:34And I think it's worth considering who did the programming.

14:41And finally, one of the biggest misconceptions, Reddit is mostly anonymous. People think mostly anonymous, that must lead to bad behavior. No. The context and the incentives lead to good or bad behavior. People being anonymous actually is safety. It gives people the freedom to be themselves and say what they really think. What we've learned about cities is that cities are organic organisms. They're living organisms created by their citizens. Everything interesting about the city that we're in was created by the people who live here, as is everything that was interesting on Reddit was created by its users.

15:17We didn't design it. It emerged. That's what you get when you let people be people. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not actually anti-AI. It is very powerful and very practical. Sometimes you just need an answer. You can go to an AI search and ask, what's the best way to cook rice and get an answer. You can go to Reddit and get 100 answers, but sometimes you just need one, and that's fine. But the more automated and summarized and sanitized and manicured that the rest of the internet becomes, the more we need places for people to be people, for people to be humans. We need places, you know, fewer stages and more cities, places where you can, instead of performing, you can participate.

16:09Where the incentive isn't to go viral, the incentive is to be helpful. So if we want to keep our humanity in the age of AI, we need to build places for people to be humans and let them do it. Thank you.

16:28TED: That was Steve Huffman at TED 2026. We've been experimenting with something different on the show, called Curator's Corner. Throughout the year, you'll hear from Ted's curators, the people who actually find and work with the speakers you hear on the show. They will share more about the idea you just heard and the behind the scenes of how the talk came to life. And now here's Ted's tech curator, Bilaval Sidhu. As someone who spends his days thinking about where technology is taking us, he thinks this talk offers a surprisingly hopeful answer to one of the most urgent questions of the AI age. Is there still a place for the rest of us online.

17:05Hi, this is Bilal, the tech curator for TED 2026. That was a fun one, wasn't it? Like, I go on social media these days and I have no idea if some of these accounts are even real or fake. And despite the fact that we've got AI chatbots that seem increasingly realistic, there's something that draws us to these humanistic communities where there's an actual person on the other end giving you advice. This is such an important conversation to be having right now, not just about what it means to be human, but how we set the right incentive structures in place so that we create a social media that reflects our need for human connection.

17:38Advice that you get from an AI could be amazing, but the fact that a real human being that has had a lived experience gives it to you just makes it far more profound and relevant. I can't imagine a better time for this talk as we've got AI agents, social media, all competing for our attention. Along comes Steve painting a picture for what it would be like to forge a real community and human connection on the internet. I hope you enjoyed it.

18:30TED: Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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