Reddit CEO Steve Huffman on mod revolt, building a legendary community & more | E1763

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1:07Now you can add the pod pro cover to any mattress. Go to eight sleep.com slash twist to check out the pod pro cover and get$150 off at checkout. All right, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. Reddit is by far the most successful community ever built not just on the internet but i think it's the most successful community at scale in the history of humanity co-founder of that website is steve huffman he also is the ceo and if you're living under a rock it's been a little bit of a kerfuffle lately and reddit finds itself once again super relevant not just because of this incredible community uh not just because uh there's a potential ipo that's going to happen but because generative ai is using the largest data sets in the world which include reddit uh to train their models welcome back to the program steve it's been a minute it's been a minute but i'm glad to be back jason great to see you thanks looking forward to talking to all those people who have been under a rock yeah um so listen just a level set here you heard my sort of framing of what reddit is it is extraordinary the staying power of reddit and how large it's gotten give us just broad strokes how long this community has been going and how big it is now because i don't think people appreciate how large and impactful Reddit is.

2:39Sure. So Reddit, we are celebrating our 18th birthday, like right now. Started in 2005. It is wild. People, the question I get asked a lot is, did you ever think Reddit was going to get to this position? And I, my answer is Reddit is bigger than I ever thought it would possibly be. And I've been saying that since August, 2005. So it's just been, it's been, it's been an incredible journey and rollercoaster and adventure and all these things. But to answer your question, we're about a hundred thousand communities that cover pretty much any interest topic, whatever reason people would have for being together imaginable.

3:26But the analogy I love using for Reddit the most is Reddit as a city. in the same way that cities are both physically built by people out of cement and concrete, they're also living organisms. And Reddit, I think very much has those qualities, right? It's a platform that we at Reddit have built. It's a bunch of communities that our users have built. But it's got a lot of organic qualities, like a, like a, it's like a living evolving thing. And so I think part of the fun of working at and on Reddit is kind of watching this thing evolve. Yeah. One of the things that you tell me if I'm right here, having watched it from the start and knowing you guys from the start um is your trust in the community and the sort of staying power of this is you never gave up you gave so much control to the community and it it hasn't changed all that much and there's something about being true to trusting the community and not making radical changes that keeps a brand like reddit or maybe we could look at craigslist another at scale community that stuck around ebay another at scale community that stuck around and maybe i guess you could say the amazon third-party sellers if you can share that community but man it's it's it's one hand you could count the communities that have kept it together so what what what is the the staying power here in your mind i think reddit one of the the tailwinds powering Reddit is that human beings naturally create community.

5:13Like if you have people in proximity to each other, that's one of the byproducts is community. And so they create these spaces. There's lots of, I can talk all day about what communities are, but this kind of collection of people with like common interests and affection for one another and this kind of sense of belonging and if you're not in the community a longing for that sense of belonging I think that's a very kind of built-in aspect of humanity and and so you see it offline right in cities and communities at work and everything big and small. And Reddit is the online version of that. So I think the, like a lot about Reddit has changed, but that core idea of people being together hasn't.

6:10And our belief that people want to be together, good things will happen when they're together in that we try not to have too many other opinions on how and around what subjects or topics or whatever they do that around, I think has served us well or served the community well. A light hand, I guess, would be the way to say it. And I mean, the only time you've ever shut down communities or told people, hey, this is too far is when people go pretty far over the line. You're generally pretty permissive. As long as people aren't breaking the law, freedom of speech is kind of built into Reddit. Yeah.

6:49That's right. That's right. We believe in openness. We believe in speech. We believe in free markets. But we're also a platform that we want people to enjoy and feel welcome on. And so when we do ban a community, which, you know, we do for various reasons from time to time, it's because they were either breaking our explicit rules and really working against our mission, right? Which is to bring community and belonging to everyone in the world. if they're working against that in some way, right? Preventing people from enjoying Reddit, from coming to Reddit, feeling safe on Reddit, you know, that's where we may say, you know, hey, this community, this subreddit is not appropriate for our platform.

7:41Yeah. It happens all the time, but yeah. There's a release valve for it. People have made Reddit open source software. It's not the hardest thing in the world in 2023 with ai especially in co-pilots to write a reddit competitor um and people do that if they want to do things that are you know just way out there and they have and so there there's a release valve you're not the only source of community on the internet people can go do that crazy stuff somewhere else you have to have like some uh basic i guess decorum etc to hit that mission people can't be cruel to each other etc but i'm curious big picture i mean we're going to get into the specifics folks uh don't worry about it but i just i don't get steve here but every five or six years so i just like to think big picture because god there's so few startups that last the test of time with the original founder i'm curious as a gen xer who grew up on hey freedom of speech is a very important tenant for us um you know here in america and in the west uh writ large this kind of um silencing censoring you know words can hurt people microaggressions um i'm curious how you look at that being of our generation versus maybe some folks who feel like oh my god these words are hurting me and uh can you please stop making people hurt my feelings god if i go into the all-in subreddit right now they can be brutal to me uh and you know what uh so be it i'm i'm I believe in free speech too.

9:15If you want to have at it, have at it. And, you know, it doesn't mean I have to participate in it or like it, but I guess I have to deal with it if I'm going to put content out in the world. But how do you look at this generational shift that's occurred where people really want to have the platforms? We saw it with Twitter pretty acutely over the last couple of years. People want the platforms to mitigate speech. What are your thoughts of that just broadly? It's a complex issue. Well, it's complex in how we respond to it. But I think there's some maybe aspects of my answer that are, I was going to say simple, but maybe easier said than done.

9:51So, right, as you observe, right, the law of the land is free speech. Literally, the first law of this land is freedom of speech. Yeah. And I think it's really important for our country, for democracies in general, for living in a modern, healthy society. And I think it's a requirement at a government level. Now, Reddit is not a government. We're not a country, but we're still pretty big. And so that's the principle that we start with. But just like in our country, there are constraints on that. They're enumerated as clearly as we can in our content policy. No hate, harassment, bullying, spam, involuntary sexualization, inciting, glorifying of violence.

10:41nothing involving kids. I think straightforward stuff and I think by and large, pretty unarguable stuff, especially for a platform like ours. Like as I said, we want it to be a welcoming platform that people enjoy.

10:57I think it's a common topic of conversation these days that we need to limit speech for safety. And I think that's a false trade-off on and off of Reddit. It's an easy trade-off to observe at first, right? Because we used to go through this at Reddit. We were like, well, we believe in speech, but then we've got this type of speech that's like makes people feel unsafe or actually unsafe. And so, it always felt like we were trading speech and safety on and off against each other. And that was tough because those are two things we care about, right? We had our own values were in conflict. And the way we resolve it at Reddit when we get in those challenging conversations in the gray area, and by the way, that's the only thing we ever talk about is the gray area because the good stuff is fine and the bad stuff is not fine.

11:56And so we spent all of our time in the middle.

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13:20I want you to do that by going to Truvada dot IO slash twist to get started for free use the code twist for 30 % off premium features for one year, like a forecasting and reconciliation. Kind of edge cases, right? It's like less than 2 % of the content. Oh, far less than that. But point two cases and over time, they get harder and harder. Um, But I often use our mission to resolve those conflicts for us. Does this subreddit behavior, you know, whatever it is we're considering, does it help our mission to bring community and belonging to everybody in the world? Or is it working against it? And that almost turns it into like a business decision, a much more defendable decision, rather than what I think is really problematic is, well, this idea is bad.

14:13because look there are many ideas while there are many ideas that are i think in our society objectively bad let's say like racism for example yeah and hate in the many ways it shows up a lot of bad ideas are not necessarily bad ideas or there might be just undecided ideas or arguments our society is currently having. And without the ability to argue and have differences of opinion and debate, even if it's not perfectly friendly and professional at all times, is really important. It's the foundation of the society we live in. So at Reddit, we're default accepting of ideas of content. And we look, does it violate our content policy?

15:11Does it work against our mission? That's basically our thought process. But if it's not in violation, we are default accepting. We have a value on this principle called keep Reddit real. Keep it real. And that makes sense. I mean, COVID comes to mind. We needed to debate that issue. And we had a lot of folks saying, you cannot talk about Ivor Macdon. Joe Rogan can't have a conversation on his podcast. Twitter, you have to ban some Stanford professor who's got a dissenting opinion. And I think now that's going to become one of the seminal ones in our life where we'll look at it and say, were we getting good information?

15:48Should we have debated it more? Should kids have stayed in school? Should, you know, wear these masks a farce, you know, and which types of masks actually work and how do you wear them versus like people can wear a bandana and that's actually suffices for a mask to protect against the virus. These were like very nuanced, important, real-time discussions. How do you look back on the whole COVID, Meshugana, and craziness, and how does it inform you going forward? It was a tough time. It was a tough time for anybody living in that era. And it was a tough time for us as a platform because we had to develop some of the opinions that I'm sharing with you today.

16:27We developed during that time debating these issues. And, you know, it was very frustrating because it felt like from my point of view, people really struggled holding two ideas in their head at once, which is COVID is dangerous. And we need to have constraints on the things we do and the way we live to get through this together. And then the advice that we're getting might not be correct. And then there was another dimension to that, which is, and we're not allowed to debate it. Yeah. And we're not like, and if you, and, and, and then if you do debate it, um, or push back or just add, ask questions, it was very easily easy to get written off as a, as a, as a crazy person.

17:19Yeah. Get silenced. Yeah. Character assassination, all that. It was really bad, really bad for a lot of folks. You know, we, and we got tied up in, in it for sure. um on the ivermectin stuff yeah and that was frustrating um so we did our best to navigate it i think we've learned a few lessons there for sure what's the big takeaway yeah because that's i mean in our lifetime have we ever felt authoritarianism kind of come in and say hey you can't think this you can't say this i don't have another moment in time where the government or organizations started to say that to us as americans hey this conversation's you're not having it it's not allowed to be talked about and so it has changed my thinking on things because i'm like wait a second i you you can't even have the conversation about vaccines are they safe or not and mrma is a new technology this seems like a really good conversation for us to have and all the all-in podcasts where we debated it they flagged them and all of a sudden the traffic went way down i'm like why are we flagging this conversation we're four reasonable adults we can't talk about mrna like and we have friedberg who's like a science guy like we should be able to talk about this very weird what's the takeaway i mean look so i do want to disagree with one thing which is like we we have been in moments like that before and are currently in them now oh really what there there's so many topics where it's risky to challenge the orthodox the orthodoxy and and and part of the spirit of reddit like the founding spirit of reddit is that mainstream media is not the best source of information in fact like the established media that we grew up with and still exists is biased or corrupt or you know has an agenda Um, and, and so that was literally the founding spirit of Reddit.

19:21Um, my co-founder used to like the joke, uh, freedom from the press and that, that, and that spirit, I think is still alive and well on Reddit, um, and in our society. And really, I think that the internet has one of the powerful things it's, it's unlocked, um, uh, a lot of voices that were previously unheard. And I think that's overall a good thing. Obviously, it can have a lot of drama too. But I mean, I can give you a simple example, like anything involving climate. And there's some really damaging ones. The fight against nuclear power. Crazy. Right? From environmentalists. It's like that's the only technology known to man that can save us right now.

20:10Yeah. And for years and years and years and years, the most vocal people in the climate community argued against it and shut it down. And of course, and I can probably do this for every example, please don't make me because I'll sound like a crazy person for an hour. But those anti-nuclear policies backfired, right? They turned into burning more coal and more wood and tearing down forests, right? Which is what Europe had to do last summer or last winter. And so you can pick any of these examples and not only was there important debate that was silenced, but the policies were also counterproductive to what the silencers actually want.

20:57And that is a, I think, inexcusable problem. It's a great paradox that you're pointing out. the the the green people got it wrong they hammered it they did the no nukes concerts they got tons of celebrities and you know to to kind of back this movement and then we have geopolitical issues and you know germany shutting off nuclear reactors and becomes dependent on an authoritarian country run by a dictator and it caught you know puts us on the brink of this you know how can germany make an intelligent decision about energy now if they're dependent on russia for keeping their houses warm. It's just such a great example.

21:37And I think the media example is also good. You know, you look at, you know, what's happened in media, they've all picked a side, you know, and that puts us as citizens of this country going, okay, Fox has a side, MSNBC clearly has a side, CNN has a side, everybody's got a side. How do I actually discover the truth? Part of discovering the truth is debating it. Where are you going to debate it? You're going to debate it online. And so you can't stop the folks who are trying to host these debates. That's the thing that I find so pernicious about this safety and, oh my God, you're giving bad information.

22:10We don't need to treat the populace like they're children. If you do, they're going to not be informed. You want people questioning everything. You want people having vibrant debate. But of course, you could have conspiracy theories come up. So how do you think about the line between dissent and trying to figure out, hey, what's the best policy and just straight up conspiracy theories? I think what speech and debate give us is the output of that is more credible ideas and guidance. As a society, I think we are capable of working through these issues. I don't think everything has to stay in debate forever.

22:54It's just when there is no conversation, then you're never sure that you're making the right decision. And I just, when I say that, I was thinking of big decisions, but this comes up at work all the time in small decisions, right? If everybody's nodding their head around the room when I'm saying something, I'm like, oh man, I'm in trouble.

23:17And I can't distinguish between everybody agreeing with me because they don't want to get in a debate or, you know, I'm right. And the only way - CEO slot comes with a power dynamic, yeah. And so the only way to be confident in our decisions is to like have turned over as many rocks as possible, debating these things, argued about them, thought them through. And of course, right, not everything's going to be right or make sense. But I think it's really important that people have the space to kind of work through these ideas. And so online, this takes the shape of people. Yeah. like saying ideas that they may not have even believed yet.

24:03You know, for, I know I personally do this, right? I think while I talk, right? I can't, I can't think without talking. And so I have to say a lot of bad ideas to like find the good one that I actually believe in. And I, I think that's, that's natural. We can't, it's, it's so restricting speech is like, it's like restricting thinking. And I think that's real. That's we obviously that's a bad thing. Listen, I work with super early stage companies at launch, like literally year zero. They haven't even incorporated yet. And then we hit the series A, people have thousands of dollars in MRR, and maybe they've only raised a couple of hundred thousand before that series A, and they don't have their insurance set up.

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26:00Would you like to whatever? You're like, oh, wow, you can guess the next word. Congratulations. Good for you. Or your Reddit for you page, guesses I like the Knicks and Mark Knopfler gives me a little bit more. Okay. Yeah, this is great stuff. But man, the jump it made, it's pretty miraculous so i guess step one um what are your thoughts generally speaking on what we've seen in the past year in terms of the advances which seem to be coming you know at a credible pace it's super inspiring so i'm curious how you think about that as a technologist and a founder but then part two when did you realize everybody was using your data to build these models and how did you come to the conclusion you know what this is this data has value people should pay for it and take it in either or you want sure so look i think as a as a technologist as a human being this is some of the most exciting technology we've seen since the internet um and it's just going to transform society i think in so many powerful ways um you know i'm firmly on the side of this is great this is great why why do you think it's going to be great.

27:11What do you think of the big wins that are going to happen? Well, we've seen this cycle. This is kind of like the cycle of technology in advance in humanity is there's a new technology and the arguments against it will be, well, it's dangerous. It needs to be controlled. It's going to eliminate lots of jobs. And there might be some danger that needs to be constrained and considered for sure. Um, but almost always what happens is we eliminate some sort of rote work that humans were doing, automate it, and then we allow humans to do new things. And so like, uh, I think when folks are kind of anti-technology, it always makes me wonder.

27:57It's like, well, like, I just think as human beings, we aspire to be more than farmers. yeah haven't we seen this movie five times we've seen this movie like 5 000 times yeah um and and so this technology is so impressive right because effectively it can do text tasks reading and writing uh and some considering better than like 95 of humans and that's incredible and i think the thing that makes me really really excited is that uh there's a new there's a new ui for computers and it's it's english and the most powerful programming language is now english incredible literally describe to these things what you want to build and it will build it or it will do it yeah as a as a coder it's just like your your mind is blown that all of a sudden everybody can become a 10x coder and then what a 10x coders become like so i thought though you know i thought smugly when we're seeing this ai wave coming i was like well as a as a software engineer at least my job is safe i didn't think i was going to be the first to go first to go right you're in the crosshairs um but it's so incredible and the thing is we haven't even seen the products built on it yet we've seen some tech demos yeah right chat gpt was really a tech demo that got way out of hand yep uh and you've got some you know whatever bard and bing uh whatever uh you know bard yeah i mean bard is i i've been using it uh i do every search instead of using a search engine now i basically open up bard i open up chat gpt two of my default browser windows when i open my browser and i just put it into both and i ask follow-up questions holy cow bard's moving quickly too and i but i i would say it's like it's neat yeah but we haven't even seen like they're not even products yet no they're like command line yeah yeah and so the idea that you can speak and then this this uh this agent can turn it into really really complex commands that control our software right right we've been the way we use computers right now is mouse keyboard programming language yeah and all of a sudden it just got a thousand x more powerful because anybody can now um control computers in this new way i think the next year or two or five is just gonna be wild it's gonna be wild too you just think about what the internet did for people's access to information and then you take starlink and you put it with ai and you think okay there's a couple billion people who don't have access to the internet right now and then they're going to grow up just like some people you know grew up on mobile phones instead of desktop computers like we did they're going to grow up with this interface where they just ask it a question it does stuff like the jump for somebody who is in a frontier market used to be called the third world but a frontier market where they have no technology and no access to broadband and the internet and then boom all of a sudden they have access to chat cpt as an interface like it's going to lift a couple of billion people into knowledge workers boom in a year or two it's going to be wild well imagine yeah every human to take that make that idea one notch more specific every human on the planet has access to a world-class tutor that's always patient and knowledgeable um and every human on the on the planet has access to an army of assistants that can just like do all this stuff like there's just so much stuff that we do that doesn't really create value it's just like kind of moving bits around yeah chores you have to do your chores yeah yeah all these kind of like digital day-to-day chores uh that now we can just you know siri will do it like isn't that the funny thing too when you think about it as a technologist we saw siri and alexa you see like steve jobs and you know bill um jeff bezos like saying like hey this is the this is the real deal and you're like i can maybe change a song or it'll send a text message maybe that's got two typos and it just never clicked and then all of a sudden you see this technology like oh it's gonna get it's about it's gonna be really interesting wait i just like it's it's like this like i i feel like i'm this kid on christmas morning or this kid like december 20th and it's like christmas is coming every time i try to add a reminder into my phone and series like you know calling mom and i'm like no no no don't call mom I just wanted a reminder to buy tickets for a movie.

32:38It's coming. It's coming, hopefully, in the next year. So close. It'll be great for everybody. It's going to be amazing. I'm with you. We didn't have the job of podcaster. We didn't have the job of influencer. We didn't have the job of community manager. And 98 % of people were working on farms. Humans find something to do, and we'll be fine. And sure, some people will be displaced, But if they have the world's greatest tutor, like you're saying, great description of it, the most patient tutor. If you're somebody who gets displaced because you're the bottom third of accountants, like you're going to be able to talk to that tutor and become the top third of accountants or financial planners or some other job.

33:16I mean, how quickly can you figure out another job with this technology? Well, I mean, try to go back a thousand years or 2000 years and try to explain the job of an accountant. Yeah. And people are like, well, you have so much surplus stuff. You have to count it. Yes. and I guess I guess you could I guess you could explain it then but like there's just so many my point is there's so many jobs that exist today yeah that did not exist even 20 years ago you just named a couple right podcast or influencer whatever um there are going to be so many more new jobs new things we can do yeah there's just and it's I think it's hard to envision them from where we sit today.

33:59But I think just looking at the way history has gone in the past, it's coming. Like there's just gonna be new things for people to do, new things for people to create, new companies to start. Just riffing on what you're saying, I don't know if you've ever had this thought, like maybe, wouldn't it be great if I had taken another career path and I had been a rock star, I had been wrote screenplays or I was an actor or I did some other thing, I was a professional athlete. Like with this technology, you might, get a chance to have like two or three careers. Like, you might get a chance to just be a virtuoso in more than one thing in a lifetime, which very few people have the opportunity to do.

34:36And it just could be so magical. So you and I both know Sam Altman for a long time. He helped you raise money for Reddit at one point, I think when you did the buyout, is that right? If I'm correct correctly, he led Reddit series B back in 2014, which was just before I came back. he was on our board and he was instrumental in me returning to reddit right so this is like a super advocate of yours and supporter um so at some point uh open ai ingests reddit and then at some point you say to him uh hey can we get paid for that how is this you know all shaken down in terms of your position on we deserve to be compensated for reddit's data set and then your friendship with him and other folks who are indexing it?

35:21We do deserve to be compensated, I think, for the role Reddit played in creating these models, which was significant. You used to be able to just ask the models what percent came from Reddit, and they would happily say, oh, 22%, 30-something percent. Wow! Big numbers. So we're working through it with them. um you know that's about all i think i can say there right now but okay fair enough we we we believe we should be compensated for the use of that data um and i think it's an open dialogue and you have multiple players so do you see a world in which one player could and just putting open ai on your friendship with sam you know on the side let's assume there's 10 players here If a player said to you, we want to, you know, use our model to have exclusive access to this, is that something you would consider if it was, you know, if it was in the best interest of shareholders in the company?

36:18Or do you think, you know, you want to license it to 10 people and just give everybody access to it if they pay a fair price? I think we need to just kind of work our way through it. Right. There's the kind of big companies that you've mentioned that have used our data already. But I think there's a lot of folks who would be interested in it. for different reasons. You know, at Reddit, we've long talked about a data business. It's just not something we've actively pursued until now. But so there's the LLM stuff. But then, look, there's aspects of Reddit where it's like, look, we have this massive corpus that gets updated every day of people's opinions about pretty much everything.