Reddit CEO supports WallStreetBets amid stiffer requests for moderation

In an interview, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said the WallStreetBets episode demonstrated the sustainability of the company’s model as it matures and grows. The 37-year-old co-founder of Reddit recently changed his Reddit profile picture to the WallStreetBets cartoon of a Wall Street merchant with so-called diamond hands in a show of support for the group.

“The whole event shows the strength of large communities of ordinary people,” said Mr Huffman. “It’s not just institutional investors and massive professionals who end up participating in the stock market.”

The action on Reddit helped the company get new advertisers – its main source of revenue – and bring back expired people, including those who recently cut spending in the marketplace, Mr Huffman said. The latest numbers of unprofitable Reddit users have averaged 52 million daily since October. “We’re still proving ourselves to advertisers,” he said. The company paid for a five-second commercial airing Sunday for Super Bowl LV.

Reddit, based in San Francisco, is known for its message boards on a variety of topics, as well as for the “ask me anything” digital town halls, with celebrities, politicians and experts in the field. The company was founded in 2005 and sold to Condé Nast a year later. The father of the magazine’s publisher, Advance Publications Inc., quit Reddit in 2011 and remains a shareholder with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, the Chinese internet conglomerate Tencent Holdings Ltd.

and others.

Social media companies have long faced the way they can best moderate and control their content, and now they face the prospect of parliamentarians changing the way they operate. One possibility is a revision of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which since 1996 has protected social media companies from civil liability that could result from content that users post on platforms. A hearing on market recirculations has been scheduled for February 18; Mr Huffman said on Friday that he had not yet been asked to attend.

Reddit allows users to rate all content on the platform and relies on tens of thousands of unpaid users to discuss the police. Instead, larger social media platforms rely primarily on algorithms and paid help to do this type of work.

Facebook,

the world’s largest social network, said it had about 1.85 billion daily users in the December quarter, while Twitter most recently said it had an average of 187 million daily users in the three months ended in September. Both also rely on technology designed to help quickly identify infringement rules – just like Reddit, albeit to a much lesser extent.

Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. show a keen interest in helping users moderate the content that appears on their platforms. Facebook, which has struggled to contain calls for violence in the communities on the platform, is pushing group volunteer administrators to devote more effort to reviewing members’ posts. Twitter is piloting a program called Birdwatch that encourages users to identify information in tweets that they think is misleading and write notes that provide an informative context.

“Community moderation can work, but only when there is good collaboration and communication between moderators and platforms,” ​​said Joseph Seering, a Stanford University scholar who researches volunteer moderation.

Reddit’s relationship with its volunteer moderators has not always been harmonious. Hundreds of communities closed in 2015 to protest the sudden dismissal of a popular Reddit employee. At the time, the company’s CEO, Ellen Pao, apologized for the way Reddit handled the issue and resigned shortly after; Mr. Huffman has taken over.

Reddit banned “The_Donald” in June, a community devoted to former President Donald Trump, saying moderators often ignore content that violates the platform’s rules.

“It’s been a political community dedicated to a president, so there’s a lot of weight in that,” Mr. Huffman said. “We gave them a lot of opportunities to be good Reddit citizens and they could never do that.”

WallStreetBets alone has grown fourfold to 8.7 million subscribers this year. Mr Huffman said the group, which lists 25 moderators on its forum, chose to make the forum temporarily private last month because they were overwhelmed and faced technical challenges.

While unpaid Reddit moderators are expected to ensure that members of their communities follow company rules, they are free to create additional rules, which for some do not include swearing or jokes. The most common rule that Reddit communities have adopted, Mr. Huffman pointed out, is to be civil.

“When it’s written by your colleagues in the context of a community, it’s very powerful,” he said. Think of it as the difference between your parents saying “Be nice” and your friends saying “Be nice.” The latter has a lot of weight. ”

For the past four years, Dylan Kuehl has moderated a Reddit community called “buildapc” for people looking to help build their own computers. It has over 3.6 million subscribers. “Reddit doesn’t give us any active input,” he said. “They don’t have anyone around to say, ‘Hey, you should ban this person or give up a job.’ It’s completely up to us. ”

Mr Kuehl, a 31-year-old software engineer from Ontario, described the relationship between Reddit and its moderators as “symbiotic, almost co-dependent”. He said: “They are relying on us to keep our platform clean … so that they can keep the lights on, so that we can continue to have our free community platform.”

Mr Huffman said Reddit had launched an initiative in 2019 for its volunteer moderators to receive quick help from more experienced volunteer moderators in times of crisis. He said Reddit has more work to do in this area, but sees the company’s approach as key to its success and future, which could include additional fundraising and a public listing of its shares. Reddit has been valued at $ 3 billion since its last round of funding in February 2019, according to PitchBook, and has raised over $ 550 million since its inception.

“I often think about what Reddit looks like as a public company,” Mr Huffman said. “We still have something to do, but we look forward to it.”

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at [email protected]