CEO of Reddit Believes the Platform Can Heal America’s Divides

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Bianna. And Steve Huffman, welcome to the show.

 

STEVE HUFFMAN: Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to be here.

 

ISAACSON: You founded Reddit about 20 years ago, just out of college. What did you intend it to be?

 

HUFFMAN: Look, that’s a great question. 20 years ago was a —  it was a long time ago. There were, there were really two things in our head at that time. One was I think quite simply we wanted to build a place that was controlled by users, run by users, where you can find new and interesting things online. So at the time, having a scrollable feed of interesting things that came from users was actually novel.
The second was we wanted to create a place where humans were the, were the editors. Whereas traditional media is controlled by editors or other gatekeepers, we wanted a place where people could talk about what was important to them. But our aspirations back then were truly smaller than they are today. And so it’s funny to reflect back on how much things have changed.

 

ISAACSON: When I go on the subreddit for New Orleans or for science, the ones I like, tell me, what am I getting?

 

HUFFMAN: So Reddit today is a vast collection of communities. We call those community subreddits. And communities, just like in the real world, are groups of people that have similar values, maybe a shared vocabulary. There’s a really, a sense of belonging — or sometimes, Hey, a sense of, I’m not a part of this community. That boundary is really important. So whether in New Orleans, which is a community for people who presumably live in New Orleans, you’re going to find a very distinct personality from what you would find in the science community, where the science community, one of their rules is no jokes. Reddit is a very funny place, but not in the science community. And I think — 

 

ISAACSON: Yeah, we have the opposite rule in the New Orleans subreddit.

 

HUFFMAN: Exactly. And, and that’s, that’s really important. And there’s also an important part of Reddit, which is every community has its own rules in addition to our platform-wide rules.

 

ISAACSON: You know, it sort of may be confused with social media. But when I’m on it, it doesn’t look or feel like social media in the traditional sense, like a Facebook or an X.

 

HUFFMAN: That’s right. And so Reddit — we actually predate social media, both the words, social media and the platforms themselves. And so we’ve grown up in our own image. And so social media is organized around what I call the Fs, friends, followers, family, famous people. Whereas Reddit is organized around community. So you may be on the platform with your friends, but you don’t know who your friends are. And so the incentives are completely different. On social media, people try to get credit for what they’re saying. And it causes people to say things that are either potentially embellished or just simply not true. And on Reddit, no matter how popular you are on Reddit, you can’t take it with you. It doesn’t make you more popular in real life. And so the incentives are actually more natural. People are helpful, they’re funny, they’re interesting. And I think that it’s actually a better reflection of how people are. If you look at social media, I think it’s easy to have a negative view of the world. And one of my sadnesses is I don’t think that’s actually true. And when I look at Reddit — and I think one of the great things that I’m so thankful for in life is I’ve had a front row seat to see how people behave when nobody’s watching.

 

ISAACSON: Well wait, so why are people less negative on Reddit than they are on X?

 

HUFFMAN: I think it’s because people are net-less negative in real life. And Reddit maps  — the incentive structure of how Reddit works — maps closer to real life. People are connected around things they care about. So, you know, we’ve got everybody on Reddit, right? Men, women, left, right, nerds, normies, you know, young, old…and parents and sometimes their kids. But they’re all existing in the places that they wanna be. And so that community structure is what makes it work. And nobody does community online the way Reddit does.

 

ISAACSON: Sometimes people refer to you as, you know, for free speech. But you’ve said you’re not exactly a bastion of free speech. Contrast that with something like 4chan or 8chan or other services.

 

HUFFMAN: Well, there’s some nuance here. We believe in free speech. And I think it’s an essential law in our country. You know, in the United States where we’re based, it’s literally the first law, right? It’s the First Amendment. But Reddit is not a country. We’re a very, very large community. And one of the defining qualities of any community, big or small, is a boundary. This is allowed, this is not allowed. And so we start from that position of if it’s not not allowed, it is allowed. But that evolves over time. And so I mentioned the things like violence, hate, harassment, bullying. Those are not allowed on Reddit. And of course there’s a lot of nuance to those rules. But at the end of the day, we’re building a community where people have to want to be and people don’t want to be in a place that makes them, you know, feel unsafe.
But again, like there are viewpoints represented in Reddit that you may not like, that I don’t like. But if they present those viewpoints in harmony with our rules, then everything’s allowed from that point of view.

 

ISAACSON: I was kind of surprised to realize that almost half the population of the United States, I think 190 million people every week go to Reddit. And you do it without an algorithm serving up what’s good. How do you make it that way without using an algorithm to keep people engaged?

 

HUFFMAN: It’s all through the voting. And so the users vote up, you know, what they think is interesting. And  I think the funny thing about Reddit is  — we have this joke, but it’s not a joke. We call it, come for the cats, stay for the community. So at first glance, Reddit, you know, it’s funny, it’s got some posts, it’s a scrolling feed, like you’ve seen a hundred other times online. But if you go just a little bit deeper and start to read the comments on these posts, eventually users have sometimes profound experiences. But if you wanna know what people really think — and it’s not all, it’s not all super deep. Like, what should I watch tonight? What game should I play next, right? Let’s gossip about sports or pop culture. Reddit’s take on all of these things, I think is this funnier and more interesting, and also often surprisingly deep. And so there’s a richness there. But that just comes from people.

 

ISAACSON: Do you think that, do you have to worry about things like AI slop?

 

HUFFMAN: Oh, of course. There’s a paradox here. Reddit’s content was used to create every LLM you’ve heard of. And then in turn, those LLMs — look, which are very powerful. And of course we use top to bottom in our business as well — are also used to create just lousy content AI slop. And so — 

 

ISAACSON: And so you’re talking about artificial intelligence companies, large language models, scraping the Reddit content to train their models. What do you do about that?

 

HUFFMAN: To some extent there’s no avoiding it. And so we’ve done agreements with Google and OpenAI to put guardrails on that content, right? Here’s what you can use it for. Here’s what you can’t use it for. ‘Cause we wanna uphold, you know, our privacy commitments to our user base. And look, Reddit is the most human place on the internet. In the world of AI, our positioning is, no matter how useful the AI tools become, people will always want to talk to other people. And so that’s what our product is. But that also creates a lot of value, which is if the AI wants to know something, well it kind of has to get it from Reddit ’cause that’s where people talk about what they know. And so balancing this has become very important and it’s very important for our platform to be for humans. 

Now, I can give you example of good uses of AI: translation, right? Translation, translating our content into other languages, helping non-native speakers speak better in another language. All of these things are very powerful. But for a long time —  long before AI existed as we know it — we’ve worked to ensure the integrity of Reddit systems and particularly the voting systems. So we want the viewpoints on Reddit to be represented by actual humans. So there’ll be a lot of change along the way, but that part is sacred to us.

 

ISAACSON: And so AI companies training on your content or for that matter, our content, ’cause we’re all Reddit users or any other content, should the AI companies be paying for that right to train on the data?

 

HUFFMAN: I think there’s a lot of nuance there depending on, you know, where the data is coming from and how it’s used. But broadly, yes. You know, our view at Reddit is commercial use requires commercial terms. At the same time, like, we give our data away to universities, to researchers. So we try to be I think reasonable and permissive. But if the data is being used commercially, then yes, I do think commercial agreements are important.

 

ISAACSON: What about this backlash against social media in general, which may or may not include Reddit, but say in Australia they’re saying 16-year-olds should not be allowed to be on things like that. What do you feel about that movement?

 

HUFFMAN: So I get the spirit of the movement, which is we need to do a better job, I think, protecting kids online and be more intentional about it. Now I don’t think that particular law is going to accomplish its goals. And I’m not sure Reddit should be included in it at all. And I think we’re inadvertently preventing emerging adults from being able to be online. And so I think there are better solutions. And so at the end of the day, like we always advocate for internet rights. We’ve long been an advocate of child safety online — like Reddit’s not for kids, it, at the end of the day. We call them emerging adults. So the kind of the tail end of high school into college is where we start to, you know, pick people up. But I think there are better solutions using the phone OS, using browsers, having much more nuance in kind of where people are online.

 

ISAACSON: President Trump’s administration has been talking about making visitors to the United States, or maybe people who want visas, whatever it may be, show their social media for the past five years. Social media — the media on Reddit’s anonymous. Would you ever cooperate with the government? And so people — they could look at people’s postings?

 

HUFFMAN: Well, that’s kind of the point of the way we do things at Reddit is it’s anonymous. I want people to be able to be themselves on Reddit and know that if we were to get hacked or their account were to be taken over or, you know, we get a subpoena, that there’s just only so much information we can share. And that’s kind of the point of Reddit is to let people be free to be themselves. And I say selves in a plural sense. Because we all have different selves, right? I’m me as the CEO of Reddit. I’m me as a father on Reddit. I’m me as a video game player and sports fan and tool enthusiast. All these different personas are important. And I’ve gone through medical things here or there on Reddit that, you know, will stay that way, right? Private. And I think that’s important. That privacy promise is really important. And so, yes, we would take issue with that both directly and I think more philosophically on people’s ability to have private lives.

 

ISAACSON: Section 230, prevents platforms from being held fully accountable or liable for what people post on them. And from all different sides of the spectrum, I remember President Trump while back tweeted out “repeal 230.” And now Senator Sheldon Whitehouse this week has called Section 230 a “vessel of evil.” Explain whether you think Section 230 should continue to protect your company from things that people post that may be libelous or threatening or fraudulent.

 

HUFFMAN: So let me clear up a few things about Section 230. So it’s known as the law that created the internet. And it was created because a platform, Prodigy, was actually punished for making a moderation decision. They removed some con — some bad content, some harassing content. And then they were punished for that. And it was bipartisan legislation to say this platform was actually trying to do the right thing, and we should allow platforms to do the right thing. That was the creation of the law. And Section 230 doesn’t prevent companies, or protect companies from civil liability. So if somebody is wronged and feel they’re wronged, they can sue us. 

Now what it does is it protects us from frivolous lawsuits. So people go on Reddit and let’s say they say something like they don’t like a product, they don’t like a restaurant. (24:24) What happens without 230 — and we see these cases all the time —  is instead of suing the speaker, it doesn’t protect the speaker from libelous or slanderous behavior. Instead of suing the speaker, they sue the company. And what Section 230 says is we can create a platform for people to speak their minds. And we’re, we are protected from our users who speak their minds in a way that somebody doesn’t like. 

I will point out that both Democrats and Republicans have come after Section 230. And every couple of years their reasoning switches. So…I forget where it is right now, but somebody says we censor too much and somebody says we censor too little. And then in a year they switch sides because the other side is in power. And so it’s, it’s always about, they want us to sensor more or sensor less. And Section 230 gives us the ability to try to do a reasonable job in the middle. And I think we’ve done a very good job at that.

 

ISAACSON: We’re about to have our 250th birthday as a nation. And I think in the 20 years since Reddit has existed, to some extent, digital media has ended up dividing us — not Reddit, but just in general, more making our discourse a little bit more crass. What extent do you think that Reddit can play a role, maybe in this 250th year, of strengthening institutions and democracy and civil discourse?

 

HUFFMAN: I believe that Reddit is a more natural reflection of how people are. And…you can take two people, you know, on the far left and far right, and if they’re not talking about politics, if they’re talking about being parents or being sports fans or what TV show they’re watching, like they will get along fantastically. There are so many ways for peoples to connect around things that are, you know, shallow and profound. And I think what the — one of the things that Reddit does well is lets people connect on all sorts of things rather than just disconnect on politics. And I think that’s one of the big problems with social media is it actually, it forces this unnatural disconnection. Like people say extreme things they don’t even believe when they say them. Like that is unnatural. And so I think the voting system of Reddit, the anonymity of Reddit, the organization in the communities, this all better aligns with how people are and letting them connect over things they really truly care about. And so, I really do believe if we’re successful in our work, maybe we can bring people together more effectively rather than tearing us apart.

 

ISAACSON: Steve Huffman, thank you so much for joining us.

HUFFMAN: Thank you, Walter. It was really my pleasure.