Next to Australia, where the world's first social media ban for under 16s has taken effect, and not everyone is happy. Tech company Reddit filed a lawsuit against the government on Friday, arguing that the law is threatening free speech. In response, the nation's health minister slammed the company, saying that it's prioritizing profits. Steve Huffman is the CEO and co-founder of Reddit, and he tells Walter Isaacson about the purpose of his platform and why he believes Reddit should be exempt from the ban.
Thank you, Biana and Steve Huffman. Welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here.
You founded Reddit about 20 years ago, just out of college. What did you intend it to be?
That's a great question. 20 years ago is a long time ago. There were really two things in our head at that time. One was 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. 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 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. It's funny to reflect back on how much things have changed.
When I go on the subreddit for New Orleans or for science, the ones I like, tell me what am I getting?
Reddit today is a vast collection of communities. We call those communities subreddits. And communities, just like in the real world, are groups of people that have similar values, maybe a shared vocabulary. There's a real sense of belonging or sometimes 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 one of their rules is no jokes. Reddit is a very funny place, but not in the science community.
Yeah, we have the opposite rule in the New Orleans subreddit.
Exactly. And that's really important. There's also an important part of Reddit which is every community has its own rules in addition to our platform-wide rules.
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.
That's right. Reddit actually predates social media, both the words 'social media' and the platforms themselves. We've grown up in our own image. Social media is organized around what I call the Fs: friends, followers, family, famous people. Whereas Reddit is organized around community. You may be on the platform with your friends, but you don't know who your friends are. 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 simply not true. On Reddit, no matter how popular you are, you can't take it with you. It doesn't make you more popular in real life. The incentives are actually more natural. People are helpful, funny, interesting. I think it's a better reflection of how people are. If you look at social media, it's easy to have a negative view of the world. One of my sadnesses is I don't think that's actually true. When I look at Reddit, one of the great things I'm so thankful for is I've had a front row seat to see how people behave when nobody's watching.
Why are people less negative on Reddit than they are on X?
I think it's because people are less negative in real life, and Reddit maps to that. The incentive structure of how Reddit works maps closer to real life. People are connected around things they care about. We've got everybody on Reddit: men, women, left, right, nerds, normies, young, old, parents, and sometimes their kids. But they're all existing in the places that they want to be. That community structure is what makes it work. Nobody does community online the way Reddit does.
Sometimes people refer to you as 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.
There's some nuance here. We believe in free speech and I think it's an essential law in our country. In the United States where we're based, it's literally the first law, the First Amendment. But Reddit is not a country. We're a very large community. One of the defining qualities of any community is a boundary: this is allowed, this is not allowed. We start from the position that if it's not not allowed, it is allowed. But that evolves over time. Things like violence, hate, harassment, bullying are not allowed on Reddit. 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. People don't want to be in a place that makes them feel unsafe. But again, there are viewpoints represented on 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.
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?
