Steve Huffman explains how Reddit shifted from banning entire communities to targeting individual bad actors with warnings, timeouts, and bans. The platform saw reported abuse decrease and moderator actions drop despite more posts overall.
Chapters
It does not feel good. 100%. And so that was one change. And another change is up until that point when we had troublesome users, we'd often go after the communities. And so we'd ban these communities. And that's often, it's like, it's a pretty blunt enforcement strategy. And so we started going after individuals, the actual harassers, and that has been much more effective. So since Thanksgiving, we have this now we call basically the bad actor strategy. And if you're a bad actor and you're doing bad things, you're harassing, you're bullying, you're this, this, and that, we'll just ban you. Or we'll put you in timeout. Is it just banned or is the— There's a whole actually menu of things we can do now that we've created. We can give you a slap on the wrist, we can give you a warning, we can put you in timeout for a day, 3 days, 7 days, whatever. There's a lot of different things. And internally we have these complicated rubrics of You do this, we do this. So instead of turning these communities into free speech martyrs, we can take care of the assholes. And that's been much more effective. So we haven't had any crisis of like spezgiving or any of the other stuff we had to deal with the last couple of years since then, because we've taken a lot of heat out of it by taking care of those jerks. So you've seen a big change implementing this matrix of rules? Mm-hmm, and going after individuals. For positivity on Reddit? Yes. Now there's still jerks, but they're like, the level of harassment and reported abuse has gone way down. It was going up for a while because we just got better at finding it, and now we're starting to turn the corner, I think. And the actual number, one of the metrics we look at is report, like, Reported abuse, that's going down. And moderator actions is actually going down even though the number of posts are going up. So we still have a long way to go, but we're making a dent in it. And then final question before we open up the floor is, what do you think, if anything, could finally break Reddit? You know, I've said this jokingly, like if Reddit could be killed, it'd be dead by now. We had founders who didn't know what they were doing. We've had lack of strategy, no product innovation, bad or missing management, crazy users, crazy employees. We've had all sorts of stuff, challenges. And I think we've actually solved almost all of those problems. And so now, I don't think Reddit would be killed, but in my mind, dying and not living up to our potential is the same thing. Mm-hmm. I think we have incredible opportunity to provide this perspective and empathy and joy and fun and support for every internet user. And so we have 300 million now, and I'm very proud of that, but there are over 2 billion internet users. And so I still think we have a long way to go. And if we can If we can bring what Reddit does for our core users to everybody, I will be very proud. Awesome.
