Museum of Reddit Part 2 | Steve Huffman

We'll go to the next one. So one of the most popular users, Unidan. Don't know if you remember Unidan or—

I do, I do.

Can comment on him.

You know, this is one of those things where there's a community on Reddit, like Out of the Loop, where somebody like me at the time was just like, what the hell is going on right now? Like, that's still like— I remember it going down. I couldn't tell you the whole story. This is like 2014 was probably when I was the most distant from Reddit. And so I remember just seeing all of this drama and everybody was upset about this guy. And I was just like, what is— why are we so emotional about this?

So yeah. You can look that up, Unit N.

Yeah, he's on Out of the Loop.

The fappening, that was a tough one.

Yeah, so this was, this was, yeah, again, before I returned. Actually, this was— it was an ugly moment that I think actually turned into a good moment. And this is when ultimately this led to Reddit banning what we call involuntary pornography.

Hmm.

We were the first to do it, and now it's a law that you can't post basically pictures of people, pornographic pictures of people without their consent. And so this was— users were doing this on Reddit, and I believe Ellen, who was the CEO at the time— I think this was Ellen.

Yeah.

Maybe it was Yishan— actually banned that content.

That is amazing that it's the law now.

That made a big difference.

Yeah.

For the whole internet.

Next one. Ah, yes, the mass shooting in Orlando shut down r/news, and r/AskReddit became Primary source of dispensing information.

Yeah, and this is one of those moments where there's this worldwide event, and then it became very politically charged on Reddit. And I don't remember all of the details anymore, but basically the moderators of r/news, the moderators, the community creators and shepherds of the news, removed a bunch of content related to this. I think at the time they were saying that they were removing duplicate content, but it felt like censorship to the users. And so AskReddit, whose primary purpose is for people to ask questions, started their own thread to keep people informed. And so this is, as a user, it was kind of frustrating to watch, but also I was happy that the community self-healed over this. We try to take, as Reddit Inc., we try to generally take a hands-off approach in these sort of things, even though we'd like to go in there and just clean it up. Now, we have gotten a lot better at kind of taking action and preventing these sorts of things happening. You'll— I'm pretty sure you're not going to have any more crises, because we haven't had a lot of crises since Thanksgiving.

Well, there was one that you probably—

But we've gotten better at navigating some of these crisis moments. But nevertheless, the community self-healed over that, and I thought that was pretty cool. Pretty cool.

And then in 2016, there was a grilled cheese meltdown, which you may or may not know about.

Yeah, what happened?

It's a very small one. It was a guy on Our Grilled Cheese.

Is this about melts?

Yeah, the melts versus the grilled cheese. So which one— what is a melt and what is a grilled cheese?

OK, I believe— again, I'm a busy guy. I don't have time to keep up to date on all of this stuff. I believe the argument was over— A grilled cheese is a grilled cheese, and people are like, what do you put on your grilled cheese? And people are like, well, if you put anything on it, it's no longer a grilled cheese, it's a melt. Is that right?

That is 100% correct.

Okay, fine, so whatever. Like, you know, a grilled cheese with ham is a ham and cheese melt.

Or Monte Cristo. And then Reddit was blocked in Russia from r/ru-drugs, I think somebody said.

Yeah, okay. I actually think, So we had a post that— a post about how to grow mushrooms in Russian on r/drugs. It had no attention. Nobody ever saw it. And this was— Russia had sent us a takedown request for this, which Reddit just ignored. This is one of the— there's a bunch of problems that I inherited, and this was one of them. I was like, you guys have just been ignoring these. I was like, what the hell? And so finally, I basically learned about it when Russia banned us for not removing this post. But I'm pretty sure, and they made a bit of a public stink about it, I'm pretty sure the person at the Russian agency who asked us to take this down and actually did the banning also probably wrote the post. I think this whole thing, it was just like a big troll. I think, you know.

Are you still blocked in Russia?

I don't think so. I don't really care, but I don't think so.

We've been having problems with them.

Yeah.

And then the last one was—

Ah, yeah.

The Spezgiving, which you could probably say something about.

Yeah, so we have a community on Reddit called The Donald, which is the home for a lot of Donald Trump supporters. that has had an antagonistic relationship with Reddit and with me personally.

Yes.

And in the wake of us banning a community around Pizzagate, The Donald was throwing one of their many temper tantrums and were calling me all sorts of nasty things. And so I had this idea. I had the worst thing that can happen, is I had an idea, in some free time. And so what I did is I went into the thread where they were ridiculing me, and I changed every appearance of my name, Spez, on Reddit to the name of one of the moderators of The Donald.

Trolling a little bit.

My intention in doing this was, well, I'm not gonna ban these people. I can talk at length about why I'm not banning them. But I'm not gonna ban them, and they don't really respond to reason. But I myself was an internet troll and grew up playing video games and saying nasty things about people. I have a thick skin. It doesn't really hurt me. But I've also grown out of that and figured maybe I could have a little fun at their expense and do to them what they were doing to me. And so they freaked out, of course, and then it turned into a national news story. I was definitely, and it was like on Thanksgiving. It was like, I feel terrible. I don't regret doing it. I feel mildly annoyed, and a lot of people are annoyed at me for giving the Donald any ammunition. Like, bro, like, because now they say like, oh, well, we can't trust anything 'cause you're probably editing our comments. I was like, give me a break. But I did like ruin Thanksgiving vacation for a number of our community team.

Mm-hmm.

Because they had to clean up this mess and deal with it. And so that hurt. That was embarrassing.

What were some takeaways that you—

Well, actually, a couple really good ones. One was prior to that, we had this rule internally that harassment's not allowed. That's an external rule. Harassment and bullying are not allowed, except if you're a public figure. And so if users did what they did to me to like a civilian, we would ban it. But when they do it to me because, you know, I am the CEO of Reddit and I have a thick skin and I'm a public figure and this and that, we said it's okay. And so I just kind of felt like I had no recourse. I'm like, how do I like— okay, we don't ban these people for harassment, but how do we teach them that this isn't acceptable? So I thought maybe just kind of playing a game. game with them. Maybe we could find some common ground in trollery. And we changed that. Now harassment is not allowed of anybody, including me, because our reasoning there is allowing them to do that to me normalizes that behavior, and I don't want them doing that to other people, 'cause it does not feel good.

100%.