Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman discusses how entrepreneurs and brands should engage authentically with communities rather than relying on ads, and explains product features like a two-feed model and Geo Popular designed to prevent echo chambers.
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Well, Steve, I want to thank you for something very important, a lesson I learned. Mildly, mildly interesting and mildly annoying. Apparently that's a good theme. Oh, and also common ground through trollery. Now that's awesome. The question I wanted to ask was, the theme behind Reddit seems to be around communities, and how, as a lot of the audience are entrepreneurs and people in the space, how might potential businesses or entrepreneurs best utilize the Reddit platform? And then how might we best think about Reddit and building these communities through a consumer standpoint as well?
Okay, so how as an entrepreneur do you leverage Reddit communities? Carefully, right? Now we're gonna make it easier actually. But right now, the communities, the commercial communities that exist on Reddit that are the most healthy are the fans. So League of Legends is one of our largest communities. Now Riot Games, the creator of League of Legends, they live in that community, but it was created by users and it's moderated by users. Soylent, you know, these kind of, there's these companies, these businesses that have this kind of grassroots kind of people evangelizing their product. Those sorts of things do well on Reddit. The companies themselves didn't necessarily create them, but they're definitely there massaging them and contributing and being present. So today the best way to do it is to come honestly. Your motives should be really clear. 'Cause Reddit, if they hate one thing, it's bullshit. And it's hard to do these, create these organic movements on Reddit on purpose. It's not impossible. But it's difficult. You have to be very savvy to do it. But we are doing a couple of things to make this easier. One is you can just buy ads. Users know what ads are. It's a commercial interaction and users know what they're getting. Now advertisers will do very effective things. Offer free things. Hey, give me feedback on my product. In exchange, we'll give you a free trial. That sort of stuff actually works really well. That whole, like, we'll give you a free trial and you give us feedback. Users love sharing their opinion. So that sort of interaction works really well. Profile pages are something we're building out now as a place for original content producers, Reddit celebrities, real celebrities, and even brands to have a place to put their content on Reddit that isn't at the expense of a community. So they can put their stuff on Reddit, and then they can pull people in, but they're not like just— but if they were to do that to a community, it feels more like spam. And so we're trying to create We know people want this. People, whether it's a kid making videos or a company selling a product, we know they wanna interact with their customers. And so we're trying to create more ways for them to do so that doesn't feel exploitive. That's the objective, I guess, in terms of creating that engagement relationship where from the companies is derived value. Yeah, but, and the way I would think about it, it's not Reddit specific. If you're trying to acquire customers, if you're trying to get them to do you a favor, is the expression I use, right? You're trying to get them to give you money. You have to give them some value. And so if you're showing up with value, whether it's a product or it's entertainment or whatever, then you can get value from them. And so I— but if you're just trying to purely siphon off value from Reddit or from any other channel or any other just real person, you're gonna have a hard time. We have time for like 2 more questions.
A common criticism that we're now hearing with social media like Facebook, especially in light of the last election and other issues affecting us in the world, is just that our communities are just becoming more narrow, or our vision of what is happening in the world is narrow based on who our friends are. And how is Reddit different than some of those other networks that we've seen?
Yes, great question. How is Reddit, you know, how are we kind of working against what I would call like the echo chamber problem, which is like, you know, probably started with like cable news and then it was like exacerbated by social media where you can basically choose who you listen to. And then therefore as a result kind of lack perspective and your own viewpoints get deeper and deeper entrenched and then, you know, Now we have this country that's scarily divided over nothing, in my opinion. Stupid issues. So on Reddit, we actually don't have this problem as much because the main interaction you have on Reddit is through our front page, which is a shared space. And so there's just a lot of stuff there. There's a lot of perspectives. And that's why I was saying the election on Reddit was actually very tense. Because you were seeing these 2 sides just go at each other. But there's some value in that because you're kind of forced to see both sides. Now when I talk about relevancy and how do we grow, we need to make Reddit more relevant to new users. And so maybe you're not always seeing that one-size-fits-all page. It's actually something I'm spending a lot of time thinking about. Because if we get really good at relevancy, then effectively we've gotten really good at building echo chambers. And that's what I don't want. So right now the way we've approached it on the product, and this is not set in stone by any means, is there's basically— we're gravitating towards this kind of 2-feed approach where one feed is your stuff, the stuff you're explicitly interested in or maybe the stuff we recommend you based on the stuff you're interested in. And then there's the what is globally popular. 'Cause I think both are really important. You wanna see the stuff you're interested in, but you also wanna know what's going on in the world and get some of that perspective. And then we're also at the same time trying to make it easier to see even more perspectives. So one of the features we're rolling out right now, we call it Geo Popular. So instead of just what's popular globally, you can see what's popular in New Zealand or what's popular in the US or what's popular elsewhere in the world. And it's all explicit, right? You can kind of choose what you're looking at. And I actually think that's a really neat way to like, Kind of explore what does the world think about today in this country. And that sort of— so just making it accessible and kind of in your face is our approach right now. But I don't know the final answer because we're really just now putting effort into it. But we're starting on the other end of the spectrum from where our peers are. Thank you.
