Steve Huffman answers audience questions about scaling Reddit's moderation, the gaps in moderator tools, and how multilingual content complicates the platform. He advises startups to launch early and iterate.
This side of the room.
Hey, huge fan. Question is, for the nature of Reddit, the way it works with communities, I find works so well in some of the subs I'm part of because of moderators. It keeps trolls out, it keeps everything kind of following the rules. How do you scale that when a sub gets Massively popular and has a million followers?
Great question. How do we scale the moderation as communities grow? Well, we— Reddit, we haven't done a great job at that. Well, yes and no. Communities have scaled to millions of users, you know, but the tooling is not very good. And so the way most communities are doing it is by just adding more moderators and kind of self-organizing and using kind of the limited tools or maybe plugins that exist. A big effort of ours right now in the process of the redesign is also a revamp of all of our moderator tools. Because right now they are very primitive. It's a lot of single action. It's a lot of manual work. And so getting in kind of bulk actions and just kind of modern tooling I think will actually make a big difference. And then the other thing on my mind, although we're not— we haven't quite— it hasn't coalesced in actual product work yet, is we're creating, I think, a new set of problems with the Geo Popular stuff I'm talking about, where you have communities that have been moderated by predominantly English-speaking moderators who now all of a sudden might start seeing content from other countries because we're getting better at showing it and surfacing that stuff up. But they don't know what that content is. Like, is it spam or is it just Greek? And I actually don't know the solution to that. But the strategy we generally take is we try to do our development in front of users and kind of release these things kind of one community at a time and get communities bought in and get moderators bought in and kind of work with them as we go. And so over the course of this year, there'll actually be a lot of that as we're shipping more and more of the moderator tools. And we'll kind of go from there and see how we improve. So it's a vague answer, but it's kind of a big problem too. But you've got our attention. And as a closing to this whole thing, do you have any advice for the entrepreneurs in the crowd? I think I would give you the— first piece of advice I got from Y Combinator, which is launch soon. Get something in front of your customers. If you're shipping, you're learning. And if you're not, you're not. And it's very easy to spend a lot of time working on a bad idea only to finally ship it years later and learn that it was a bad idea the whole time. So always keep moving, keep shipping, keep learning. And that's how you That's how you grow a business. Very few businesses, successful businesses, look like they did on day one. I think an important reality is things are gonna change and you're not gonna know what to change until you've got something in the market. That'd be my probably biggest piece of advice. Steve, thank you for being here. Thank you guys for coming. Round of applause. It was my pleasure, guys. Thank you.
