Reddit CEO backs WallStreetBets amid calls for stricter moderation

In an interview, Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, said the episode of WallStreetBets has demonstrated the sustainability of the company’s model as it matures and grows. The 37-year-old Reddit co-founder recently turned his Reddit profile image into WallStreetBets’ cartoonish mascot of a Wall Street merchant with so-called diamond hands, in a show of support for the group.

“This whole event shows the strength of large communities of ordinary people,” said Mr. Huffman. “Not only large institutional and professional investors can participate in the stock market.”

The action on Reddit has helped the company bring in new advertisers – its main source of revenue – and bring back lapsed advertisers, including those who recently stopped spending in the market clashes, said Mr. Huffman. The most recent user numbers of Reddit, which is not profitable, put the daily average at 52 million as of October. “We are still proving ourselves to advertisers,” he said. The company paid for a five-second commercial that aired Sunday for Super Bowl LV.

Based in San Francisco, Reddit is known for its bulletin boards on a wide variety of topics, as well as its digital town halls “ask me anything” with celebrities, politicians and subject matter experts. The company was founded in 2005 and sold to Condé Nast a year later. The parent company of the magazine’s publisher, Advance Publications Inc., spun off Reddit in 2011 and remains a shareholder, along with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, the Chinese internet conglomerate Tencent Holdings Ltd.

and others.

Social media companies have long grappled with how best to moderate and manage their content, and now face the prospect of lawmakers changing the way they do business. One possibility is a revision of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which, since 1996, has been protecting social media companies from civil liability that may arise from content that users post on the platforms. A congressional hearing on recent market swings is scheduled for February 18; Mr. Huffman said on Friday that he had not yet been asked to participate.

Reddit allows users to rate all content on the platform and relies on tens of thousands of unpaid users for police speeches. In contrast, larger social media platforms rely primarily on algorithms and paid help to do that kind of work.

Facebook,

The world’s largest social network, said it had about 1.85 billion daily users in the December quarter, while Twitter recently said it had an average of 187 million daily users in the three months ending September. Both also rely on technology designed to quickly identify rule breakers – much like Reddit, albeit to a much lesser extent.

Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. have shown increasing interest in having their users help moderate content appearing on their platforms. Facebook, which has made an effort to stem calls for violence within communities on the platform, is urging volunteer group administrators to make more effort to review member posts. Twitter is testing a program called Birdwatch that encourages users to identify information in tweets that they believe is misleading and to write notes that provide informational context.

“Community moderation can work, but only if there is good collaboration and communication between the moderators and the platforms,” ​​said Joseph Seering, a Stanford University scholar researching voluntary moderation.

Reddit’s relationship with its volunteer moderators hasn’t always been harmonious. Hundreds of communities closed in 2015 to protest the sudden resignation of a popular Reddit employee. The then CEO of the company, Ellen Pao, apologized for the way Reddit handled the matter and resigned shortly afterwards; Mr. Huffman took over the position.

Reddit in June banned “The_Donald,” a community dedicated to former President Donald Trump, and said moderators often ignored content that violated the platform’s rules.

“It was a political community committed to a president, so there is a heavy weight on that,” said Mr Huffman. “We’ve given them many opportunities to be good citizens of Reddit, and they never succeeded.”

WallStreetBets membership alone has more than quadrupled this year to 8.7 million subscribers. Mr. Huffman said the group, which lists 25 moderators on its forum, chose to make the forum temporarily private last month because they were overwhelmed and faced technical challenges.

While Reddit’s unpaid moderators are expected to ensure that members of their community adhere to the company’s rules, they have the freedom to create additional rules, which for some don’t include swearing or jokes. The most common rule that Reddit communities have adopted, Mr. Huffman emphasized, is to be civil.

“When it’s written by your colleagues in a community context, it’s really powerful,” he said. Think of it as the difference between your parents saying, be nice, and your friends saying, be nice. The latter carries a lot of weight. “

Dylan Kuehl has spent the past four years moderating a Reddit community called “buildapc” for people seeking help building their own computers. It has more than 3.6 million subscribers. “Reddit doesn’t give us any active input,” he said. “They don’t have anyone around saying, ‘Hey, you should ban this person or delete a post.’ It’s totally up to us. “

Mr. Kuehl, a 31-year-old software engineer in Ontario, described the relationship between Reddit and its moderators as “symbiotic, almost an interdependence.” He said, “They rely on us to keep their platform clean … so they can keep the lights on, so we can continue to have our free platform to keep our community in.”

Mr. Huffman said that in 2019 Reddit launched an initiative for its volunteer moderators to quickly get help from more experienced volunteer moderators in times of crisis. He said Reddit has more work to do in this area, but sees the company’s approach as essential to its success and future, which may include additional fundraising and a public listing of its stock. Reddit was valued at $ 3 billion after its last round of funding in February 2019, according to PitchBook, and has raised more than $ 550 million since its inception.

“I often think about what Reddit looks like as a public company,” said Mr. Huffman. “We still have some cultivation to do, but we’re looking forward to that.”

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at [email protected]