Reddit, says co-founder Steve Huffman, is "certainly the most human of the internet platforms". Photo / Getty Images
Reddit has become both the birthplace of innocent viral memes and a platform for every niche subculture. Earlier this year it was where the notorious GameStop trading frenzy began. Its founder, Steve Huffman, talks about the personal and political fallout of a global phenomenon.
The frenzy began slowly when a day trader using the alias DeepF***ingValue uploaded a screenshot depicting a single US$53,000 investment in the ailing video games retailer GameStop.
He posted the evidence of his stock options purchase to the social media platform Reddit in September 2019 along with the message "YOLO" (you only live once). Specifically, he shared it on a Reddit forum called WallStreetBets, a raucous community of mostly amateur investors who swapped expletive-filled insults, cheered on each other's triumphs and failures and proudly called themselves "degenerates".
GameStop's widely scorned shares were then worth about US$4 each.
For the next 15 months the day trader built excitement around GameStop on Reddit, on Twitter and through his Roaring Kitty YouTube account, where he live-streamed himself for hours at a time from his home in suburban Boston fielding stock market questions, sometimes while swigging beer and wearing aviator sunglasses with a red bandanna holding his shoulder-length hair in place.
In mid-January, GameStop's value began to rise steeply. Euphoria gripped the WallStreetBets message board as investors goaded each other to take bigger positions, pushing the price higher still. Hedge funds that had shorted GameStop were forced to buy, driving prices up even more. A sense that the Reddit community had the Wall Street establishment on the run took hold.
Wild swings ensued.
On January 27 GameStop shares jumped almost 135 per cent to US$347.51. The following morning they rose to US$483, then lost more than half their value by the close of trading. They rebounded on January 29 and crashed below US$100 the following week.
Some small investors who bought high had their savings wiped out. Others made fortunes.
By the end of the month the day trader who started it all held investments worth nearly US$48 million, according to his Reddit posts. He was Keith Gill, a 34-year-old former distance running champion, who, it later emerged, had been a financial services professional all along. His broker's licence was annulled at his firm's request after he resigned in late January.
Some hedge funds were badly burned. Others earned hundreds of millions of dollars from the wild ride.
Regulators investigated. Gill was called to testify before Congress, along with the boss of Reddit, the chief executive of Robinhood (a stock-trading mobile app used for many of the trades) and the billionaire head of one of the hedge funds most involved.
WallStreetBets' membership, which stood at about 640,000 when Gill announced his bet, soared past 9 million.
Reddit itself experienced a surge in interest, bolstered by an ingenious five-second advert during the Super Bowl on February 7. It included the line: "One thing we learnt from our communities last week is that underdogs can accomplish just about anything when they come together around a common idea." The next day the company announced additional funding that valued it at about US$6 billion.
Wall Street was left in a state of shock by the whole affair. Even people with no interest in the financial markets understood that a new kind of cultural earthquake had taken place.
"The GameStop rally marked a crystallising moment for the online mob," a technology reporter at The Washington Post wrote soon afterwards. "Distrustful of major institutions, angry at the powers that be, a faceless crowd brought together by a single website had, in a time of great loneliness, co-ordinated a strategy forceful enough to move markets and reshape the world."
Earlier this month, GameStop announced plans to sell up to US$1b worth of its newly exorbitant shares (priced at US$177 at the time of going to press) in order to fast-track its transition to an online model, a move necessary to its survival.
A few weeks before, in an empty office high above San Francisco, I ask the man who built and runs Reddit what he makes of the episode.
"I'd been a WallStreetBets reader for a while," says Steve Huffman, 37, the co-founder and chief executive of Reddit. What happened still took him by surprise.
Did the GameStop rally demonstrate a fundamental shift in our understanding of the power of the internet, particularly as it came only a few days after the deadly attack on the United States Capitol, which was also organised online?
"Well, there's zero overlap," says Huffman immediately. For almost an hour up until this point he has been measured, friendly and softly spoken in his replies, but now he wants me to be very clear about two things: the mob of Trump supporters that stormed Congress on January 6 was "definitely not" assembled on Reddit in any way and – unlike some other social media platforms he could name at this point, but doesn't – he can prove it.
"There are no secrets on Reddit," he says. "There are no hidden spaces. So when I say January 6 wasn't organised on Reddit, I can say that with confidence, because if it was there, we would be able to point to it."
There's also another message that he wants to get across, though. Because we're both wearing masks, I can't quite work out whether Huffman says this next bit with absolute contempt for the media or just mild contempt mixed with sincere disappointment.
Journalists have encouraged a perception that communities that organise effectively online is a cause for alarm, he says. Why? "It's like, are grassroots movements a new thing? That's what people are behaving like." He pantomimes the moral panic: "'Oh my God! People have a voice? The horror!' Can you imagine? In a democracy, freaking out about it? That's the point of democracy."
He spits out that word "point" with bitter emphasis, which seems to calm him down. "But then I guess it's like, 'Oh, people have a voice online?' " His voice drops. "It's the point of the internet. To bring people together."
I try a slightly different tack. Perhaps the wider world has belatedly realised that there is no distinction between people's virtual activity and their real-world existence, that real life these days is what takes place online just as much as it is what we do offline.
"That's right," Huffman says, smiling again (as far as I can tell). "Now, online changes things. People can communicate; they can find like-minded people much more easily. I think that's been, overall, an extremely positive force for the world and for humanity. But we've seen the challenges as well. And I think it's of course up to all of us – we who work on platforms such as Reddit, and society more broadly – to adapt."
To back up a bit, the idea that Reddit had influence was hardly news. For years the business, founded in 2005, has described itself as "the front page of the internet".
According to Alexa, a data analytics company, Reddit is the seventh most visited website in the United States (after Google, YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo, Zoom and Facebook) and the third most popular in Britain (after Google and YouTube).
It has more than 50 million active daily users around the world (and far more occasional ones), many of whom post extensively. They also vote for or against each other's posts, generating a real-time ranking system that dictates the prominence that those posts achieve.
Made up of more than 100,000 separate communities, all with their own internal rules and characteristics, Reddit is therefore both a marketplace for popular ideas and jokes and a potential home for every conceivable niche subculture on Earth.
It contains multitudes.
New York Magazine once called Reddit "the world's foremost meme engine, the place where things go viral" and if you are looking for, say, a photograph of a baby penguin that looks like an angry kiwifruit, there is still nowhere better.
However, the site and its associated app are much more than just that. Reddit's rules, which require only a pseudonym, rather than a real name, mean that vulnerable individuals, including rape victims, addicts and people preparing to come out as gay, can find support from people with similar experiences without fear of being tracked by their families, classmates or colleagues.
The comfort of anonymity has darker consequences too. In 2015 the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a hate group watchdog, declared that Reddit was home to "the most violently racist content on the internet" and for years black Reddit users complained that their own large communities were constantly invaded by white racists masquerading as black people who then unleashed torrents of bile at them. The company insists that new regulations it has put in place, particularly since last summer, have done much to eradicate such abusive behaviour.
Reddit's most popular communities include ones dedicated to solving scientific queries (r/askscience), discussing books (r/books) and sharing interesting maps (r/MapPorn). Or, of course, you can go to r/reverseanimalrescue to see a video played backwards so it looks like a man is ripping a sloth off a tree and cruelly placing it in the middle of a road to die.
The most-liked Reddit post ever is a 1989 photograph of the singer Rick Astley posted last year by the actual Rick Astley. Yet the world's top politicians also use the site to reach out to voters. In 2012 President Obama answered questions on Reddit's Ask Me Anything forum. When Reddit later ran a similar Q&A with the Onion's Joe Biden impersonator, the real Joe Biden, the vice-president at the time, sent in his own question.
The site is even an effective election prognosticator, Huffman says. In 2016 the "sheer amount of human energy" stirred up by Donald Trump's presidential candidacy on Reddit dwarfed the excitement on left-leaning parts of the site. You could "100 per cent" tell that he was going to win the election. Similarly, by the autumn of 2019 "it was pretty clear the energy was gone".
In other words, Reddit offers a constantly refreshed mixture of heavyweight content, virulent invective, life-saving compassion and joyous froth.
For all its reach and impact, though, the company is nowhere near the size of its largest competitors, at least for now. It has about 800 staff (only 51 of whom are based overseas), compared with more than 58,000 for Facebook and more than 5000 for Twitter. The two larger social media businesses are also worth far more, with stock market valuations of US$800b and US$49b respectively.
Huffman has big plans for its expansion and a potential stock market float before too long. "Our mission is to bring community and belonging to everybody in the world," he says. "I believe there is an opportunity for everyone in the world to find community on Reddit. So our ambition is everybody. We've got a long way to go."
Last year Reddit Inc moved into new headquarters in San Francisco, just in time for the pandemic to kick in and send everybody home. That's why Huffman and I are alone, except for Sandra Chu, the company's head of communications, sitting opposite each other in masks on the open-plan 16th floor of a tower block with spectacular wrap-around views of the city (Reddit has two higher floors as well).
We're surrounded by a sea of empty desks, which are about to be thrown out before they have really been used, because working from home has changed the leadership team's expectations. When it is safe for staff to return to the building, "ee are not requiring people to work in the office," Huffman says. "Gonna be more like a coffee shop, come as you please situation, for at least the next year. Basically, we've just tried to embrace the idea that we don't know what's going to happen.
"I'm not going to come to the office five days a week. I enjoy working from home. But I don't want to work from home five days a week either. I really want to see people."
He has pale skin, messily parted blond hair and the beginnings of a stubbly beard that's visible when he briefly slips his mask off to sip an iced tea. He's wearing a dark grey sweater, blue chinos and Clark's desert boots. His tastes are "moderately modest" and he is "not a big spender". (These things are relative. His greatest extravagance was a 1996 Porsche 911 Turbo, which he had towed that morning. "It's my yearly ritual: battery dies, everything leaks, I get it fixed, drive it for a week and then it's in my garage. Rinse and repeat.")
How important is money to him? Huffman sold his founder's stake in Reddit when he was in his early 20s, but he has since acquired a generous chief executive-sized slice of the business. "I've had enough money to live for pretty much my entire adult life, but it's not a fantastic amount. Now Reddit's become really valuable…" Huffman tails off, looking a little haunted.
He almost sounds anxious about the prospects of getting disgustingly rich.
"Sort of," he agrees. "My honest answer is: I just don't know."
There are slight bags under his eyes, which he once told an interviewer he had laser surgery on in case, in a doomsday scenario or even just a "temporary collapse of our government and structures", he was unable to get hold of glasses or contact lenses.
Huffman has spent four years since then trying to live down those comments (he also said that he had "motorcycles… a bunch of guns and ammo [to] hole up in my house for some amount of time").
"I'm not a prepper!" he practically shouts. "They made me sound like a crazy person. I might be crazy, but I'm not that person."
What, he doesn't have a bunker? "No, I live in the Castro [San Francisco's historic gay district] and my door's on the street."
He shares that home, a 10-minute cycle ride away, with his fiancee. She "runs marketing for a start-up". They have a dog (a cavapoo) and a 2-month-old daughter. Laying out the process like the thorough software engineer he is, Huffman points out that their child was "conceived and born, the whole thing" during the pandemic. He affects a shy voice. "Covid is a very romantic virus."
Even with a newborn to look after, some aspects of work have improved during the pandemic, he believes. "I might be the only person in the world who thinks this, but meetings on Zoom are better. Because I can see everybody's face at the same time. In an office you're looking around and so it's a little harder to control the room."
A few months ago they attempted a hybrid meeting with some people physically present and others on the TV screen. "It was going so badly, I was like, 'Can everybody in the conference room just open your laptops?' So that's what we did. Then we sat around the table, looking at our laptops." There was a sense of relief, a feeling of, 'Oh, this is what we're used to!' On Zoom people can raise their hands. You can mute them. I think we'll be using a lot of Zoom even when we're back in."
Huffman likes to imagine Reddit as being like a giant city that happens to be online. "Cities are organic living things," he says. "They are created by people. They may have founders, but the founders are largely irrelevant. Cities might be designed in some ways, but they more or less grow on their own. At best, you could shepherd a city.
"Cities naturally divide into neighbourhoods and those neighbourhoods have different cultures and vibes. Reddit, very similarly, has divided into communities, which we call subreddits, with distinct cultures and vibes."
He turns in his chair and gestures towards the hills of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. "No one person could design this, but cities exist all over the world. They're like a natural byproduct of humanity."
You can live in a city or just visit. You can go shopping, work, eat, enjoy the culture, explore neighbourhoods. "Reddit is the same way," says Huffman. "You could come to learn things, to have a few laughs. You can check the news. You can give or receive support. You can have fun. You can argue about politics."
It is, he adds, "certainly the most human of the internet platforms". Why?
Because "it's run by humans", not algorithms. Its communities are self-governing, as long as they comply with Reddit's platform-wide policies. Each subreddit is largely policed by its own users and volunteer moderators, who shape its distinctive community character. "The other platforms don't really have that."
Huffman loves to observe these communities, like an anthropologist studying obscure tribes, and with its "self-assured" culture, WallStreetBets "was one of my guilty pleasures".
In March, news broke that WallStreetBets members had donated more than US$350,000 to a gorilla conservation charity. (The gift was partly self-referential. The community styles itself as an army of "apes" tackling the "geniuses" of Wall Street.) Huffman was delighted. "I'm really happy for that community and for the gorilla community right now."
He created Reddit in 2005 with Alexis Ohanian, his best friend at the University of Virginia, who is now married to tennis star Serena Williams. They were building on a suggestion from one of Huffman's heroes, the programmer and venture capitalist Paul Graham. He supported them early on as they pulled the site together over a few weeks, living in a single room in a suburb of Boston.
The baby-faced Huffman was a gifted programmer, a hacker with an irrepressible mischievous streak (even today he says that his friends would still describe him as a "troll") and a surprising sideline as a competitive ballroom dancer (he competed with his sister; their brother is now a leading instructor). The imposing, charming Ohanian seemed his ideal complement: a natural entrepreneur.
"When we started Reddit we didn't know where we were going," says Huffman. "It almost felt like a homework assignment. I was just trying to build this place for programmers to find interesting content."
If someone had suggested to him then that Reddit would develop global ambitions, "I would have laughed. I wouldn't even have laughed. I would have scoffed."
Yet Huffman thinks their lack of vision in the early days held Reddit back. If it had been built as a site for everyone in the world, "we would have made different decisions" on content policing, design and engineering.
"Reddit was created as a reaction to what we were growing up in – a media in which, we felt, everything was bulls*** and spun. Advertising was parasitic. Everybody was lying and just everything was fake."
He and Ohanian were intent on "authenticity", which meant they did not want "gatekeepers" who would restrict access to information and that on principle they would not remove content (although very occasionally they did, surreptitiously).
The problem was that Huffman and Ohanian had not thought far enough ahead. "When we said we don't remove things, we were thinking swear words. We weren't dealing with racism or other dangerous content. It wasn't a thing. It wasn't on Reddit. It wasn't in front of us."
The site "looked old when we built it" too and, although it had a raw, unmediated appeal, its untamed jumble of text and simple graphics date it even more now. Finally, if the founders had seen the future more clearly, would they have sold the business less than two years later to Conde Nast for between US$10m and US$20m?
"Thank you for saying the obvious," says Huffman. "Somebody offers you what was significant money to us then for a homework assignment, it's like we just hit the lottery. But if you're trying to build something for everybody in the world, you'd be like, 'We've only been working on this for five minutes. Get out of my face.' "
Both co-founders became employees and then left in 2009. They grew apart. Ohanian moved to New York, promoted himself as an evangelist for online freedoms and was nicknamed "mayor of the internet" by Forbes.
Huffman tried to build a new business with a different co-founder, a travel company called Hipmunk. Unlike at Reddit, "We had aspirations and we weren't meeting them. And we weren't growing. That was humbling. I had to learn a lot of hard lessons. Personally, I went through a divorce at that time as well. So around that time of my life I was confronted with existential failure in the two main things going on in my life at the same time."
Those years were the catalyst for "a lot of growth" and made him a much better, more empathetic leader. "When I was 20, I thought I knew everything. Now I've learnt that I don't know anything about anything."
From outside the business both founders watched their idealistic hopes for Reddit as a lightly moderated free-speech destination be overtaken by its growing association with a minority of users posting comments and images that were racist, antisemitic, misogynistic and in other ways hateful.
Ohanian returned to Reddit in 2014, as executive chairman. Huffman came back as chief executive in July 2015. By that point communities in the grimmer corners of Reddit included r/Nazi and r/CuteFemaleCorpses.
Huffman's predecessor in the role, Ellen Pao, had endured horrific online harassment by some users. In a public farewell message, she wrote that she had "seen the good, the bad and the ugly" among Redditors and that "the ugly made me doubt humanity".
In his first week back, Huffman signalled a gear change in Reddit's attitude to content. "Neither Alexis nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech, but rather as a place where open and honest discussion can happen," he wrote. "These are very complicated issues, and we are putting a lot of thought into it."
Several culls of the most odious subreddits and users followed. Reddit developed tighter content policies, but failed to dispel the perception that it was tolerant of toxic conversations.
Then in June 2020, as protests in the real world rocked America in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, the biggest mutiny in Reddit's history broke out. Subreddit moderators claiming to represent 200 million users signed an open letter denouncing "the problem of Reddit's leadership supporting and providing a platform for racist users and hateful communities". They published demands for changes.
Ohanian, by then married to one of the world's best-known black women, tweeted a link to the letter and resigned from the Reddit board. He urged the company to replace him with a black board member, which it did.
Huffman has not spoken to Ohanian since.
The Ohanian-Williams wedding in New Orleans in 2017, also attended by Beyonce and Anna Wintour, was "probably our last happy memory together. I remember when he told me about Serena. He was so excited."
Huffman was furious when Ohanian left the company. The first he knew about it was during "this weird Covid scene" when he was taking an investor's call sitting on a kitchen stool at home when the internet went down.
"So all I had was my phone. It's superchaotic and all of a sudden all these text messages start coming in and I was like, 'I've got to go. I don't know what's going on. I've got to check my phone, but I'm on my phone. So if you'll excuse me?' That's how I found out. I just don't think that's the way to do business."
Does he think they can become friends again? "No. No. We've tried to force it over the years. I think the foundation of our relationship hasn't been there for a long time. We're just fundamentally incompatible. It's sad, because we were as close as brothers for a long time. And I really loved him. But I have kind of mourned the death of that relationship."
Was it worth it? "I've tried to systematically remove regret from my life," he says.
The demands in the June 2020 open letter "were all things that we had done" already, he says. Even so, a few weeks later he announced new tougher moderation policies bolstered by stronger enforcement efforts to root out abusive and toxic behaviours on Reddit.
Time and again the most effective solutions for clearing out Reddit have been to give more power to moderators, who today "can remove pretty much whatever they want".
The same logic applies to keeping disinformation at bay. Crowd-sourced fact-checking means that Reddit is "uniquely good" at "sniffing out the bulls***" and debunking lies and conspiracy theories. "It's hard to have a fringe opinion on Reddit and have it last without getting called out."
The QAnon community, for instance, was banned in 2018 – "long before you ever even heard of it"– for "encouraging or inciting violence and posting personal and confidential information" (although an NBC news investigation did later find that "Reddit was key" to QAnon's early spread).
"If the whole community is problematic… we can say, 'Oh, this is a problem? Gone.' We're not waging guerrilla warfare, looking for all these individuals hiding behind different hashtags. They're all in one place."
Returning to his favoured metaphor, Huffman compares the options at his disposal with those available to a city dealing with a breakaway neighbourhood that is actively trying to antagonise the rest of the citizenry.
The city's choices would be "send in the army or wait it out". Reddit has "a lot more" flexibility. "We can put sanctions on them," says Huffman. "We can replace leadership. We can quarantine them and ban the community. And of course, none of those things involves violence. That's a huge distinction."
Reddit both stokes and reflects the increased political polarisation in the real world – he acknowledges an "interconnectedness" – just as it has magnified and revealed the fear, despair and rising optimism that users have experienced during the pandemic.
"I think there's a lot to learn about humanity in looking at platforms such as Reddit. It serves as documentation for where the zeitgeist is, what people think about something, where the challenges are."
He has never met Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but sees Jack Dorsey, his equivalent at Twitter, now and again for dinner. "I really like Jack. We both have this idealism about the internet. We often just talk about the future of the internet. [At Reddit] we all were children of the open internet. We believe in authenticity. We believe in privacy. We try to do the right thing and we're building a business in the real world. We often face these conflicts between our own values. I think Jack's going through the same thing."
So can we trust them both to work for the better interests of humanity rather than for their businesses?
"I hate that narrative," says Huffman, smiling again. "I understand why it exists because I could easily have the same cynical view. But the way I look at it, what's in the best interests of Reddit, in the best interests of the shareholders, in the best interests of people overall: it's the same thing."
Written by: Ben Hoyle
© The Times of London
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