![]() We don't think about changing that balance, but it does change in response to the work we've done. Why do you think more women are joining Reddit? It's hard to measure precisely, but there are companies that will do that and I think they'd say we're like 60/40. It's almost always a true statement that the gender balance on Reddit is more balanced now than the last time I was asked that question. You’ve said in the past that Reddit’s gender split is somewhere close to 70/30 (male to female). Such a head fake, because all the algorithms run the show in Beijing. Or the idea that we're going to store the data in the United States? That is laughable. Maybe the most hostile.Īnd if when people say that’s not happening, that is a ludicrous take. One, the app when you make a video on TikTok, it's recording, not just you, not just the video you think you're making, but your face, your likeness, your voice, the voices of other people in the room, all the objects you have in the room, maybe where you are, the things in the background and other people going straight to a database controlled by a hostile foreign nation. I think the trend over the last few years is that, “People have too much power, people have too many opinions… Everything needs to come from central government or media controlled by the government.” That is a trend that is really alarming. It is controlled by voting for other people. I think speech and democracy are inseparable concepts, and Reddit is a democratic platform. Look at the Twitter Files: the government literally controlling speech. This desire for the government to control speech, which is effectively controlling what people can and can't think. I'm more worried about this just general trend in western democracies to be extremely anti-democratic. So I think it'd be really hard for me and for the team to kill Reddit in that way. The way you could criticize Reddit is that we weren't a company – we were all heart and no head for a long time. I think the problem Digg had is that it was a company that was built to be a company, and you could feel it in the product. Is there anything about Reddit that makes you worry something like that could happen to you? It was your biggest competitor and imploded almost overnight. One of the big turning points in Reddit’s history was Digg’s collapse. Can you hum a few bars? Can you sing it? How does the music video go?” I wouldn't call it a pastime, but I love getting people to say stupid things… Someone will ask, “Have you heard that song?”Īnd I’ll be like, “No. You've described yourself and have been described as a troll by nature. The lightbulb moment for me was if I continue drinking, it will compromise both of those things – and then the decision to quit was very easy. At the time I didn't have kids, so it was my relationship and my work. It started with the thought that I have two priorities in life. ![]() “We wanted to IPO the company last year, and the market has not been great,” he says. Once that’s all done, Reddit is finally growing up and going public, just as Facebook (which was founded a year earlier, in 2004) did way back in 2012. ![]() The sprightly 39-year-old is talking to us on a dreary London day, just a few weeks before he’s due to be married and hours before he’s jetting off to a blockchain conference in Paris. Partly, you suspect, because Huffman still thinks of himself and Reddit as an underdog compared to those social media networks that came after and quickly outgrew it. Despite having created what has become one of the world’s 20 biggest websites, there’s little that’s ostentatious about him. Having first learned to program computers at eight years old, you could easily mistake him for any other web developer in their late 30s with a floppy blond quiff, grey sweater and a Rolex Explorer on his wrist. To meet Huffman in person is to understand where all this gloriously contradictory chaos originated. Sometimes that means protesting (or celebrating) Donald Trump’s indictment, others it’s a picture of a pheasant with some bulging biceps Photoshopped onto it. It's all fake.” If Facebook was founded as a means for Harvard students to meet women and Twitter started out as a group text service, then “the front-page of the internet” was made so that the 57 million people who now use it every day can decide what’s important to them. “But we created it in response to the same idea, which is the media is just lying to us. “We created Reddit before ‘social media’ was a word,” he tells me. For 17 years now, Reddit has been the social network with an anarchic streak – one that it inherited from its co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman. ![]()
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