Redditors howled at these modifications — and Mr. Wong’s successor as C.E.O., Ellen Pao, was chased out by a horde of indignant customers — however the firm’s pivot to respectability was an plain success. Reddit’s picture has progressively improved below a co-founder, Steve Huffman, who got here again in 2015 to run the positioning as chief govt, and Reddit was in a position to construct the ad-based enterprise mannequin that sustains it right now.
Specifically, I need to single out three steps Reddit took to wash up its platform, all of which have been instrumental in paving the best way for the corporate’s public debut.
First, the corporate took purpose at dangerous areas, relatively than dangerous people or dangerous posts.
Reddit, not like different social media websites, is organized by matter; customers can be part of “subreddits” dedicated to gardening, anime or dad jokes. That meant that after the corporate made new guidelines banning hate speech, harassment and extremism, it confronted an necessary query: Ought to we implement the brand new guidelines person by person or publish by publish, as new violations are reported, or ought to we proactively shut down whole subreddits the place these guidelines have been constantly damaged?
Reddit, to its credit score, selected the much less common possibility. It nuked hundreds of offensive and hateful subreddits, attaching culpability to not particular person posts or customers however to the areas the place poisonous issues regularly occur, on the idea that on-line areas, like offline ones, usually develop customs and norms which might be laborious to dislodge.
Harsh because it was, the method labored. Years later, when researchers studied these modifications, they discovered that Reddit’s subreddit bans had led to a measurable discount in total toxicity on the positioning. Customers who had frequented the banned communities largely both left Reddit completely or modified their habits. The poisonous areas didn’t reconstitute themselves, and rule-abiding Redditors acquired the advantages of a cleaner, much less hateful platform.
